Review: The Season of the Plough

The Season of the Plough by Luke R.J. Maynard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm in two minds about this book.

On the one hand, it's well written at a sentence level, the characters are appealing, and it does something new with the tropes of epic fantasy. The main character may or (more likely) may not be the Chosen One, violence is clearly portrayed as horrifying and repulsive rather than being valorized, and the lives and concerns of ordinary people are celebrated as important. Even in the pre-release version I got via Netgalley, apart from a few missing words in sentences and "belied" used to mean "betrayed," the editing was remarkably clean. While the druid character has an obvious debt to Gandalf (and Väinämöinen, his inspiration, before him), he's not just Generic Mentor Figure #1, and nor is the monster sidekick just a monster sidekick. All of the characters have a bit more to them than their archetypes, and feel like real people with their own concerns and internal contradictions and struggles.

On the other hand, it has a big pacing issue. The first sign of something resembling a plot or inciting incident comes at the 52% mark. Prior to that, it wanders around, telling bits of stories of numerous characters - in some cases adding that this isn't their story - without any sense of urgency or direction. Many of the events are (for the setting) mundane, and consequential only for the people involved. It keeps, in other words, one aspect of epic fantasy - the sprawling wordiness - that I suspect few people love (I certainly don't), while not being in any other sense epic.

Because the more compelling content comes in the second half of the book, I did end up coming down on the positive side. Even the first half managed to keep my interest, though I started looking for the inciting incident at the traditional 25% mark and probably wouldn't have lasted much longer if it hadn't arrived when it did. However, even though there are character and plot arcs under way in the second half, the book doesn't tell a complete story in itself; it's an extended setup for later books, hinting at big dark epic events to come. It doesn't end in a cliffhanger, but it does seem to promise that most of the payoff that we haven't had yet is going to come later. And that keeps it off my Best of the Year list, and doesn't do its job of making me want to continue with the series.

Call me too traditional, but I was looking for a structure more like: first quarter sets the scene and brings on the characters, middle half develops the situation and characters, last quarter resolves something. What it does, it does well, and I applaud the attempt to write a book that isn't just the same old cliched epic fantasy over again, but it was sufficiently far from meeting my structural expectations that I don't plan to continue with the series. I need more frequent and more significant payoffs if I'm going to spend this long on a book.

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