Yeah, I forgot about the blog again. Like a neglectful parent to an unloved child I keep it in a dark cellar and occasionally throw scraps of food in for it when I remembered it through my perpetual drunken haze, ignoring its whimpers and pleadings and only dragging it out into the sunlight when I read a new book that appears like a worker from the Social Services, hissing threats at it to keep quiet and say nice things about me.
So yes, I read Fire Caste, by Peter Fehervari. Before I go on, I feel I should say that, no, Ack-Ack Macaque was not the last book I read, but I’ve been reading a lot of your typical classic novels in preparation for my Uni course in English Literature next year and I figured you people probably didn’t need me to tell you that, yes, Kafka is a very good writer. Though seriously, he is. Metamorphosis be peng.
Anyway, I figured I’d probably read something light and figured I might as well enjoy myself with a new release from the Black Library’s extensive collection of tie-in fiction with Peter Fehevari’s Fire Caste. Having never read Fehervari’s work (and, indeed, having never heard of him before) I was unsure of what to expect, but telling you as someone who has now read the novel, I can tell you that you can expect Fire Caste to be pretty damn good.
Set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (‘Really? I had no idea!’ I hear you all exclaim), Fire Caste follows the stories of Commissar Holt Iverson, and of the guardsmen of the 19th Arkan Confederate as they fight the Tau empire on the jungle planet of Phaedra. Thrown into a meatgrinder, the Commissar and the Arkans find that there’s a lot more going on in Phaedra than just a simple war, and soon enough it becomes clear that there are far more sinister things afoot.
Surprisingly, for a book named ‘Fire Caste’ the Tau don’t get a huge amount of a look-in, and instead the narrative alternates between a focus on the tormented Commissar Iverson and the Arkans. Iverson makes for an interesting, if somewhat unhinged, lead for a good half of the novel, and thanks to a strong focus on him as well as the usage of extracts from his journal Fehervari manages to create an interesting and complex main character, and manages the difficult feat of making him dark without being overly-brooding. The Arkans, a regiment modeled on American Civil War Confederacy soldiers (Arkan Confederates, geddit?) are a much larger and more diverse cast, and perhaps a little over-sized at points; Fehervari is able to paint the individual members of the regiment in broad brush strokes, but simply due to their numbers never succeeds in going into detail on them, leaving them feeling overall a little shallow. They’re interesting, don’t get me wrong, as are the rest of the characters who aren’t part of the Arkans, and it’s worth mentioning just how well Fehervari does in writing a large cast of characters who are tormented, traumatised, fanatical, haunted or just downright insane, but ultimately a lot of the cast seem to struggle to go any deeper than a sketched outline.
As well as this, I found it somewhat difficult to get a lot of information about the Arkans’ homeworld and their customs aside from their beliefs in their Thunderground (a sort of spiritual testing ground) and I got three quarters through the book before I realised that their homeworld was named Providence. Possibly. That said, I did enjoy the enjoy the inclusion of the Zouave Knights in the Arkan regiment, officers from noble houses who fight in heavily armoured ‘Thundersuits’ that seem like a poor man’s version of the power armour of 40k’s iconic Space Marines, and the suits were one of the more memorable and original things from the book; should the stars align, my wallet somehow swell, and I find myself collecting 40K miniatures once more, I might just have to make myself a Zouave of my own.
The size of the cast, and the way the narrative is structured, does mean that a lot of the more interesting characters end up pushed to the sideline. Admiral Karjalis, for example, is one of the most memorable and unnerving villain characters I’ve read for a while, and he’s an excellently grotesque, but I found myself disappointed by how little page time he received. The same goes for the story’s main Tau protagonist, Jhi’Kaara, who gets barely any page time whatsoever; this feels even stranger when her introduction in the prologue is considered, as it’s suggested she’s going to be a major character but then doesn’t appear all that much afterwards.
As one would expect from a Black Library novel, there’s combat, and a lot of it. Instead of going for the usual set-piece battles that typify Warhammer 40,000, combat is instead focused on much smaller-scale skirmishes and ambushes in Phaedra’s jungles, and the book benefits from that a lot; the tight focus of the fight scene makes them all the more intense, and when combined with the viciousness of the planet’s environs they become intense affairs, helped along by the fact that Fehervari is quite happy to off characters at the drop of a hat, and they become all the more interesting when it’s abundantly clear that characters you might like are going to be in the firing line just as much as the redshirts. They’re vicious, thrilling and a little frightening at times, and no doubt that was exactly what was being gone for.
The real star of Fire Caste, however, has to be Phaedra, the jungle planet the book is set on. Fehervari excels at bringing a horrific planet to life, and of creating a world that is rotten right to its core; his prose can be a little purple at points, and it probably doesn’t help that it’s peppered by an over-abundance of ellipses and exclamation marks, but overall it does an excellent job of creating a world that makes me think of Degobah’s must nastier big brother. It fits perfectly into the hyper-gothic science fantasy of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and alongside Fire Caste’s cast of lunatic and zealots, it’s obvious that he’s one of BL’s authors who ‘gets’ 40k.
I appreciate that I’ve spent a lot of time in this review knocking various things about this book, but while they are problems I found that my core question of ‘am I enjoying this book’ was answered with a pretty unambiguous ‘yes!’. Peter Fehervari is one of the Black Library’s most promising new authors, and while Fire Caste may be the first of his books that I’ve read, I’m sincerely hoping that it won’t be the last.
Verbal Fisticuffs 