# 6
Morningstar by David Gemmell
1993 - Orbit paperback - 282 pages
From Amazon:
From the internationally bestselling author of Lion of Macedon and The Dark Prince comes an action-filled new epic fantasy based on the classic Robin Hood legend. Jarek Mace, a thief who preys upon wealthy nobles, is hailed as a hero. But is he a soldier of honor, or just a mercenary?
Thoughts:
This is the book I actually set out to get the other week, then ended up coming home with six or seven Gemmells It's one I kind of overlooked at first, largely because I was trying to complete the Corgi set (this one's published by Orbit) before they changed them all to the new cover style.
Morningstar is unusual in that, of the ones I've read so far, it is the first Gemmell I've encountered that is written in the first-person. The prologue is even written in first-person and present tense, which seems to have caused some consternation (why do some readers struggle with present tense, I wonder?). What makes this more unusual is that the main character - Owen Odell - is not the hero of the story, and we are therefore at the whim of a potentially unreliable narrator. We see everything through Owen's eyes as he, as an old man, tells his story to a ghost.
Odell was, in his day, a bard; not a particularly great one, but he got by. He was also a journeyman magicker, and could conjure illusions to accompany his tales. When he was a young man he travelled to the city of Ziraccu and, on the way to his lodgings after a performance, happened on a young woman being attacked by several thugs. He was unarmed, but yelled at the men to stop. Naturally, a couple of them turned on him. And that was when chance came to his rescue, when another man jumped from a balcony and fought off the attackers. This man was Jarek Mace, and Odell quickly learned that he did not jump into the fray through any altruistic motives, but because he was himself being pursued by the authorities.
Gemmell's heroes were often flawed, troubled individuals, sometimes with dark events in their pasts, but usually trying to atone in one way or another, or maybe even escape from that past completely. Mace, on the other hand, doesn't really care. He's a self-centred thief and womaniser who isn't bothered about anything except his own satisfaction and the gold he can accumulate. He's an anti-hero drawn into situations that spiral out of his control. Odell spends much of the time hating Mace: Gemmell took another risk in making him so unsympathetic and it gives a quite uncompromising edge to the book.
Mace is, imo, maybe not as good an anti-hero character as Connavar (Sword in the Storm), but it seemed to me that Gemmell was trying to achieve something else here. We aren't privy to the inner workings of Mace's mind like we are with Gemmell's usual characters. Instead, Gemmell explores the nature of the hero through the eyes of his adoring - and not so adoring - followers, and the effect a legend can have on an oppressed people, and also the positive and negative effects this can have on the individual in question. This isn't the sort of story where the anti-hero suddenly has an epiphany and sees the light - much the opposite - but it does a great job of illustrating the shades of grey in between.
Morningstar has quite a different feel to it, mainly due to the first-person narrative. The pacing is exemplary (there isn't a word wasted here), the supporting cast is fantastic (especially Megan, Piercollo, Wulf, and the mute Ilka). The action, due to the nature of the narrator, takes more of a backseat than usual. And there is a brilliant twist near the end that puts a new perspective on the whole story. Perhaps its only fault is that the enemy is not fleshed out in Gemmell's usual manner, the result being that they are somewhat faceless and devoid of motive, other than that they are evil, which is a shame.
This is a completely stand alone story and, as such, is not a bad place at all for anyone interested in Gemmell's work to start, although I'd still recommend his 'Rigante' series, or Troy trilogy, or Legend above it.
8/10
