A Bark, A Bite and a Bloody good book (The Silver Wolf - Alice Borchardt)

Member Name: Mitnik

Product:	The Silver Wolf - Alice Borchardt
Date:	19/08/03 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast-Paced, Superbly Executed

Disadvantages: none

Locked in a room in a decayed boarding house in Rome is Regeane of the House of Pepin, distant kin to Charlemagne, King of the Franks. The child of a Saxon lord and a Frankish lady, Regeane is a werewolf, with senses both acute and uncanny, preternatural strength and profound ignorance of her own nature and abilities. Her parents having died, she is the ward of her vicious uncle Gundabald, and his dolt of a son, Hugo.

Penniless and avaricious, all Gundabald can think of is marrying Regeane off quickly, to the richest man he can find, and beating her into submission if she so much as dares to think of defying him. Fear and greed fight a perfectly matched battle inside his depraved heart, and if she were simply human his barely restrained violence would have killed her long since.

In a distant Alpine valley, Maeniel, wealthy lord of a fortress commanding a vital pass, receives word of a marriage offer to a lady of the royal Frankish house, knows it would be impolitic to refuse, and so sets out for Rome with his ragtag band of followers...

The story that follows is rich, dark and gleaming. Borchardt is one of those rare writers with a perfect grip on the physical realities of the time she writes about. In her hands the decayed splendours of ninth century Rome, the plundered eternal city, come to life; squalid markets and leper colonies, papal palaces and gorgeous villas, sumptuous food and brutal warriors, a canvas of extremes, vividly realised. Better still, her control over this backdrop is flawless. It's there, but it never interferes with the tale.

Regeane is the centre point about which the tangle of papal politics and royal alliances turns. The Lombard lords, desperate to stop Charlemagne's advance into Italy are keen to see her dead and her mooted marriage to Maeniel, well, moot. At first she seems to simply blunder from one chance encounter to another, meeting famous courtesans, priests and warlords as if by happensta
nce, but soon the pattern emerges and she finds herself taking sides, fighting as both human and wolf as she struggles to avoid the tightening snare of threatened war, a witches pyre, and her uncle's ghastly plans for her utterly unwanted marriage.

It is hard to know where to stop praising this book. Regeane slips in and out of brutal confrontations and subtle traps with real elan. The fight scenes are fast, furious and utterly believable. Her perceptions as a wolf are beautifully realised and when Borchardt sweeps her off into an Otherworld of ancient Graeco-Roman myth it is not only a splendid piece of writing, but utterly integral to the plot of the story, both deriving from previous events and contributing to the final confrontations of the book.

The cast of characters is large, varied, and wonderfully vivid, from the redoubtable Pope Hadrian, to the scrappy street urchin Elfgilfa. Better still is Gundabald. The struggle between him and Regeane is the central conflict of the story and never out of sight for long. He's the villain every good piece of fantasy needs; brutal, cunning, remorseless and perfectly credible. Without him constantly getting in her way, nothing Regeane does or experiences would be one tenth as fascinating.

If all that were not enough, the writing even has wit, a broad streak of clever humour that rises mostly from the dialogue between characters who are as subtle, clever, ironic and earthily crude as any you will ever encounter. I have to say that I consider The Silver Wolf to be as close to a perfectly executed specimen of the genre as I've ever encountered. Intricate, fast-paced, profound, and best of all, complete.

Summary: