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Bazil Broketail | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Christopher Rowley | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Bazil Broketail | Bazil Broketail, A Sword for a Dragon, Dragons of War, Battledragon, A Dragon at Worlds' End, Dragons of Argonath, Dragon Ultimate | ||
Argonath has been pressured by the dark Masters to the west for centuries. Their few legions of infantry and calvary are augmented by dragons and their dragonboys. Wingless and walking on their hind legs, the dragons wield swords eight and nine feet long, and so are the powerhouses of the battlefield. Not even trolls can stand up to their strength and skill.
Bazil and Relkin are a matched pair, a Dragon and his boy who hope to join the new legion forming up. If they can manage it, a life of adventure and danger await them. If they can't, Bazil will be used as a sentient draft animal on the farms. This is the story not only of their attempt to join despite some formidible obstacles, such as the fact that they are runaways from their last posting and some literally vicious competition for the available slots in the Legion, but of the mission that made them the talk of Argonath, in which their legion attempts to track down Princess Besita's kidnapper and return the woman back to Marneri. The mission, undermanned and undersupplied, will be up against hordes of savage tribes from the Gan, masses of trolls and imps, and the Blunt Doom itself in the dark city of Tummuz Orgmeen. Their only hopes lie in the witch Lessis and the strength of their dragons.
The book, overall, was quite good. I enjoyed the story of Relkin and Bazil, and how they came into the legion. How they met Lessis, and her eventual assistant Legdolen. They tale of their travels in persuit of Besita's captor has enough action and more than enough battles to satisfy most fans of the genre. Rowley, in other words, doesn't skimp.
But there are still some things I found... odd. The animals populating the landscape are an odd mix - coyotes in the forest, and lions in the Gan, right next to each other. This is a fantasy, I know, and not the real world, but it was very jarring to see the two on the same continent, much less in close proximity. The author also made some peculiar choices regarding what battles to show and what to skip. After Relkin and Bazil finally make it into the legion, the book skips some months, and when next we see them they're battle-hardened veterans of the campaign against the Teetol tribes to the south. While I agree that this wasn't the main thrust of the story, and so could have been given less space than the rest, to give it none at all struck me as a bad choice. These were their first taste of real combat, and it would have been interesting to see just how they reacted.
For that matter, the tone of the entire book is a bit strange. It's a bit hard to describe, I'm afraid; about the closes I can come is to say it sounds like a person is telling the tale instead of a book. Except there is never anything so blatant as breaking the fourth wall, or saying, "And Relkin, you see, didn't like that." No such personal asides. But it was phrased in such a way that I thought it was being told - but told in a formal way. And, sorry to say, it was very difficult to get used to it.
But once you are used to it, things go quite well. The pace picked up a bit as treachery is uncovered in the capital, but the book never seems rushed. The battles in the quest to recover the princess are described more than adequately, they're done quite well (though I thought the casualty figures listed were rediculously low). The fights are well choreographed on both a small scale - we see the dragons grappling with enemies and see a nearly blow-by-blow account at times - and in the large scale, showing the tactics of the battle.
But that peculiar tone that the story is told in really is what brought my estimation of the novel down. It really was hard to get used to, and I'm not sure I ever really did. Every time I was on the verge of ignoring it, something would be blatantly skipped over or summed up that I thought should have been shown in detail, or would be phrased in a way that nobody these days ever uses, anymore. If you can get by relatively minor but absolutely constant issues like that, then this book would probably be much better in your eyes than mine. Unfortunately, I could never quite ignore it. But the storry the book told, I think, was good enough for me to continue reading, anyway.
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