Cry of the Newborn
James Barclay
819 pages
published in 2005
James Barclay is not a writer I had heard of before I got this book out of the library. The backcover blurb sounded interesting and the frontcover sported a quote by Steven Erikson, one of my favourite fantasy writers, so while the first few pages I sampled were a bit dull I thought I’d take a chance. The library also had the sequel, but I didn’t put that one up as this was big enough already; I could always get it next time. But I don’t think I will. Erikson’s blurb said that Cry of the Newborn was “a most extraordinary and impressively ambitious novel”, but in reality it was just a bog standard epic fantasy novel. Not a bad novel by any standards, competently written certainly, but nothing special.
[…]
The second objection is more fundamental. The world Barclay has created is presented as if the Concord is a force for good, described in terms which argue that the Estorian hunger for empire is not driven by base motives, but out of a noble desire to create order and stability. Trouble is, I don’t buy it. Looking at it objectively, the Concord is just not that nice, happily waging wars of conquest only to then suck the conquered countries dry for further conquest, not to mention the enrichment of the Estonian elite. Sure, by author fiat there’s little of the cruelity on display practised by real world empires like the Roman or British Empire and it’s even fairly gender neutral, with the current ruler of the Concord being a woman, and with various viewpoint characters being female soldiers and officers, but this is just window dressing. I just could not see the Concord as the good guys, or help root for the supposed baddies, who after all only wanted to live in peace in their own country. Fantasy is a somewhat conservative, some would even say reactionary genre and I can overlook some of the more …odious… assumptions in a given novel if the story is right, but not this time.