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Alchemy Unlimited | Rating | |
| F | |||
| Douglas W. Clark | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
The Spanish Inquisition is a remarkably harsh campaign to get rid of all the demons in the Iberian Penninsula. It is also remarkably effective. But while each procedure leaves one more person free of demonic influence, it also leaves one demon free to infect someone else. The solution, of course, is to cork the demons and ship them over the border. So now it's France's problem. And in the town of Pomme de Terre, it is up to the master alchemist, Corwyn, who specializes in water of all things, to figure out what is going on and stop it. Oh, and his new assistant, Sebastian.
The story was difficult to enjoy right from the start. It quickly became apparent that this isn't a very fantastical fantasy. Magic is very low key. Basically, this is fifteenth century France as it really was, with all the bad hygene and crappy jobs that entails. There are "demons" added on, in the form of sentient, malicious vapors coming from polluted water. It's not nearly enough. In fact, as that is the only noticable supernatural element in an otherwise normal setting, it doesn't make this seem like a fantasy, it just seems out of place.
Although Sebastian is the protagonist, the main character is clearly Corwyn. But he, too, is utterly normal. He just has a rather high knowledge (for his time, mind) of practical chemistry. That, and an uncanny ability to predict the distant future. But his predictions quickly become tiresome, even annoying in their accuracy. He knows of coffee, for instance, and is sure that one day it will be a hugely popular drink. He ingeniously uses windmills to pump water into a castle, and predicts they might be used to reclaim low-lying land from the sea in the future. Worst of all, he knows that the political and social reform starting up in Italy will be called the Renaissance, when people get around to calling it anything. The first two can perhaps be excused, but how can he possibly know what some major change like that will be called? If the book was funnier it might all be considered a series of winks at the reders, and if the book was more magical it might be a display of his powers. But the story is utterly serious and mundane. It just doesn't fit.
Eventually, I stopped reading. There was simply nothing engaging about the plot, the setting, or the characters. Sebastian has all the arrogance and haughtiness of a nobleman and all the resources of a peasant, and is gullible besides. Nobody would want to empathise with him. Corwyn is nice and he knows a bit, enough to make him a genius to the world of the fifteenth century. But to readers here in the twenty-first, he's quite ordinary, and the disparity gnawed at me. There was no mystery to the plot - the prologue tells readers outright what is going on and who the culprits are - so the entertainment of figuring things out before the characters, or even of just watching them figure it out and tagging along, is entirely absent. And the setting is too plain, too ordinary, too real to be of much interest.
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