Phoenix
Steven Brust
245 pages
published in 1990

One of the things I've noticed over the now more than six years I've done this booklog is that I get an awful lot of hits from Google searches, with people looking for reviews or book reports stumble across this site. Accordingly, one of the things I try to do is to make each review stand on its own as much as possible, because even a review of a book like this, the fifth entry in a reasonable popular series of fantasy novels may be read by somebody who neither knows the series, nor has read my reviews of the previous books in it.

For those readers then, let me explain that Phoenix is the fifth books in the series of fantasy novels starring Vlad Taltos, assassin/smalltime crime lord set in the world of the Dragearan Empire, in which longlived Dragearans (elves) and Easterners (humans) live in a not that peaceful coexistence. The Dragearans are divided into seventeen houses, each named after a specific animal. The Dragearans believe history moves in a great circle, which each of the seventeen houses ruling the empire in turn, with the Phoenix starting the circle. Vlad himself, though an Easterner, is a member of the Jhereg, who form the criminal class in Dragearan society.

Brust started this series with Jhereg as a lighthearted fantasy series, in which the morality of Vlad's profession was barely touched upon. By Teckla, the third novel in the series, however, the first seeds of doubt were shown and with Phoenix, a direct sequel to Teckla, these doubts come in full bloom. Originally this was also written as the final book in the series, though Brust has since then changed his mind and continued it.

Phoenix starts with Vlad having walked in an ambush and calling out in desperation to his patron goddess, Verra, who turns out to have set up the entire affair just so she could ask a favour of him. She wants him to kill the king of Greenaera, a small Dragearan island kingdom a few days sailing from the empire, where both Dragearan magic and Easterner sorcery are (almost) useless. Vlad agrees to do so, sets sail to the island and kills the king with no problems, but has more difficulty escaping. He's helped by a drummer named Aibynn when he falls ill from a wound and both are captured and imprisoned, from which some of Vlad's powerful Dragearan friends manage to free him.

Back home in Arilankha, Vlad still has troubles with his wife Cawti, who got involved with a mixed bunch of Easterner and Teckla revolutionaries back in Teckla. His superior in the Jhereg organisation warns him against involving himself further with them and not to interfere when they're dealt with. This is of course the wrong thing to do with Vlad and he proceeds to interfere when Cawti and her group are arrested, which leads to a gangwar between him and the rest of the Jhereg organisation. He does manage to get Cawti and her people free however, by appealing to the empress directly.

Meanwhile things are coming to a boil in South Adrilankha, the Teckla/Easterner ghetto where Vlad's grandfather lives, and it is after Vlad's visit to his grandfather and dodged an assassination attempt, that the Easterner uprising begins, with Vlad in the middle. The uprising grew out of draft riots, when the military forcibly attempted to recruit Teckla and Easterners for the war with Greenaera, which started with Vlad's killing off their king. At the end of the uprising Cawti is arrested again: to get her free for a second time Vlad proposes to end the war. Even if he succeeds however and comes out of Greenaere alive, which doesn't expect to do, he will still be in trouble with the Jhereg and unable to return to Adrilankha...

Phoenix is another excellent entry in the Vlad Taltos series, impressive in that at the end of it the entire premisse of the series has been lost. Vlad is no longer an assassin/crimelord, has been forced out of his familiar surroundings and has to start a new life elsewhere. There are few writers who would take such a risk with a popular fantasy series. It's to Brust's credit that he did.

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Steven Brust, Phoenix, fantasy, book review