Cold Iron

by Miles Cameron

Paperback, 2019

Status

Available

Call number

823.92

Publication

Gollancz (2019), 448 pages

Description

Fantasy. Fiction. Historical Fiction. HTML: A young mage-in-training takes up the sword and is unwittingly pulled into a violent political upheaval, in the first book of this epic fantasy trilogy by Miles Cameron, author of The Red Knight. Aranthur is a promising young mage. But the world is not safe and after a confrontation leaves him no choice but to display his skill with a blade, Aranthur is instructed to train under a renowned Master of Swords. During his intensive training he begins to question the bloody life he's chosen. And while studying under the Master, he finds himself thrown into the middle of a political revolt that will impact everyone he's come to know. To protect his friends, Arnathur will be forced to decide if he can truly follow the Master of Swords into a life of violence and cold-hearted commitment to the blade. Masters & Mages Cold Iron For more from Miles Cameron, check out: The Traitor Son Cycle The Red Knight The Fell Sword The Dread Wyrm The Plague of Swords The Fall of Dragons.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member jsburbidge

Fantasy bildungsroman examples tend towards the very good and the relatively bad. I am happy to report that Cold Iron, though indisputably a bildungsroman, falls into the very good category.

It begins with a precipitating set of events which bring together some important characters (some already

important in terms of their society, some about to be) which set off a year or so of cascading results. Aranthur, the viewpoint character, finds himself at the centre of a those results, sometimes by the internal logic of events , sometimes by chance. (It's subtly suggested that the chance may be apparent – that Tyche, the goddess of chance, is actively nudging things around. There's no agreement in this world about the gods, but their influence isn't ruled out, either). He's a student, full-grown but still between worlds (his family are farmers; he's a student in magic at the equivalent of Constantinople), competent but no genius, and he has a good deal to learn as far as maturity goes (it's the growth into greater maturity which makes this a true bildungsroman and not simply a tale of conflict between the relatively light and relatively dark). Cameron's prose and characterization are engaging, and his world-building interesting: there's no point at which the narrative hits slack points.

Alternatively, this can be viewed as a novel with a secondary primary viewpoint character (think of Watson, or Julian Comstock): one where the narrative viewpoint is on the outside of what is going on, not a principal in it. For most of the book, that's Aranthur: the people he sees, he doesn't understand (either with regard to motivations or the real roles they are playing); much of the action in which he is involved takes place in the background (to such a degree that there's a massive context switch on the last page of the book that resets a whole set of things which the reader, and Aranthur, thought up until that point). He picks up more knowledge, maturity, and skills as the novel goes on, but until about the last forty pages of the novel he's fairly peripheral to the overall plot in the background. (This is one of those novels where you have to read the novel twice, a second time to appreciate the details which mean something different with more knowledge). From this perspective, the book begins in medias res, with a great deal of prior action as background.

Cameron's previous fantasy series was organized around battles: this volume is structured to show a succession of one-on-one (or few-on-few) swordfights, with attention paid to the details of different styles of fighting and types of swords; the details are authentic. The worldbuilding is careful: social structure is based loosely on Venice, but the location is an analogue of the Byzantine Empire and the linguistic cues (names, brief citations) are precisely set up.

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