Of Light and Shadow

"When they don’t give us our birthright, we steal it." 

The title doesn't do justice to this surprisingly compact Indian/Zoroastrian influenced fantasy novel that's so much more than good versus evil despite its bandit-versus-prince opening gambit. These pages are rife with magic systems and mythologies, politics, environmentalism, societal collapse, spirituality, racial biases, all wound around a grudging role-reversed romantic dance between the female bandit leader and the princely hostage.

I find the magic system interesting. Even healing magic exacts a penalty from the user, and our healer sometimes reflects on the perils and pitfalls of their position in ways that feel very real for someone both depended on and not quite trusted. In some senses this echoes the attitude from villagers towards herbal wise women in Europe in the witch burning years, although so far nobody has tried to burn our healer except one patient whose pain has overridden her control of her fire magic.

The environmental plot is well foreshadowed before it appears overtly on the page and forces our prince into a moral dilemma, caught between what he believes is right for the people of the damaged region, and his loyalty to his family.

It does seem that our very sympathetic female protagonist gets shorter shift as the novel unfolds. Rather than becoming more complex and facing deeper ethical or psychological or physical challenges, she seems destined to be reduced to a reluctant love interest. Fortunately, she eventually regains more equal footing with the Peri Prince.

This is a satisfying blend of environmentalism and magic, both light and shadow, that dwells within the characters as well as in the plot. Overall it’s a novel that feels more exotic than its lean writing and straightforward plot suggests. A most enjoyable read.

 

 
Of Light and Shadow

 
A Fantasy Romance Novel Inspired by Indian Mythology
Author: Tanaz Bhathena

 

 

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STANDING IN THE SHADOWS by Peter Robinson

 

There’s something moving about reading a book from an author whose early work you know well, when it is published after he’s gone. So it is with Peter Robinson‘s last Inspector Banks novel.

This is another split-timeline story. The earlier sections are set in winter of 1980, when a university student is briefly a suspect in the murder of his ex-girlfriend. He’s trying to figure out what happened by questioning her friends and family. After a dramatic start, those plot sections rather devolve into a slow meander through 1980 university life with minor forays into the recent doings of the victim. We don’t much care about the student who is suspected, and we hardly learn anything to make us mourn the student who was killed.

The contemporary novel sections involve a years-old unidentified corpse that is turned up by archaeologists surveying the site of a future shopping mall. With no reason beyond mere curiosity to care about this unidentified collection of bones and bits of leather or metal, we can only plod along as Banks directs his team on lines of potential inquiry, occasionally buying them drinks, and generally showing why he’d be a nice boss to have. Old case threads and characters get some page time. Favours get called in from pals in high and low places. No more about archaeology, and the archaeologist rather fades away without leaving any impact, despite being one of the first (and only) interesting characters we meet. There’s a lot about music of the era, which bands were hot and which not, amid a few digressions into the spreading news that John Lennon was killed.

I found myself wondering how much of the manuscript was written many years ago and never quite reached publication in its original form. Could it have been updated with the investigation set in 2019, to feature the ageing Banks still cleaning up the mess from his previous case?

The book’s interesting enough in its way, and competent as usual, but not a ‘final book’ in any sense beyond the author's passing and the characters' occasional glances backward. We'll never know now how Robinson might have retired--or killed--his venerated Inspector, or what plans he might have had for the many sidekicks and side characters. Read it if you’re a longtime fan, if only for the poignancy of knowing it is the final book from a prolific and widely respected author.

 

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