Some years ago, Brust wrote a book called The Phoenix
Guards. It is set in the same world as his Vlad Taltos novels,
though nearly a thousand years earlier; it is also recognizably
inspired by Alexander
Dumas‘s book The Three Musketeers. Some time later he
wrote a sequel with the odd title Five Hundred Years After; the
sequel to The Three Musketeers is called Twenty Years
After. So it was no surprise to the Dumas fans in the audience
when he announced that the next book would be called The
Viscount of Adhrilankha (click on Dumas’ name, above, to see why).
Nor was it a surprise when it was revealed that The Viscount of
Adhrilankha would be published in three volumes. And, after far
too long a time, here is the first of them.

I’m almost at a loss to know how to describe this book. First of all,
it’s a rollicking adventure, like The Three Musketeers.
Historically, it takes place during the Interregnum that followed Adron’s
Disaster, and involves several efforts to reestablish the empire. The hero
is a young Tiassa named Piro, the son of our old friend Khaavren. And
finally, it’s written by Sir Paarfi of Roundwood.

The thing you need to know about Steven Brust is that he almost never
writes without a narrator (the Vlad Taltos books, for example, are
narrated by Vlad himself). And so, just as
The Three Musketeers is an historical novel written by
Alexander Dumas, The Paths of the Dead is not a
fantasy, but rather a Dragaeran historical novel written by an historian
named Sir Paarfi of Roundwood. And Sir Paarfi is a prolix soul (Jane
kept asking me if Paarfi was paid the word) who wants to be sure we
understand completely everything we need to about his tale–and a good
many things we don’t really need to know at all. A lot of the charm of
the book comes from Paarfi’s storytelling….and a lot of the humor is at
Paarfi’s expense.

An example: the Paths of the Dead are a very odd feature of the Dragaeran
landscape. Dead Dragaerans somehow end up there; and if they can
traverse the Paths of the Dead they end up in the Halls of Judgement,
where they stand some chance of reincarnation. The Paths of the Dead
clearly lie along the Blood River at the base of Deathgate Falls, and yet
they aren’t really on earth. Time behaves strangely in the Paths of the
Dead. And Sir Paarfi spends about half a page reminding us about this
peculiarity, in great detail, just so that he can then say that in fact
it has no effect on our tale.

Brust is one of our regular read-aloud authors, and so I read this aloud
to Jane; and I must say that while I enjoyed it, it was heavy going.
Paarfi’s prose is always perfectly clear, and grammatically correct, but
he likes convoluted sentences and long idiomatic constructions, and never
uses one word when five will do, so he’s a tiring author to read aloud.
It was worth it, though.

One caveat: although it ends with a reasonable climax, this book isn’t
really complete in itself; like The Fellowship of the Ring,
it’s simply the first third of a single novel. There are lots of threads
left dangling in odd places; if you’re easily troubled, you might want to
wait until the full work is available.