Two of Swords is the new serialised novel by K.J. Parker.
The first three parts are available now, and run to about eighty pages each.
Further parts will be made available on a monthly basis. I’m going to try and
put out a review for one of the currently available parts each week, and then
review each new part in the month where it becomes available.
I’ve made no secret about being a big fan of K.J. Parker,
who I think writes a lot of extremely interesting stories, with depressingly
believable characters. Things tend to end badly for those characters; one of
the key themes of Parker’s work is entropy; everything gradually falls apart,
typically due to the actions of characters working with the best (or at least
most reasonable) intentions. This tendency toward systemic collapse always
makes for slightly depressing reading, but on the other hand, it’s usually
tightly wound with a dry wit that exposes the essential humanity of the
characters whilst eliciting the odd chuckle.
I’m happy to say that Two of Swords continues this trend.
This first part introduces us to several farm boys, conscripted into a war They
have a certain baffled innocence as a group which is rather charming, and the
initial focus, on a lad who has some skill at archery, works as a means of
drawing the reader into the world. Our viewpoint into the larger scale of
things is as confused, disoriented and uninformed as we are – as he makes a bit
of progress toward understanding, so do we. It’s always good to see world
building done well, and Parker manages it through the little details – mentions
of wider political situations in incidental dialogue; economic progress
revealed through fashion...there’s all sorts of small clues to the world the
characters inhabit scattered around the text, ready for readers to pick up,
like ravens.
The characters are very well captured; Parker gives us a
sense of confusion and drudgery most strongly, but there’s a whole gamut of
emotions here. The gentle friendship of the protagonist and the village over-achiever,
for example, is put into place so quickly you don’t notice, and forms the
bedrock of the first half of the text, as they begin to move into the wider
world together. The same is true of the sort of casual dislike f the
protagonist for one of the other boys, something only becoming obvious as they move out of their comfort zone and into...well,
a war zone.
The actual narrative is very tightly written. You could read
it as a standalone short story, and it would work. There’s a definite character
arc here for the protagonist, which eventually ends up going in some very
unexpected directions. Suffice to say, the journey builds the character up
nicely, and I’m not entirely sure what the destination will be. Parker doesn’t
pull any punches either, in line with their usual style. There’s a lot of plot
events packed into the eighty pages or so of text, and several of them are
game-changers within the narrative, taking it off the expected path and
throwing it somewhere entirely unexpected. Then once the reader is used to the
new situation, they’re torn back out of it again. These narrative shifts are typical
of Parker’s work, but they don’t lose their impact here.
In the end then, is this worth picking up? As a standalone
short story, it isn’t too bad at all; interesting characters, a fast moving
plot, and a believable and not over-drawn setting. As the start of a broader
narrative, it shares those virtues, with a promise to build on them in the next
segment (which has an entirely different protagonist). In either case then,
yes, it’s definitely worth your time and money, and absolutely worth reading.
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