the owl and the olive tree

The Death of the Necromancer, by Martha Wells

I picked up Death of the Necromancer as part of my 'read more steampunk' blitz, and in a lot of ways it fits the bill perfectly. Nicholas Valiarde is a gentleman thief whose thieveries are merely in service of his greater goal: achieving vengeance for his foster-father Edouard, executed on trumped-up charges of necromancy. In the course of his heists, however, he stumbles upon the works of a vicious and dangerous necromancer, who in turn targets Nicholas and his companions, as well as Nicholas' 'favorite enemy,' Inspector Ronsarde.

I enjoyed this quite a lot, and I think the reason I did so was because it had a beautiful brisk pace, clipping along from one caper and investigation to another. I'm not the most plot-oriented person in the world -- if the writing is good and the characters are compelling, I don't really notice the plot much, for better or worse -- but I really liked the plot in this one: tightly-sprung and ticking along like a pocketwatch, clear and crisp and comprehensible without being too predictable. There were a few points where I couldn't quite follow the logic of the main characters, but they were few, and largely ignorable, and though some of the plot twists were predictable, they fortunately coincided with some of my favorite tropes of the genre (the Honored Enemy, the alliance of rivals, the improbable heist).

Wells created an intriguing society in the country of Ile-Rien. It's Victorianesque with magical underpinnings (which is why I picked it up as part of my steampunk reading), and the changes to the magic/technology level actually have impacts on the society. It reminded me a good deal of the world of Sorcery and Cecelia (though that was Regency, and alternate-historical fantasy rather than second-world fantasy), and I love that kind of setting. I'm very fond of it, and I always want to explore it and see where it goes. But Death of the Necromancer didn't give me much leisure to explore it. The characters were all too focused to spend much time thinking about or observing the world they lived in. This is probably just as well. Since they all were born to that world, more or less, a lot of thinking about it would be as peculiar as someone in a modern novel stopping to think about the ins and outs of the post office, or the way their toaster worked. (Sorcery and Cecelia avoided this problem by having one of the cousins go to the city and report back on what life was like.) Still... I would have liked a bit more time to explore.

The characters weren't as compelling as the setting, but most of them were good and some of them were delightful, particularly several of the minor characters: Inspector Ronsarde, Doctor Halle, Isham and Arisilde. (The 'underworld' characters -- Crank and Cusard, and Nicholas himself, by his own profession -- I liked, but found unconvincing as hardened thieves. They were all too heart-of-gold for that. Although that may have been deliberate: it's obvious that Nicholas likes to think of himself as one of the lower-class, but perhaps he's supposed to have been fooling himself as to how much that's actually true.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Madeline, the main female character, was least compelling to me. I really enjoy female characters, and more and more I insist upon them (books that have no interesting female characters have to work harder to keep my attention). So I'm at once more forgiving of a story if it has at least one good female character, and picky about how she or they are depicted. Madeline belongs to an archetype that doesn't really interest me, and so, unfortunately, does the other female character, her grandmother (though it's a different archetype). Plus, she's depicted as caring a great deal about one set of skills that she's worked hard to develop, but her primary role in the plot relies on another set of skills that she's been studiously and deliberately ignoring... I would have loved to have seen her get a chance to really show her stuff in her arena of expertise.

All that aside, though, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm a sucker for the type of world depicted here, neither medievalish nor modern and with strange magic or technology thrown in for spice. And the plot was crisp and entertaining, enough so that I'm putting the next of the Ile-Rien books on my list.