Jhereg

Blue_Mage — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 07:03:42 +0000

Jhereg is a great book. And it’s great because it’s fun. Here are four reasons why:

Vlad is a badass.

Not only is he a badass, he’s bad guy. An assassin, even. I mean, this guy gets paid money to kill people and he’s fine with it. So why is this a good thing? Because he’s not the typical teenage boy at the brink of manhood going out into the world to fulfill a quest/prophecy and learn about himself. That’s right, I’m tired of the hero’s journey and I place the blame for it squarely on the shoulders of David Eddings and Terry Brooks and their ilk. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, but I love having a fully formed person who is neither nice nor particularly sorry for being so.

The supporting cast are insanely cool.
So who do I mean by that? Well:
- Loiosh: trusty sidekick and wiseass. Also a jhereg; a relatively small flying animal with a poisonous bite. He’s also Vlad’s familiar which seems to have increased his intellect immensely.
- Aliera e’Kieron: a Dragonlord, wielder of one of the great weapons (Pathfinder) and a scientist of sorts – she studies sorcery. She’s the daughter of the man who broke sorcery for four hundred years while trying to take over the Empire and she was the unwilling heir to that very same empire. She’s also short and it seems to make her rather short-tempered.
- Morrolan e’Drien: another Dragonlord and a cousin of Aliera’s. He’s also a scientist in that he studies witchcraft extensively and he also wields one of the great weapons. He’s also the host of a non-stop party held in a floating castle. I’m oddly reminded of Life, the Universe and Everything.
- Sethra Lavode: a vampire (or at least undead) enchantress who has been around for at least two hundred thousand years. She wields yet another one of those great weapon thingies and has had an instrumental role in shaping the Empire. For some strange reason she also seems to like Vlad. Inexplicable, really.
- Daymar: a Hawklord and incredibly powerful psychic. Also completely oblivious.
- Kiera: a thief and one of Vlad’s oldest friends. In the sense that he’s known her longest. Sethra totally wins the other interpretation of “oldest friends”.
- Kragar: Vlad’s business associate and the guy who does most of the day-to-day work to keep Vlad’s organization running. He’s also effectively invisible – no one ever seems to notice he’s there until it’s too late.
- Cawti: Vlad’s wife and another Easterner (ie. she looks like you and me). They seem to have gotten over the fact that she killed him at least once.

Some of these characters we only meet for a short time, but you can already tell they’ll be cropping up later on.

Reading about an entire (successful) assassination plot is interesting, novel and fun.

And if you don’t think so, I think you may want to reexamine your priorities in life. It’s even better because the reader gets to see the entire thing. Why the assassination is at least justifiable, how Vlad goes about getting the job done and even the resolution. Despite Aliera and Morrolan’s occasional descents in melodrama, the supporting cast provides a great backdrop and Vlad putting together his final plan feels almost like the conclusion of a Poirot novel, but with more action and bigger mustaches.

It’s short.

There’s been a lot of high fantasy and epic sagas of late, but it’s nice to remember that not all fantasy needs to be that way. Jhereg sets out to tell a story and it does so with a minimum of fuss and distractions. It also allows you to get to the next book in the series all that much faster…

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