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Mark Chadbourn, World's End (Pyr Books, 2009)
There are certain elements of television writing which work much better on the small screen than they do on the page. These include, but are not limited to, regularly spaced mini-cliffhangers that coincide with the pacing of commercial breaks; characters defined by one trait, one skill, and one "wound"; minor characters with useful information being pointlessly cryptic until it's too late (at which point they spill their guts, and the secret knowledge they were guarding is revealed as worthless because they waited too long); characters doing the stupid thing they were previously warned not to for no good reason whatsoever and trumped-up character conflicts based on one or more characters' inability to take a comment in anything other than the worst way possible. Whew. Which is to say that Mark Chadbourn's Age of Misrule series, and specifically the first book, World's End, is chock full of these signifiers in a way that feels like the story was originally conceived as a television program. Chadbourn himself writes for the BBC, and it shows. The story concerns Jack "Church" Churchill, a symbolically named wreck of a former archaeologist wrecked by the suicide of his girlfriend. Church and high-powered lawyer Ruth stumble across a brutal murder underneath a bridge in London, one committed by a creature that's so horrifically inhuman that they block out the memory. Searching to recover their recollection of the event, they discover a terrible secret: that the Old Ways are coming back, and they're pissed off. More specifically, the age of technology is over and a horde of evil supernatural beasties known as the fomori (familiar to any student of myth and legend and/or RPG fan, and the intersection of the two is squarely where the book is aimed) have returned to wreak havoc. Science slowly stops working while the countryside gets wilder and nastier, and the government tries to keep a lid on things. Ruth and Church, for their part, have a part to play in the grander scheme of things. Hooking up with three other "Brothers and Sisters of the Dragon," they set off across the country with the aide of a crotchety hippie guide named Tom, whose true identity isn't hard to guess. Their goal is to recover the Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan and summon the erstwhile good guys to deal with the fomori. But there is, of course, a catch, or in this case several, and things get set up appropriately for books two and three as a result. As noted above, the biggest problem with the book is that it feels like television, with all of television's weaknesses laid out on the page for extended contemplation and few of its strengths. The squabbling between characters, which might serve in a quick scene, feels forced and unpleasant when it's laid out at greater length in the book. The characterizations fail to take advantage of the greater space available on the page. We learn pretty much everything we're going to learn about modern shaman Shavi in his first quick infodump; his defining characteristics are that he's pansexual, Asian, and still reeling from the murder of his boyfriend. (The other characters, incidentally, are also reeling from various murders in their personal lives, which means pretty much what you think it does.) Events grow out of the need for story "beats" every so often, rather than organically from the characters, as witnessed by Tom's random warning early in the book and Church's act of stupidity that follows immediately thereafter. The warning comes out of nowhere and thus carries no weight; the fact that Church disregards it feels obvious and inevitable, and the fact that This Is Going To Be Important Later is made painfully clear. And the whole "siblings of Dragons" thing remains dreadfully amorphous except as a plot device. We never learn what they do, but the characters are alternately bound together by the destiny inherent in the name and willing to throw each other under the bus at a moment's notice. To its credit, the book does move. There's action a-plenty, not to mention some witty banter that does achieve actual wit. And the portrait of a modern England trying to deal with the slow return of the magic-infested dark ages is perhaps the best thing in the book, though the constant minor character reminders about how getting rid of technology isn't all bad gets a bit twee after a while. A reader who's already up on the subject matter could do worse for a light read; a reader looking for something more involving could probably do better.
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