Book Reviews

Stephen Hunt's For The Crown & The Dragon.
Paperback. £4.99. Green Nebula

An inset map recalls those conjectured scenarios used as scare stories for global warming (the eco-disaster which, the informed reader might recollect, proceeded the more immediate crisis of recession, collapsing world economies, and AIDS). For in this tale Hunt's alternative world topography resembles our own, but has extra bits of ocean similar to that caused by a rising sea-level. France and Spain are separated by the Tolisi straits, the great English north-south divide has materialised as the watery gulf of Emrys, and Italy is reduced to a cluster of half-familiar shapes.
 But there's something more serious than rampant aerosols and CFCs at work here.

Hunt's Roman Empire failed to succumb to the heretical sect of Christianity, and his world was thereby saved from the horrors of the inquisition, the Jewish pogroms, the colonial genocide and religious wars that resulted from Emperor Constantine's folly. Instead, his Rome embraced a kind of Pagan Demonology which involved demisapi slaves - beastmen - and all manner of quasi-nastiness that resulted in the shattering of the world. There are potential elements of Keith Roberts, Moorcock - and even the classical myth-magic of the wonderful Thomas Burnett Swann in such imaginings.

But the genre Hunt is conjuring is flintlock fantasy. And to achieve this he fast-forwards his history to the resulting unremittingly dour 18th century Europe, where squalid brutality and petty warfare are the common currency of death, and human lands are hemmed in by an enchanted wilderness of faerie witchwoods - haunted by interminglings of sly feral things: "A wilderness which wrote her own rules."

Taliesin is the story's protagonist; a one-eyed opportunistic soldier with attitude, in yet another vicious little insurrectionary war in Queen Annan Pendrag's Cold Sea Islands (ie Britain). By witnessing supernatural events at the final storming of Drum Draiocht, Taliesin and his companions, the giant highlander Connaire Mor, and a hell-rake dandy called Gunnar are precipitated into a rollicking series of picaresque adventures in the Dumas mould, but with a higher body-count. They journey on a mission to the other side of the world, next to the very Frost itself, where "the overland pass is a nightmare, and the Enclosed Sea is full of privateers preying on every ship attempting to sail across it."

There's much intrigue and treachery, demons and darkness, assassins and weirdsman, corsairs and courtiers, in a well-portrayed world where women are dollymops, men use holster-puffers, and duellists say things like "damn your eyes, sir."

 In pursuit of this vision of a twisted alternative English Regency, his soldiers - with Finbar the renegade priest, Laetha the hunchback, and other oddities in tow - get themselves dispatched to seek Princess Ariane, who has eloped to Sombor, a Balkan invention of the former Yugoslavia: "My merchanteers say this part of the world is a madness now. Reports from this direction are vague, but alliances seem to be shifting with each telling, territory changing hands with equal rapidity."

So no change there! But the further from home our heroes adventure, the more bizarre the cultures they encounter; the Dagda tree-folk, the Germanic Thuringian Empire of the Tree with its steam-based technology, and Sombor itself, where massive haplocanth lizards haul wheeled cities through man-high pampas grass. And through a catalogue of gut-spilling limb-lopping battles they finally penetrate beyond the wall at the end of the world, to a William Hope Hodgesonesque ultimate ziggurat, and into Hunt's finest prose to discover the cosmic secrets of the Sunken Empire which wrecked the world with its black necromancy and demon plots (its apocalyptical demise directly connected to a clash of direction in the heavens).

For the Crown & The Dragon is a first novel with a closely detailed - if skewed 18th century, spiked with intriguing elements of myth. Hunt has ignited a continuum of wonder. "Ah," breathes one of his characters, "the mixture of superstition and worldliness, it all adds to the fascination of our age, doesn't it?"

It do.

About the reviewer. Andrew Darlington is a book reviewer for Protostellar, Orion SF, New Moon, Far Point, and many NSFA publications. Better known in the wider world as a freelance music journalist, as well as the writing half of the Ron Turner partnership which revived the 1956 Jet Ace Logan cartoon strip.

This review first appeared in Protostellar Magazine, and in a modified form (we believe) in one of the NSFA journals.

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