I really feel like I ought to hate this book. I generally find most medieval fantasy to be a tiring and repetitive genre for me, one where I’ve seen it all before, and with Heir of Night, I’ve got to say this: I’ve seen it all before.
There’s a giant wall in the north holding a supernatural enemy away from a largely oblivious world in a stalemate, garrisoned by a noble house (well, houses) slowly slipping into decline. The heir to the rulership of this is rebellious and headstrong and she’s struggling to connect with her distant, duty-driven father. There’s a prophecy that marks her as The Chosen One, and she manifests powers inherent in her bloodline which were thought to be lost. That sparks a quest to master these powers and at the same time causes the nascent threat of the supernatural enemy to rise in strength once more and threaten to overwhelm the known world (which just suggests to me that they could have done this before but have just sat around procrastinating). Oh, and at one point the characters have to flee pursuing enemies by running to a dangerous landscape influenced by a mysterious supernatural power and gamble on it dealing with their enemies whilst not turning on them.
At least it doesn’t have elves.
The Heir of Night contains all of these things. Aside from one or two small things, it has no original ideas. Damn near every single thing in it is something I’ve read or played somewhere else. I should hate this book. I should despise it. I should loathe, curse it and Helen Lowe’s lack of originality, dismiss it as clichéd trash and throw it out. And yet I really, really liked it.
The thing is, while The Heir of Night does absolutely nothing with the fantasy genre, what it does do is done really well. The characters are all well-rounded, engaging and interesting. The actions scenes are intense and consistently keep the protagonists in an underdog position, which make them that much more exciting. The worldbuilding, while not mind-blowingly original, is well-done and the lore is deep, interesting and has some cool details behind it. The writing is crisp, sharp and enjoyable, the dialogue feels natural and not simply there for exposition and the plot is compelling.
The novel does deserve special mention, I feel, for the female characters within it. It has a large cast, which is evenly split at about 50/50 between men and women, and unlike in some fantasy novels where it’s only the guys who get the glory and do all the fighting, most of these women are in positions of authority, are key to the storyline and are more than capable of taking arse and kicking names. And as well as being tough, they manage to actually be feminine instead of the usual ‘strong female character’ shtick of basically being a macho guy with boobs and a girly name. Malian, one of the novel’s two leads, may be young and inexperienced at the start, but even so she’s still capable, brave, clever and perfectly willing to take the situation into her own hands. The other two characters who ended up in my top three favourites for the novel were both women as well, one of them being the herald Jehane Mor and the other being Honour Captain Asantir, a character so incredibly awesome and badass I ended up nicknaming her Kickassantir, because I’m an awful human being like that.
There’s only really one gripe I have with the novel, but even then this is a pretty minor one; the fight scenes always have the protagonists in an underdog position (by no means a bad thing, don’t get me wrong) and things seem to be on the brink of defeat before they’re rescued by the surprise intervention of a third party. This is something I’m generally fine with if it happens once, but the fact that this happens in just about every single time the protagonists face off against the bad guys, and that half of the time this rescue come out of nowhere and just feels incongruous. A lot of the time my reaction to such scenes’ conclusions was a simple “…really?”.
In conclusion, whilst The Heir of Night doesn’t do anything new, it takes ideas that are old and proves that, with a thick layer of well-applied polish, they can still make a novel that shines.
P.S. Also, I’m slightly amazed that I managed to get over 500 words of review for a book which I thought I didn’t have much to say on other than ‘this is really good’.
Verbal Fisticuffs 