By Catherine Cheek
Long-time fans of high fantasy will find The Dark Ferryman, by Jenna Rhodes very comforting and familiar. Elvish Vaelinors, Hobbit-like Dwellers, and various humanoid races struggle in an epic war of sword and sorcery for control of the land of Kerith. It’s book two of a series called The Elven Ways, sequel to The Four Forges.
The novel starts in Queen Lariel’s war camp when the mysterious Daravan wakes half-elf Sevryn up and tells him they have to go on a little trip. They go to meet the dark ferryman, who has the supernatural power to take people from the bank of one river to the bank of a completely different river. When they arrive on the other side, they fight inhuman creatures called the Raymy. The presence of the Raymy is apparently significant, because when Sevryn finally gets back, he tells the queen and she expresses grave concern. It’s assumed that we know who Daravan is and where he’s gone, but he vanishes and doesn’t reappear for many chapters.
Queen Lariel spends time gathering information from her magic hawks who fly around and spy for her. She finds out her enemy Diort is gathering an army, and he may or may not be working with Quendius, her other enemy. All the news is bad. There’s evidence that the “ways,” ancient spells the Vaelinor use to protect their lands, (among other things) are faltering.
While the queen makes her war plans, Sevryn spends time with his true love, Rivergrace. Rivergrace is an orphaned Vaelinor who was raised as a foundling by a Dweller family. She has a magical affinity for water; she was the host for a river goddess in the previous novel. Sevryn has a connection with the demon Cerat, and he struggles with it for control of his blood-lust. When he’s not running errands in the queen’s name or casting moon-eyes at Rivergrace, he’s in the practice ring fighting with whomever will face him.
Rivergrace’s foster sister Nutmeg Farbranch is in love with the queen’s brother Jeredon. Nutmeg has been trying to nurse Jeredon back to health following a spinal injury he sustained in the first book. Jeredon loves her too, but he feels he can’t, because she’s a Dweller and he’s a Vaelinor. The elvish Vaelinor are quite racist, and even make slurs against Sevryn because he doesn’t have the two-toned eyes that full blooded Vaelinors have.
Meanwhile, we learn about Quendius, Narskap, and their plan to reforge the demon Cerat into deadly arrows with which he will slay his enemies. Diort shoots the queen’s hawks down so she can’t figure out what he’s doing. Also, there are rumors that the old Gods of Kernan are coming back.
During this time, Nutmeg’s brother joins the evil warlord’s band so he can spy, and he watches while Quendius destroys the magical jewel that holds the wards that keep the Raymy away from Vaelinor lands. The queen and her allies are horrified that Quendius could be so evil, but at this point in the novel I’d already grown fond of Quendius because, he’d at least had some character development. In fact, I was kind of rooting for him.
Rivergrace and Nutmeg get tired of their respective beaus and take off for a library, where they gather more information about the troubles ahead. They find Narskap, the sidekick of the evil Quendius, except this time he’s nice and gives information. After they leave, it’s discovered that someone poisoned the library. The queen uses this and another flimsy rumor she heard to decide that Rivergrace is a traitor.
The queen captures Rivergrace and Nutmeg and throws them in a dungeon, but Rivergrace is rescued, and taken to some mysterious caves. Nutmeg goes after her, Sevryn goes after her, the queen goes after her, and it all falls together in a giant action scene with battles, reconciliation with characters from the earlier novel, and tearful death-scenes.
I won’t spoil the plot, because those who read The Four Forges were probably looking forward to finding out what happened to Sevryn, Rivergrace, Queen Lariel and the others. Those who hadn’t read the first novel, like me, will wonder why we are supposed to care about these characters.
One of the problems I had coming into this without reading the first novel is that I wasn’t there for when the Vaelinor proved their worth and valor. I just started reading about a bunch of prissy elves who conquered this land and treat the humans like second-class citizens. If a bunch of pointy-eared jerks conquered my country, I’d be sniping them from windows and strapping IEDs to their corpses. The people seem to be okay with it because elves are pretty and pretty means good, right? But it didn’t fit. It’s kind of like when you see a movie where Nicolas Cage is playing one of the characters, and they don’t bother giving you backstory because hey, who doesn’t like Nick Cage?
The Vaelinor are racist, petty, and self-absorbed, especially the queen. We don’t see anything about her that makes her worth caring about. The first half of the book is all set up for the final climactic scene, and the only characters who are really developed are Sevryn, Rivergrace, and Nutmeg. Frankly, Nutmeg’s folksy aphorisms and apostrophe-laden dialect made her annoying. As a result, by the time I got to the end of the novel, all I cared about was whether Rivergrace and Sevryn would be together.
The fact that The Dark Ferryman is the weak middle of a trilogy is only one of this novel’s problems. I admit I have a strong aversion to high fantasy: there’s no hate like hate which was once love. I expect mediocrity. Every once in a while, an author like Kate Elliot or Scott Lynch will come along and convince me that something wonderful can be done with this hoary sub-genre, but this book did nothing to break stereotypes.
The novel is almost a checklist of what not to from Diane Duane’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. First of all, we know the eye and hair color of every single elf. And they don’t just have eyes that are “greenish” or “dark,” they have a crayola box of colors peeping out under their eyelids. Aquamarine, sea-green, forest green, silver, gold, etc. One character had her hair and eye color emphasized so often I started making tallymarks (honey colored hair mentioned three times, forest and moss green eyes mentioned four times) Also, the redhead in the book has magical power, the good queen has silver-and-golden tresses, and the evil unspeakable villain has sooty colored skin. This wasn’t cute when C.S. Lewis did it, and it’s even less cute in this millennium.
The world itself feels like it was created out of a mail-order fantasyland kit. There are swords, and shields, and chainmail, but no trebuchets or sappers or bolos or nunchucks or anything else of a similar technological level that doesn’t come in the box. And of course they eat apples and bread and stew and cheese, but they don’t eat salted fish, or dried persimmons, or moldy bacon, or pasta, or parsnips, or unsalted pumpkins, or anything else plausibly period that doesn’t fit in the milieu. When the characters go to a city, it’s just a city. There aren’t whitewashed buildings and bare breasted women selling lemons, or fish vendors paddling around on coracles, or sheepherders wending their way through adobe apartments. It was as though the author figured we knew what a fantasy world was supposed to look like, and left it at that. It makes me miss Robert Jordan, and it’s hard for me to say that.
The novel needed a cliché-ectomy. Cheeks are always described as “apple red”, blood is always “coppery” tasting, and the author used the cliché “like a hot knife through butter” twice, thinking that adding adjectives would fix it. The Vaelinor/elves are tall, beautiful and magical. The Dwellers/hobbits are short, earthy farm folk whose much-ballyhooed wisdom seems to consist of an endless store of useless aphorisms.
Like many high fantasy novels, the world of Kerith has the trappings of medieval culture but its characters think like modern Americans. For example, when the queen discusses whether she can marry Rivergrace off for a political alliance, the idea comes off as unexpectedly old-fashioned. No one cares that Rivergrace doesn’t have a dowry and isn’t a virgin, because what do you think this is, the middle ages? When Rivergrace and Nutmeg get some horses and go to the library, no one bats an eye. Just as people seem to have modern ideas about young girls shacking up with guys they aren’t married to, they also have no problem with them taking off by themselves. This world apparently has no bandits or brigands or highwaymen or frat boys who might prey on women alone.
It also lacked realism. In the beginning, they’re living in a war camp, but there aren’t any latrines, or camp followers, or muddy roads, or store wagons crawling with vermin, or starving peasants. Horses can run all day without eating. Money is never an issue. Rivergrace and Nutmeg get what they want just by asking for it, and even the Warrior Queen never worries about how much the war is going to set her back. Also, except for Nutmeg and Rivergrace, everyone at the camp who has a name also has a rank. But the peasants don’t respect the noble ranks of the Vaelinor, and the Vaelinor just nod and smile at how cute it is that the peasants boss them around, so their ranks are meaningless. Sometimes a servant would pop in just long enough to bring food, but then they’d vanish again, so it felt like the peasants never existed at all. It was topheavy with meaningless titles, more like a Rennaissance Festival than a real world.
Those who aren’t put off by the run-of-the-mill worldbuilding and want to read The Dark Ferryman will still want a running start before figuring out where all the characters stand in regards to one another. I recommend starting with the first novel instead of floundering through the second as I did. This book does have a glossary, but it also needed a ‘who’s who’ index and it desperately needed a map. Those who have already read The Four Forges will know whether or not they liked the characters enough to continue with the series.
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