The Court of Broken Knives

This is a bit of a departure from my usual book reviews, as most of the works I have done so far have been more like 30 or 40 years old. In this case, Anna Smith Spark contacted me and asked if I would like to review her book, and once I was satisfied it fit generally within the bounds of Sword & Sorcery fiction, I said okay. So this will be a bit longer, and I intend to be a bit more thorough. Also: Spoilers.

The Court of Broken Knives is the first in the Empires of Dust series, of which the second book, The Tower of Living and Dying, has just recently come out. As an author, Spark is just getting started, and Court is her first published book. It’s plain from her work that she is well read in history, and is also a fan of some classic pulp fantasies. There’s a place on her world map called “Hastur”, so I know there’s some Lovecraft on her bookshelf, though the world she has created seems to resonate more strongly with Moorcock and maybe Clark Ashton Smith in its otherworldly unfriendliness, and a lot of the book reminds me of Glen Cook’s Black Company and Dread Empire series – though she herself told me she actually hasn’t read any of his work.

Spark has been called the “queen of grimdark” and her publisher seems to be selling this story on the basis of how gritty and grim it is. Maybe my meter is set differently, but I didn’t find it all that dark, myself. It’s obviously a morally ambiguous world and none of the characters are what you would call sympathetic, but there are plenty of places where the story could have gone much darker than it does, and it does not approach Elric-like levels of existential horror.

The world as presented is almost a long-post apocalypse landscape where a thousand years in the past a guy called Amrath basically became the High Lord of Fucking Shit Up and led a crusade that was less one of conquest and more just killing and burning everything. He was supposed to be the child of demons and dragons and unkillable until he got killed by an actual dragon. He was so terrible that the world celebrates his birthday as a holiday as essentially a way to propitiate his spirit and hope he doesn’t come back. A lot of his legend is cloaked in uncertainty, and while I find the idea of “dragonborn” almost painfully cliché at this point, I get the sense that there is more to it awaiting reveals in the later books.

The action of this book centers on the city of Sorlost, decaying center of the decadent Sekemleth Empire, depicted as a kind of blend of Persian and Egyptian mythologic feel and cultural ideas. The story presents us with two interrelated and yet distinct plotlines. One plot concerns Orhan, a high noble of the empire who is involved in a plot to assassinate the emperor and seize control, and the other plot follows Marith, a young man with a mysterious past who is a part of the mercenary company Orhan has hired to help carry out his plan.

A third thread of this story is Thalia, who is the High Priestess of the central religion of the empire – the Worship of a god called Tanis, who seems to draw thematically on the myths of Osiris. Thalia spends over half the book completely separate from either plot thread, though we know she will become involved because we have several small chapters from her point of view in first person. This is in opposition to the third-person of the remainder of the book, and makes these interchapters somewhat jarring. They serve to inform us that Thalia will be important later, but I think the POV shift was a mistake.

Spark is a sometimes gorgeous prose stylist, with a tremendous ear for words and an eye for vivid imagery. When she evokes her imaginary world, she does it with a sharpness of detail and loving attention that makes even the traveling music spring to life. Unfortunately, she sometimes lets this tendency run away with her, cranking up the rhetoric at climactic moments and sometimes descending into abstraction and inner monologue when we really just want to see what is happening. Her battle scenes tend to get mushy, with the action sometimes simply dissolving into strings of overdramatic one-sentence paragraphs and the text itself chanting things like “Death! Death! Death!”

One of the ways she creates a feel of gritty irony is with the dichotomy between her elevated, almost purple narrative prose and the chopped-down, vernacular style of the dialogue. It gives a sense that the world is not taken as mythic and wondrous by the people who live in it, and adds a dimension of realism. Also, the sometimes crude, often profane speech of the characters side by side with the stately prose of the narration gives an almost subliminal sense of decay beneath a shining veneer.

The great theme of the book is people struggling to exercise their own free will within a world and societies that are shown to be stultifying, controlling, and inhumanly cruel. Marith is the descendent of the last royal house that claims the blood of Amrath; Thalia is the high priestess of an ancient and bloody religion; and Orhan serves a state ruled by a supposedly reincarnated emperor who is reborn again and again. Reincarnation, and the belief in it, runs through the book like a bloodstain. Marith is hinted to perhaps be Amrath reborn, and by the end he expressly claims it, while Orhan openly mocks the idea that the emperor is actually reincarnated, and plans to simply pick a child emperor and rule through him.

One of the biggest strengths of this book is that you are not sure where it is going. It is not one of those novels where you read the first three chapters and can practically chart out the rest of the story from there. Spark kept me guessing about where she was headed for a long time, and that did a lot to keep me reading. There are a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but in a first book you expect that.

There are weaknesses to this book, and the first is that the structure and pacing are rather messy. The book takes too much time to get going, and then, about two-thirds through, things seem to kind of grind to a halt and start over rather than cranking up the tension for the final act. I am curious if this was written as one long book and then later broken up, because that would explain quite a bit. The pace is rather leisurely, and the story does not seem to hang together as it should.

The real main weakness of the story is that none of the characters are that sympathetic. Marith is a banished prince with a drug problem, and while he is our ostensible protagonist, he does not really drive the action of the story. He’s feckless, weak-willed, and spends a lot of time hung over and vomiting. We are repeatedly told that he is beautiful, but that’s not a character trait. He often seems to become incapable of action through ennui simply because its convenient to the plot. Other times he does horrible things for seemingly no reason. I mean, once your protagonist murders a baby for a place to sleep, it’s hard to recover from that.

Thalia has done terrible things – including kill babies – because as a priestess she performs human sacrifices weekly. You can kind of forgive her for it, because she was raised by the temple, and does not know any other way, but she lacks agency, and after she escapes from the temple, she quickly falls into bed with Marith and becomes a typical damsel-in-distress appendage to his story.

Orhan is probably the most likeable, because his motives make some kind of sense, and he is really the character who drives the plot forward through most of the book. He actually feels remorse for the bad things he does, and wonders if he is really justified in his actions. His relationship with his lover, Darath, has some genuinely sweet moments, and is the most compelling relationship in the book. He does not have what would be described as an arc, but he is acting, and not reacting.

The only other relatable characters in the book are the mercenary captain Tobias and his small band of slightly amusing soldiers. They are obviously fodder, and get killed off throughout the story, leaving only Tobias and his back-and-forth switches between greed and responsibility. We are supposed to feel like he is conflicted, torn between his hard-headed practicality and an inexplicable affection for Marith. But Marith is such an unreliable, murderous, treacherous character that we don’t really feel that.

So this is very much a story of dark, often reprehensible characters in a morally corrupt and unforgiving world. It is highlighted by powerful imagining, vivid writing, and an unpredictable plot. It’s hampered by too many characters who are not interesting enough to counter how awful their actions are, and by writing that does not control the ebb and flow of tension very well and sometimes uses pumped-up language rather than trusting in the characters to create the drama. In the end, it’s that unpredictability that has me curious to see where the story is going next.