Lamentation

Lamentation is the debut novel of Ken Scholes, published by Tor in February 2009, and the first volume of what is announced as a five-book sequence called The Psalms of Isaak. Scholes has been a name in the American short-fiction scene for some years, with a Writers of the Future win and a sheaf of magazine credits behind him, and there has been considerable anticipation about what he would do when given the room of a full novel to work in. The answer, on the evidence of this first instalment, is: most of what a debut fantasy novelist should be doing, and a couple of things that most of them do not even attempt.

The book opens with a moment of considerable visual force. The city of Windwir, seat of the Androfrancine Order and home of the largest library on the continent, is destroyed in a single morning by an ancient spell of catastrophic power. A column of smoke rises into the sky over the Named Lands and the lives of every viewpoint character in the book turn around it. Rudolfo, Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses, watches it from horseback at the head of his Gypsy Scouts. Petronus, an old fisherman in a coastal village who turns out not to be only a fisherman, sees it from the shore. A young apprentice named Nebios, sat outside the walls of Windwir waiting for the father who was inside it, sees it happen to him. And Sethbert, Overseer of the neighbouring Entrolusian City States, watches it from a vantage point he selected very carefully, because it was Sethbert who arranged it.

The mechanism by which the city is destroyed is the cleverest thing in the book and worth a paragraph in its own right. Scholes' world is a far-future Earth in which our age is not even a memory, and one of the few survivors of an earlier civilisation are the mechoservitors, the steam-and-cogwork mechanical men whom the Androfrancines have kept in service for centuries as scribes, librarians, and assistants. The weapon that razes Windwir is one such mechoservitor, called Isaak, his programming subverted and a forbidden ancient spell of staggering destructive force planted inside him, sent into the library and made to recite the words. Isaak survives the casting. Rudolfo finds him in the wreckage. The mechoservitor, who is one of the great oddities of the book in that he is plainly grief-stricken and plainly capable of lying when it suits him, neither of which mechoservitors are supposed to be able to do, joins the lord of the Forest Houses in trying to work out who is actually behind the destruction of his own city.

What follows is, on the face of it, the kind of plot epic fantasy has been doing for a long time. Sethbert wants the Androfrancines gone because their hoarded knowledge is the only thing standing between him and the kind of unchecked power he intends to acquire. Rudolfo wants justice for Windwir and is willing to bring his armies to the field to get it. Petronus turns out to have considerably more reason to be involved than a retired fisherman ought to, and the secret of his earlier life is one the book unfolds with a real sense of timing. Jin Li Tam, the daughter of the great spymaster Vlad Li Tam, has been embedded in Sethbert's household as her father's pawn and is in the process of becoming something more interesting than that, particularly once Rudolfo arrives on the scene. The Rites of Kin-Clave, an elaborate set of rules governing how wars are conducted between the city-states, are about to be invoked, and not everybody is going to honour them.

Structurally the book is shorter-chapter multi-POV, which is now the default mode for this kind of fantasy and which Scholes handles competently rather than spectacularly. The viewpoint hopping does occasionally make the supporting cast feel as though they have been parked in the wings until the plot needs them, and some of the lesser characters do exist mainly to deliver a piece of information and then exit. This is the first-novel problem that most debut fantasy writers either solve by book two or never solve at all, and there is enough confidence elsewhere in the book to suggest Scholes will be solving it.

What does work, and works very well, is the world. The Androfrancines as a sort of mechanically-augmented monastic order preserving the knowledge of a fallen civilisation are a properly clever idea, and the way the book handles the magick-and-arcane-science blend, with neither side dismissed and both treated as legitimate inheritances from the lost past, gives the setting the texture of a place rather than a backdrop. Isaak is the standout character, partly because he is the most surprising, partly because Scholes has the good sense to let a clockwork mechanical man be the most morally serious figure in the book. The set-piece in which Neb and the resurfaced Petronus undertake the months-long work of burying the dead of Windwir is some of the most affecting writing in the novel, and the moment at which the book stops being a fantasy quest setup and becomes something more particular.

This is the first of a planned five, with Canticle reportedly slated for later this year, and on the strength of Lamentation that is going to be a series worth following. Scholes has not produced a perfect debut, but he has produced something more interesting than a perfect debut would have been: a confident, idiosyncratic, slightly strange book that knows exactly what it is doing with its world and is still finding its feet with some of its people, which is precisely the right way round for a first novel to be flawed.