The Raven Warrior

This book continues where The Dragon Queen, the story of Guinevere (Gwynaver and Guynifar) left off - one novel published in two parts rather than two in a series of novels. It does not stand alone. There are a thousand references and allusions to people and events in The Dragon Queen.

Igrane (the wicked witch/sorceress) continues to suffer dreadful torments at the hands of Merlin, the even wickeder (and far more powerful) wizard/sorcerer. You might say she deserves every moment of it, were it not that she seems to enjoy every moment of it. The lurid descriptions of Guinevere's sufferings at the hands of nature and Igrane's at the hands of Merlin with which the book opens will certainly put some people off.

Stick with it - at least for a while.

The Raven Warrior of the title is Guinevere's werewolf friend Black Leg, the boy/wolf she grew up with, who as a man/wolf becomes the great warrior and knight known to the rest of us as Lancelot.

Uther, Arthur's father, is still High King of Alba, the White Isle. "The system he headed worked well, and had done so time out of mind. And in the process made Alba one of the most prosperous places outside of the east." That system had been almost destroyed by the "greedy", "stupid" Romans (how different from Jack Whyte's view of the Romans in the Camulod Chronicles!) but was now beginning to reassert itself given national independence and the need to unite against the Saxon invader. And there is the Brotherhood of the Bagudae, who were "the bane of the dying Roman imperium," but who saved the victims of the system wherever they could.

Reviewing The Dragon Queen, I wrote "In this book, the fantasy is always real; scrupulously so." In this book, I am afraid, it is not. In fact, the fantasy is so all-pervading and out of control that it hardly qualifies for this site (view definition).

And not only is the fantasy out of kilter: the Lady of the Lake for instance is no lady but a raunchy all-American tramp, which at least makes her stand out for no one else in the book speaks remotely like that; but also the editing is careless: the name of the sorcerer Ure is sometimes misspelt Eure; Guinevere's companion Albe is misspelt Able; there are tense errors such as "Uther forsake my bed years ago" and malapropisms such as proprietory for propitiatory in "And proprietory rites [she is referring to sacrifices] must be made before we can cut one [of the sacred pines]". Also, there are too many sub-plots - they are really plots, each with its own viewpoint - and no one main story-line. I mentioned in the review of The Dragon Queen that stories there are told in alternate chapters, which can be frustrating and annoying, but here she is telling so many different stories that we have to wait for five, six other stories to go by, each in a different fantasy setting, before we get back to what what was once a cliff-hanger concerning Guinevere or Uther but has now been all but forgotten.

This is not how to tell a story, and it is not what we have come to expect from Alice Borchardt, whose Silver Wolf is one of the most perfectly conceived, constructed and executed books I have ever read. And most realistic, in the sense of making fantasy seem real in that setting.

Here, only Uther's story retains its hold on reality. (In Uther's case there is a love between him and "a handsome Saxon boy", a military officer who is really a woman, that is very real and - what can I say? I fell in love with her too!) Also, there is more about Maenial and Maeniel's past, which is always of interest.

Final word? Though it is flawed in a way that no other books of hers are, it is still good, and in parts, as one would expect, great. Those who took to her version of Guinevere in The Dragon Queen, and especially all those who are enthralled by the on-going story of Maeniel, the Wolf King, and his family and friends, will not want to miss it but they may want to skip large parts of it as they search for the next part of the story they are trying to read.

MBG.