Shadowplay

Tad Williams has a knack for creating an atmosphere. His fantasy worlds are fully populated and full of fanciful imagination and realistic character interactions. When you read one of his fantasies you can imagine a whole wide world full of his imaginary people. Shadowplay is no different. The second of his Shadowmarch series, Shadowplay directly follows the events from the first book.

He starts off with the narrow escape of Princess Briony from her home as it is taken over by a treasonous branch of the royal family. The reader first follows Briony and her companion, Shaso, the former Southmarch master of arms and the man she had formerly believed to be a part of the murder of her brother, Prince Kendrick and who had thus been imprisoned for months. Theirs is an uneasy voyage; the princess has never had to fend for herself, has never been hungry and at first has difficulty with the idea of running and hiding.

The next thread for the reader to take up is the story of Prince Barrick, Briony’s twin, who has been given a secret mission for the Twilight People behind the shadowline following the Southmarch army’s defeat at the hands of those same People. Traveling through their lands, into unknown territory with unknown dangers and difficulties; Barrick is accompanied by Ferras Vansen, the former captain of the royal guard who is not only in love with Briony but has been charged by her with the safety of her brother.

While those are the two main threads of the storyline, Williams weaves into the story a handful of other players. Among these are the imprisoned King Olin, held for ransom by Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol, Qinnitan an acolyte of the Hive in Xis who has escaped and is on the run, Merolanna, the royal twins’ great aunt who is still inside the Southmarch castle, Chert Blue Quartz one of the Funderlings who not only has a very strange adopted child but is helping Chaven, the former royal physician work against the treasonous Tollys, Matthias Tinwright at poet at Southmarch, and Daikonas Vo a Perikalese mercenary sent by the autarch of Xis to return Qinnitan. As you can see from the long laundry list of players above, this is not a simple one act play. The reader is allowed into each of these characters minds and is able to see the world from their point of view as well as the view of the main characters. Some may find this distracting, the moving back and forth among so many characters, but I generally don’t as long as the number of characters that I enjoy reading about outweighs the number of characters whose stories I must wade through. Unfortunately, in my opinion, there are very few characters whose fate I truly wish to follow in this book. Thus I found the story to be very uneven with the characters I was interested in being thrown in like candy amongst a morass of plot and characters that I just did not care about.

While I found the plot itself, at its most basic, to be something I would normally enjoy; Williams’ need to throw in everything but the kitchen sink and to drag out certain storylines till they were dull as ditchwater made me sigh with frustration several times during my reading. With some hefty word count cuts and some judicious flashback and tale-telling use, I feel this could be a stellar book. The characterization is deftly handled, the political plotting and inter-character relations were all finely tuned and the realization of the world itself incredibly imagined. At heart, this is a good story and worth reading, though it certainly would not be harmed by a judicious cut back of about 100 pages.

Other Reviews of works by Tad Williams

The War of the Flowers - May 8, 2008

The Dragonbone Chair - Aug 29, 2005