The March North

Graydon Saunders

Mar 2014 · Commonweal Book 1 · Tall Woods Books

About this ebook

Egalitarian heroic fantasy.  Presumptive female agency, battle-sheep, and bad, bad odds.

Ratings and reviews

A compelling and entertaining read, in spite of a frequently bewildering style that separates subjects from verbs with interjections and which has exchanges of dialog where who is saying what is not clear. Many key elements of the novel's fantasy world are named but not explained until later (or sometimes never). You have to make your best guess about events and move on. I am still scratching my head about what happens, geographically, at the end of the book. Be warned: there's no map! That said, I think the style is (mostly) intentional. The narrative is structured as the discursive reports of a serious-minded military careerist (whose personal origins are a mystery until the last chapter). It reads like a police blotter, or like old episodes of "Dragnet." The conversational, just-the-facts-ma'am narrative style may actually be what gives this book its charm and drive; a more omniscient and explicit style might have resulted in a duller story. The author does seem to have worked out the details of his fantasy universe in great detail, but perhaps he is wise not to be too concrete about them. I look forward to learning more about the Commonweal!

This is a very finely written narrative. The craftsmanship is several cuts above what you would normally expect in a military fantasy. The prose is concise and precisionist-grade, pared down without being too spare. Incluing is gradual and details are subtly woven into the narrative. The narrator is fully characterised and probably unreliable -if the reader doesn't pay careful attention at the beginning he/she will miss details clarifying the events which are expanded on only much further on. The voice the author gives to the narrator eschews personal pronouns, presenting a viewpoint from which gender is only of incidental interest. This novel uses the tropes of military fantasy to introduce a primary focus on a society shaped by some fundamental forms of organization in the enchantments by which the Commonweal has been organized. The military aspect is only one (subsidiary) facet of the whole theme.Though by no means a utopia, this is in dialogue with a long tradition of speculative fiction thinking about how best to structure society (of which Utopia is an example; so also is The Just City).

An A for world-building. B- for plot and characters, but the sequels are more engaging. I read "The March North". Then I read the other two books. Then I reread them. Then I reread the trilogy. So, yeah, five stars. Some time in the not-too-distant future, magic comes to our world, and not in a nice way. A fraction of of the population develops magical abilities - a small fraction, but that still means thousands of people with what it takes to become Evil Overlords. Now move forward a quarter of a million years, to the time of "The March North". Magic is commonly written as a thin plot device over a basically-unchanged world. The non-magical majority still lives in a pseudo-medieval world or a pseudo-modern world we can recognize. Saunders's world has had hundreds of thousands of years of irresponsible magicians. Magician A creates giant carnivorous moat monsters for his castle. Magician A then gets himself killed, and the moat monsters wander off and breed. Magician B wins a war by unleashing a plague. Most of the bacteria die - and a few encyst themselves, and reemerge periodically. Magician C just starts an ice age... The society in which this novel is placed - the Commonweel - is trying to live free of sorcerous overlords. It's been doing so for five centuries, which is either a long time or too soon to tell, depending on your perspective. And now the sorcerous overlords next door are invading.