Review: Word of Honour

Word of Honour by Michael Pryor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An improvement on the previous book; the same editing issues are there ("may" when it should be "might," occasionally "is" when it should be "was," verb and noun not agreeing in number, too many commas between adjectives, a dangling modifier, and this time a homonym error too: "racked" for "wracked," and an incompletely revised and therefore garbled sentence: "Sounds like a pair music hall of music hall performers"), but they're less frequent, and the plot almost gets along completely without helpful coincidences, in contrast to the multiple ones in the previous book. It even manages to avert both a deus ex machina and a heel-face turn at the climax, which the protagonist manages by protagonizing; this is good.

It does explain a little more about how magic works: the bigger the effect, the more complex the spell needs to be and the more it costs the caster (which surely means that Aubrey should not have been able to levitate a 5-storey stone tower with minimal preparation, or even at all, in the previous book, but never mind). The one fortunate coincidence supplies Aubrey with a kind of Rosetta stone to Egyptian hieroglyphics, one which seems too small for the purpose and oddly situated in a Roman temple, but again, never mind; this enables him to advance his theories on how to manage his unfortunate partly-dead condition, though not to the point where he can actually take care of it. The Aubrey-Caroline romance gets somewhat back on track, but makes little progress. Caroline points out that they did dance at the ball in Not-Paris, at least, but if my memory is correct they in fact did not, since Aubrey started out looking for people, and then events occurred, and there really wasn't any room for dancing in there.

This is a middle book; things progress incrementally, but nothing is really resolved. The villain appears again, and all the same problems are there (and a couple of new ones, at least one of which does resolve within the book). Notwithstanding, this is an action-packed volume with some strong set-pieces, though still let down a bit for me by the poor standard of editing. Something has gone wrong with the paragraphing, too, in this series; it doesn't follow the convention that a new speaker gets a new paragraph, and sometimes there's a paragraph break in the middle of someone's speech for no reason. Poor conversion from a print book to an ebook, perhaps.

The whole series frustrates me, because with just a bit more work by a competent editor it could be really good (and an experienced author like this shouldn't make the errors in the first place). But the storytelling is good, the emotional arc is sound, and despite all my carping I did enjoy it and am now reading the next one.

View all my reviews