I’ve been reading Tom Holt since Expecting Someone Taller in the early 90s, and KJ Parker since stumbling across the Shadow trilogy in the 2000s, and wasn’t aware for a long time that the latter was a pseudonym for the former - or, to be more contemporaneous, that many people suspected KJ Parker was a pseudonym for a well-known writer, and there was quite heated discussion within the community as to their identity.
Not that I’d have been that interested - I’ve always been more interested in the work than the personalities behind it - but I don’t think I’d ever have linked the authors. Holt’s funny, frenetic, while learned and very English style seemed (to me) to bear very little relation to Parker’s dark, foreboding, intricately-plotted tales of individuals fighting fate and obsession to a level that changed the course of nations. Indeed, it didn’t even occur to me to compare the two until a friend mentioned the potential connection.
I mention this because this is the first KJ Parker book I’ve read that has been written since the connection has been acknowledged, and I don’t think it can be coincidental that, in many places, this seems like a blending of the two styles. Mixed in with the story of the military engineer colonel, a former slave and displaced person who has risen through the ranks of an imperial army due to his skill and knowledge but is no soldier, much of the tone is comic; Orhan ( the protagonist in question ) from the start feels out of his depth, apparently muddling through a situation where disasters seem to be multiplying exponentially. The difference in tone to the Scavenger and Engineer books, with their pace driven by the protagonists’ obsession and friction between destiny and self-determinism, could hardly be more marked.
Early on, I confess that this tone kept my opinion lower than it might have been - I’m certainly not against levity in grimdark fantasy ( the master of this is Joe Abercrombie who can take you from belly laughs to stark horror and back again in the space of a few pages ), so perhaps the fault was in my own comparing of the evident clash of styles.
Soon enough, however, I found myself entirely carried forward with the story. Orhan and his regiment of engineers find themselves at the capital city of the mighty Robur empire ( there are many references to classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Constantinople - and I’m sure others I missed ) just as things seem to be falling apart, and Orhan may be the only hope of saving it. Or at least saving the city. Or at least saving his friends. Or at least saving himself.
The tale is pure KJ Parker - overwhelming odds, intricate and surprising plotting, moral ambiguity, incredible detail on technologies of carpentry and metallurgy and siege-craft without detracting from the story - shot through with humour, almost entirely based on the fact that we see it all from the point of view of a character with both too little belief in his own brilliance and the knowledge - or arrogance - that only he can save the day.
On top of which, because Parker/Holt is a very good writer, we have multiple themes of privilege - sexism and racism, especially based around the fact that Orhan is a “milk-face” northerner, facing prejudice and legal restrictions amongst the dark-skinned Robur ( especially due to a scene at a drinking fountain, I’m confident that this is purely an artistic choice and definitely not some “whites are the real oppressed people!” shtick. This shouldn’t even need saying, but have you seen the world? ) and, especially, the meaning of loyalty and friendship and belonging.
Perhaps secondary characters are well-sketched rather than fully formed, although this can be excused as the whole book is from Orhan’s first-person viewpoint - and the author cleverly plays with our expectations when we find he has, indeed, been dictating the story to a scribe - but this is a fine example of modern fantasy, exciting and referential and thought-provoking. I reckon any expectation of style is entirely on me and, frankly, it must be pretty bloody difficult to keep up the level of grimness from the earlier KJ Parker trilogies.
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