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A review by mburnamfink
The March North by Graydon Saunders
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
4.0
The March North is an extremely specific book for an extremely specific kind of person. Fortunately, I'm that kind of person. The Commonweal series was a common punchline in the Something Awful forums scifi/fantasy book thread, at the intersection of "brilliant" and "unreadable" and "we are all Graydon Saunders". So when I found out that Saunders, in a fit of pique at American tech companies, was planning to remove his books from sale on all platforms, I decided it was put up or shut up time.
The plot of The March North is pretty simple. The commander of a military unit in a fantasy nation recalls a mission where he links up with a couple of wizards and goes off to defend the realm from an invasion of an enemy empire. There are some battles, the unit takes heavy casualties, but they win the day and return home heroes.
The tone of the narrator, the unnamed Standard-Captain, is terse and clinical. The other characters are named things like Twitch and Rust and Halt and Blossom, and military/magical jargon is thrown around like you already know how all of this works. The Black Company crossed with the Aubrey-Maturin series is a comparison I've seen elsewhere, and it's not wrong.
But what makes this book a treasure for that certain kind of person is the depth of Saunder's setting and how the implications of the worldbuilding unfold. The world of the Commonweal is far far stranger than the laconic writing conveys. The default state of life for most people has been nasty, brutish, and short due to the workings of generations of wizard-kings. Thousands of years of insane sorcerers feuding with each other has left the landscape haunted by demons and worse, river that turn to blood and fire and bile on a regular cycle, and meant that most political organizations end when some wizard decides to throw a mountain at the city.
Except in the Commonweal. About 500 years ago, the Commonweal figured out how to counter the power of wizards with collective action, something called the Focus, which is channeled through the Standards of the Companies of the Line. Prosperity in the Commonweal is protected by a magical binding called the Shape of Peace, which encourages people to work together, and offers a balance against the power of individual mages. Aside from the demonic invasions, life in the Commonweal seems almost utopian. They use the French Revolutionary calendar, and politicians who tell lies literally have their pants burst into flame.
So what this book is really about is learning how the Focus of the Companies work, what the accompanying wizards can do, and seeing that in action. Even with the cryptic style of the writing, some of the action is impressive. In an early scene, the Company and the accompanying battery play catch, with the battery firing black-black-black shot, simple iron rods, at cannon velocities, and the Company catching the shells with their Focus and ablating them to nothing in a shower of sparks, or deflecting them into the sky. The weapons of the battery go up to red-red-red, which has a "danger close" radius of 25 km. Assuming it's some kind of explosive (not a safe assumption), that puts red-red-red in the 20 megaton hydrogen bomb scale. The wizards have more subtle ways of killing: swarms of razor-winged steel butterflies, manipulation of air, heat, and minds, and compelling hosts of demons.
That said, there are a lot of flaws in this book. Characterization isn't. The three sorcerers assigned to the Company are some of the most powerful in the Commonweal, including the unquestioned most powerful magic user alive; Halt. We're told Halt and Rust don't get along in the opening chapter, some sort of long-running feud contained at the level of sniping in specialized journals and third-hand political maneuvering, but these two godlike beings just... do their jobs. The only character to get any generosity of description is Halt, who's corporeal form is someone's grandma, an old lady with her knitting and a ready cup of tea. Please ignore that she's riding on a firing breathing sheep-like creature the size of an elephant, or that she's older than reliably recorded history. As for the rest, I could tell you what they do, but not anything about their personality or character.
The Standard-Captain style also robs the climax of what should be it's tension. Taking a battered company on a suicide mission into a fortress containing the Archon of Reems, a sorcerer-king channeling the power of an entire empire of fire-priests and ashen victims, escaping a trap made of singularity-black antimagic cable and a whole amphitheater of demons, and undoing a binding powering an empire spanning road made out of crystallized despair, should be thrilling. But the writing is so detached it doesn't hit right.
Still, at the end of the day, I stayed up way too late finishing this book, which is the highest accolade I can give any novel. Saunders wrote the exact book he intended to write, and if it's not to your liking, well, you were warned up front.
The plot of The March North is pretty simple. The commander of a military unit in a fantasy nation recalls a mission where he links up with a couple of wizards and goes off to defend the realm from an invasion of an enemy empire. There are some battles, the unit takes heavy casualties, but they win the day and return home heroes.
The tone of the narrator, the unnamed Standard-Captain, is terse and clinical. The other characters are named things like Twitch and Rust and Halt and Blossom, and military/magical jargon is thrown around like you already know how all of this works. The Black Company crossed with the Aubrey-Maturin series is a comparison I've seen elsewhere, and it's not wrong.
But what makes this book a treasure for that certain kind of person is the depth of Saunder's setting and how the implications of the worldbuilding unfold. The world of the Commonweal is far far stranger than the laconic writing conveys. The default state of life for most people has been nasty, brutish, and short due to the workings of generations of wizard-kings. Thousands of years of insane sorcerers feuding with each other has left the landscape haunted by demons and worse, river that turn to blood and fire and bile on a regular cycle, and meant that most political organizations end when some wizard decides to throw a mountain at the city.
Except in the Commonweal. About 500 years ago, the Commonweal figured out how to counter the power of wizards with collective action, something called the Focus, which is channeled through the Standards of the Companies of the Line. Prosperity in the Commonweal is protected by a magical binding called the Shape of Peace, which encourages people to work together, and offers a balance against the power of individual mages. Aside from the demonic invasions, life in the Commonweal seems almost utopian. They use the French Revolutionary calendar, and politicians who tell lies literally have their pants burst into flame.
So what this book is really about is learning how the Focus of the Companies work, what the accompanying wizards can do, and seeing that in action. Even with the cryptic style of the writing, some of the action is impressive. In an early scene, the Company and the accompanying battery play catch, with the battery firing black-black-black shot, simple iron rods, at cannon velocities, and the Company catching the shells with their Focus and ablating them to nothing in a shower of sparks, or deflecting them into the sky. The weapons of the battery go up to red-red-red, which has a "danger close" radius of 25 km. Assuming it's some kind of explosive (not a safe assumption), that puts red-red-red in the 20 megaton hydrogen bomb scale. The wizards have more subtle ways of killing: swarms of razor-winged steel butterflies, manipulation of air, heat, and minds, and compelling hosts of demons.
That said, there are a lot of flaws in this book. Characterization isn't. The three sorcerers assigned to the Company are some of the most powerful in the Commonweal, including the unquestioned most powerful magic user alive; Halt. We're told Halt and Rust don't get along in the opening chapter, some sort of long-running feud contained at the level of sniping in specialized journals and third-hand political maneuvering, but these two godlike beings just... do their jobs. The only character to get any generosity of description is Halt, who's corporeal form is someone's grandma, an old lady with her knitting and a ready cup of tea. Please ignore that she's riding on a firing breathing sheep-like creature the size of an elephant, or that she's older than reliably recorded history. As for the rest, I could tell you what they do, but not anything about their personality or character.
The Standard-Captain style also robs the climax of what should be it's tension. Taking a battered company on a suicide mission into a fortress containing the Archon of Reems, a sorcerer-king channeling the power of an entire empire of fire-priests and ashen victims, escaping a trap made of singularity-black antimagic cable and a whole amphitheater of demons, and undoing a binding powering an empire spanning road made out of crystallized despair, should be thrilling. But the writing is so detached it doesn't hit right.
Still, at the end of the day, I stayed up way too late finishing this book, which is the highest accolade I can give any novel. Saunders wrote the exact book he intended to write, and if it's not to your liking, well, you were warned up front.