Much of what I like about The Palace Job, the debut novel by
Patrick Weekes, who is known for his work on the Mass Effect video game series,
is that while it carries the DNA of the fantasy genre, it adds something I’ve
not seen since David Eddings The Belgariad and The Malloreon series, humor.
While Piers Anthony did the same with his long-running Xanth
series, it devolved into bad puns and a formulaic structure that made me
eventually give up the series around the tenth book (which has ballooned into
forty novels as of October of 2016). Even Terry Brooks Shannara series had some
humor, but it was the success of the drama filled and very serious Thomas
Covenant series by Stephen R. Donaldson and the launch of Robert Jordan’s The
Wheel of Time series made sure that the humorous fantasy was going to take back
seat. Since then we’ve seen many epic fantasy novels from next generation of
writers like Brandon Sanderson (who while successful in his early days, won the
lottery when he was assigned to finish Jordan’s overlong and very bloated
series after that writer passed away in 2007) and George R. R. Martin’s (who
had been around for a while, I admit) Song of Ice and Fire series.
I’ve whined for a while that I’ve yet to find a fantasy
novel, or series, in my more mature state of mind of my 50s that takes me back
to the halcyon days of my late teens and early twenties when writers like
Eddings, Brooks, Anthony, Tad Williams where producing fantasy series, while wholly
indebted to J.R. Tolken, were still fun. Listen, I have no problem with serious
fantasy, but my issue with today’s writers comes from that fact that most of
these books are overlong, are sometimes paralyzingly tedious and often got me thinking
that publisher needs to get a stronger editor for the
writer or anyone else who can help tone down these writers rhetoric and force
them to get to the point of the story.
While The Palace Job relies on tropes
of the genre, Weekes takes a page from science fiction, and adds a bit modern
day social and political issues to make this first book in a series more easily
identifiable. So what we get is an Ocean’s Eleven (as its been described),
blended with some original ideas along with a great dose of humor and tongue
placed well within cheek that pokes fun at the genre as well.
“Loch used to be a soldier but is now serving a prison
sentence on the underside of the floating city of Heaven’s Spire, cleaning the
crystals that keep it suspended. It’s a dangerous task and the prisoners are
not meant to survive it for long, but Loch and her former attendant Kail manage
to escape, driven by Loch’s single-minded goal of retrieving a priceless
manuscript that will insure them a more than comfortable future. To this end they enlist the help of
the most ragtag crew ever imagined: a shape-shifting unicorn and a virgin -bumbling
teenager named Dairy; a failed mage with a penchant for illusions; a skilled
lock-picker and her gravity-defying companion, and a death priestess, who used
to be a love priestess, and her talking warhammer.”
The plot gets a bit complicated
as it proceeds and there are a ton of twists that I did not see (though there
just as many as I did), but what works for me (again) is that the world Weekes
creates is very different from others –it’s some combination of standard
fantasy ideas with steampunck tropes thrown in for good measure. And Weekes
does not go out of his way to explain how this sort of higher technology that
depends on magic actually works, which (for some reason) I found very charming.
Then there is modern
politics, class, and racial issues that populate the tale. And while the agenda
of Weekes is evident, he does not hit you over the head with his metaphors,
though I suspect many of the anti- SJW groups will hate the idea that the hero
is female and black.
And while Silestin is
really a James Bond villain out to destroy the land for his own profit, in
post-2016 elections, he can easily be Donald Trump. His speechifying, his
plans, his dark agenda, and backstabbing mirrors a lot of what is currently
coming from the president-elects mouth and Washington.
In the end, this is a
series I know I will continue. Now I
just have to order them.
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