Review (sample): D.H. Dunn, The Fifth Interdictor

The Amazon page description for D.H. Dunn’s The Fifth Interdictor reads like this:

WHAT WOULD YOU TRADE FOR THE TRUTH?

She is the Fifth Interdictor, a powerful warrior imbued with magical abilities and the gift to see into the future. Yet now she faces defeat from the one enemy she has never challenged before: the truth of her own history.

She has no name, no past, no memory of who she was before she became the proud and noble defender of her King, keeping the people safe through her potent sorcery and skill. What need did she have for a past, when the present and her role in it was so clear, so easily understood?

But when the King’s latest assassination attempt calls every aspect of her life into question, the Fifth finds herself plunged into a deepening crevasse of danger and deceit, where allies become threats and her deadliest enemy may be the answers lying inside the Fifth herself.

Each step toward the hidden answers of her existence takes the Fifth farther away from her power, her own magical abilities betraying her more with every uncovered lie. Will the Fifth discover the truth before it is too late, or are these the final days of THE FIFTH INTERDICTOR?

I’ve reviewed some of Dunn’s work before, the first volume of the Fractured Everest series, Under Everest. But where Under Everest makes a stab at classic pulp (not entirely successfully), The Fifth Interdictor is straight-up fantasy in the style usually marked high-epic or the like (say, from Terry Goodkind and Brandon Sanderson to Melanie Rawn and Mercedes Lackey). And on the whole, it looks fairly workmanlike: if you like that kind of thing, you’ll probably enjoy this.

The basic shtick, as indicated in the description, is that the protagonist is your classic butt-kicking girl, except that she doesn’t do the tedious, trivial “sassy” thing which is usually intended to tell us that the female protagonist is not only tough but also likable. Interestingly, the Fifth isn’t cut from that mold—which has some potential, but leaves me worried.

In essence, every time somebody seriously plans or attempts an assassination on the king, the Interdictor gets a clear advance vision of what’s going to occur. She shows up at the appropriate place and time, and uses special magical powers (from the same source as the visions) to blast the would-be assassin to ash.

Now as soon as you think about this a little, it ought to strike you as odd. How often can these assassination attempts really happen? When she’s not blasting assassins, what does she do with her time? The blasting doesn’t seem to involve traditional martial arts of any kind, apart from fast reflexes—she touches the guy and the Magic Death Power zaps him—so is she actually especially tough or dangerous when there’s no assassination going on? And as we quickly learn (from the description of the book, as well), there’s the further oddities that she has no idea who she used to be or how she ended up the Interdictor, and that each time she uses the Magic Death Power she’s completely drained and has to rest for days to recover.

What could make this work is that it means she’s a weapon, not a person. That sets up a pretty classic sort of back-and-forth, where she’s trying to figure out “who she really is” and everyone in power already knows what she is—and wants he to stay that way. Fair enough. Not especially original, structurally, though I haven’t seen it done quite this way before.

In particular, I mentioned above that boring, heavy-handed “butt-kicking Sassy Miss McSass” nonsense, which was sort of cute the first 87 times but since then has become wildly ordinary and tedious. Now by way of contrast, the Fifth has no personality whatsoever. All we get is her interiority—the book is in first-person limited POV—but there’s nothing there. She really is a weapon and not a person. Now I gather that this is going to change in some way over the course of the book, based on the description, but I actually kind of like the idea that she’s been stripped of not only name and background but also everything else that makes her an actual person. I really hope this was intentional!

I could wish that the prose weren’t so heavy and dense. This situation is already kind of grim, and Dunn presents it utterly without humor. That combination makes the prose seem frankly leaden, sort of plodding along through stock high-epic fantasy sentences and paragraphs. They’re perfectly workmanlike, on the whole (as usual with the samples I see, another proofreading pass would really have helped a lot, but it’s not bad at all), but it all feels like it fell out of the same mold as everything else. To put that another way, it reads like an excellent imitation of other writers.

Now if you love those writers, that’s perhaps no bad thing. You like Robert Jordan or whoever, so you get more of same from Dunn. I just think it’s a little disappointing, because I rather like the idea of taking the “she’s a deadly weapon honed to the finest pitch” shtick and twisting it sharply…but to make that twist work, I think your prose would have to indicate, somehow, that you’re aware that this is a cliché being subjected to a different sort of treatment.

Still and all, I think if you like the description, and you like that kind of post-80s semi-grim high fantasy epic style, you’re likely to enjoy D.H. Dunn’s The Fifth Interdictor.