book review: The Hallowed Hunt

[zwol]

The Other Change of Hobbit had a table in the dealers' room at Baycon, and so I of course grabbed this, Lois McMaster Bujold's latest in her distorted-mirror-of-Europe fantasy series. The previous two novels, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, concerned themselves with Chalion, an area that corresponds roughly to one of the kingdoms of pre-Reconquista Spain; this novel moves the focus to the Weald, which is more Germanic.

Overall, I like this book less than Paladin of Souls, which is still my favorite of the three, but I think it's as good as Curse of Chalion albeit in a different way. Unlike either of the previous two, this is an ideas novel, and for that reason may seem a little off to those used to Bujold's usual, which is strictly character-driven. The ideas she explores here are most satisfying, though. We get bits of the darker side of orthodox Quintarianism; we see magic that does not flow from the gods; we get a much larger picture of the world.

I now wish to quibble with Heidi Bond's spoilerful review of the same novel, and so I must give spoilers likewise. Stop reading here if you haven't read the novel yet.

First off, I think Heidi's equation of "more blood = stronger magic" is simply incorrect. Only Ingrey bleeds when he does magic, and then not always; Earl Horseriver doesn't do it at all (except when he has Fara kill him, and then it's about death, not blood). There are three places where Ingrey's loss of blood to the magic is called out:

• When he first uses the "weirding voice" that his wolf-spirit gives him. At that point he has not wholly come to terms with letting the wolf do stuff; I could argue that it's entirely down to the wolf having to fight for control of the body. Later, he uses the voice and doesn't seem to bleed for it.
• When he is releasing the ghosts of Bloodfield. Notice that there are two separate actions to release each ghost: removing the spirit animal bound to it, which does not require blood, and unbinding the ghost from the botched magic of Holytree, which appears to. But what's really going on is that Ingrey, in the role of hallow king, is blessing each ghost and freeing it from its oaths in life. He may only be bleeding because the land is wounded there, and the king is the land; this would be another deliberate parallel with real-world Germanic myth and magic. Furthermore, he's doing this mostly in the spirit world, where he has as much blood as he needs; it's not at all clear that he lost very much blood in the world of matter.
• In the epilogue, when he tries to do the same for the ghost of his father. This fails. He's not the hallow king anymore, and his father wasn't bound to Holytree to begin with. The blood he sheds has no effect. He does succeed in removing the wolf-spirit bound to his father, which (again) doesn't require blood.

Heidi's second concern is that Ijada doesn't get to do anything, despite being the female lead. It's true that she doesn't get to do anything; however, as I read it, it's not true that Ijada is the female lead. The book doesn't have a female lead. It has Ingrey, and a bunch of people whose collective function is to wind Ingrey up and point him in the right direction. This might sound bad, but it isn't, really. The gods of this world can only accomplish things in the world of matter by nudging people in the right direction. It might be best to consider the book as following one thread of the Son of Autumn's attention, as he gives Ingrey a long series of nudges that finally bring him to Holytree in the right frame of mind to undo the curse wrought there. On that construal, it only makes sense for everyone else to be peripheral; they're not the focus of this thread of the god's efforts. Now, whether this makes for a good book is another question. It's certainly not Bujold's usual thing, but I don't mind. As I said above, though, I'm a sucker for this kind of ideas novel. Germanic magic in its unwatered, bloody original form! Skalds! Totem animals! What's not to like?