Review (sample): J.E. Nice, _Matter of Time_
J.E. Nice’s Matter of Time, book 1 of the trilogy, The Last War, has this description on Amazon:
It starts with a scream.
People are going missing in Drummbek castle. It's something castle maid Tabitha can't ignore, and she's determined to find out what's really going on.
Meanwhile, in the Wastelands, exiled veteran dragonslayer, Del Thorburn, knows exactly what's going on and she's on her way home to finish what she started.
What happens will change their lives, and the lives of those they hold close and love, but if they think that'll be the end of it, they're sorely mistaken.
Some dragons just won't die.
A fast-paced action adventure fantasy trilogy.
This boxset contains all 3 book in The Last War Trilogy.
I read the sample, which contains two chapters, and thus far there’s not really all that much to say. It’s written smoothly enough, apart from a few clunkers and some rather hamfisted attempts at dialect (“prob’bly”?), but despite the claim to a “fast-paced action adventure fantasy,” what the first two (of twenty-three) chapters reveal is “fantasy.” Otherwise there’s not much: no action, an extremely slow pace, and only the faintest hints of any adventure to come. I recognize that this isn’t trying to be Robert E. Howard-style pulp, all action and little else, but it’s certainly slow-moving.
To my mind, the difficulty comes with the fact that the characters don’t develop. Obviously there’s an arc here, such that what we see at the outset is different from where these women (both protagonists, or possibly two out of three, are women) start, but Nice doesn’t give us much interiority. “Castle maid Tabitha” is curious (inquisitive, nosy, unprofessional—take your pick) and small. “Exiled veteran dragonslayer Del” is a little nervy, but although the dragonslayers she bumps into are complimentary about her memory, she’s not done or said anything memorable—apart from accidentally revealing her identity to the first people to bump into her, that is.
One problem for me is that I liked the opening of the book very much. “It starts with a scream,” a weird, unidentifiable scream somewhere in the castle that prompts the kitchen-servants to speculate. What I liked so much was that they didn’t seem remotely concerned about it, nor really curious. It’s just one of those things, and besides there are a lot of screams (mostly from the dungeons), and who’s got the big rondeau because I have to brown off these onions, that kind of thing. It struck me as a rather funny way to start.
Only it then quickly turned out that Nice just didn’t handle the opening the way she intended, in the sense that apparently we’re suppose to detect brooding menace here, and brave little Tabitha is going to poke and pry to find out what’s going on, and all that cliché stuff. Ho hum. A pity: I quite liked the idea that nobody really cares about weird screams because they’re busy people who live in a fantasy world. No such luck.
I will say that I was struck to discover that dragons here are about human-sized and distinguished, it seems, principally by their having tails; the head of the castle kitchen is a dragon, for instance, and seems to be pretty much exactly like anyone else (notably the cook in Downton Abbey without the panache) apart from her tail. But at least in the first two chapters there’s no explanation of this, no way to imagine dragons here, so I don’t know what to make of it.
On the basis of what I see here, this trilogy is going to be rather predictable and ordinary, the kind of thing that lovers of Melanie Rawn and Mercedes Lackey and maybe Robin Hobb are going to enjoy—probably just enough to make them go back and re-read their favorites. The books are very inexpensive, and seem likely to be pretty long, so you can’t fault them if they pass the time. And as I say, it’s all smooth and professional enough, on the whole. It just seems kind of flat and uninspired.
If you read Matter of Time, do let me know whether I got any of that right—and more importantly, what you thought of the book!