This is one that passed me by last year when it was first released. I’m pleased I caught up with it, though.
It’s set in a world of Kings, Queens and assassins. The story is written from the viewpoint of Girton Club-Foot, a teenage cripple who has been trained from a young age by Merela Barn, one of the best assassins in the land. It is clear that the two together have a complicated history, and many of these complications are told throughout the novel as flashback ‘Interludes’.
The main plot of the novel concerns Queen Adran, who calls in a favour from Merela – they also appear to have a complex past. Adran is afraid that her son, Aydor, is to be assassinated, and so Merela and Girton are given the job to go undercover, find the assassin and/or stop the assassination.
You can be forgiven, that if by reading the summary you think – “Well, I’ve read it all before.” (I suspect that this was the reason I didn’t carry on reading it beyond the first couple of pages). Nevertheless, I’m pleased that I’ve since found that Age of Assassins is worth pursuing with. Where the author scores is that his characterisation is great. What is a pretty obvious set of tropes become more interesting when we discover that Adran is deranged and that Aydor is an over-privileged, spoilt bully. By contrast, Garton himself is a likable enough young man, though it is also obvious that for all of his assassin’s skills he is woefully inexperienced in other life-skills, such as dealing with his peers and young love. There’s a sprinkling of respectable supporting characters throughout as well, to elevate this narrative a little.
What begins as a straight-forward Fantasy novel has a narrative pull that belies these tropes. It’s a sign of a book’s strength when it rises above its traditional tropes and keeps you reading, and once the reader’s settled in, it’s a real page-turner. To be fair, it’s very impressive as a debut, and RJ skilfully manages to steer the reader down a few blind alleys before the book’s denouement. The ending was surprisingly good, although a little bit in the nature of ‘the Grand Reveal’, where, in the traditions of the great crime novel, the main characters explain (nearly) everything.
My feeling at the end was how old-fashioned it was – and that is refreshing. It’s not a tale that tries to be deliberately clever, it’s not trying to impress the reader with skilful literary techniques or a broad range of vocabulary. Though it has its moments, it’s not Grimdark, nor is it as harsh as the trials Robin Hobb makes her characters go through. It does what it sets out to do and does it well, without some of the rookie errors other debut authors have made that have killed books for me. As a result, I enjoyed it a great deal, even if I didn’t feel that there was anything really new there.
For that reason, if I was looking at my ‘best of’ list for 2017, it probably wouldn’t quite be in my top five of the year – but very probably in the top ten, which for a debut is impressive. Had I read this ten years ago, when the ideas within could have been fresher, it would have been remarkable.
I realise that this sounds like I’m damning the book with faint praise, so I’ll finish by saying that by the end I was convinced of the book’s entertainment value. It is a book worth reading, and I’ll look forward to reading the next book sooner rather than later, which can only be the sign of a good thing.
Age of Assassins by R J Barker
Published by Orbit, August 2017
ISBN: 978-0356508542
432 pages
Review by Mark Yon
