Lacking the BITE of the First! (The Wolf King - Alice Borchardt)

Member Name: Mitnik

Product:	The Wolf King - Alice Borchardt
Date:	20/08/03 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: hard to think of any

Disadvantages: tangled and flawed, overall lack of focus

Half-buried in a snowbank high in the Alps, an escaped Saxon slave stumbles across an unconscious woman. Gathering her up he blunders to a nearby monastery which turns out to be a brigand's den dominated by an unclean, possibly demonic spirit, which has driven most of the inhabitants mad in an orgy of torture and botched revivification. Luckily for the Saxon the woman turns out to be a werewolf, Regeane, the wife of Maeniel, the Wolf King and once she has recovered somewhat they handily fight their way out of the mad-house.

And here, perhaps, the story could have been allowed to decently end, were it not for the fact that Regeane's distant cousin, Charlemagne, is waiting at Geneva with his army, poised to descend on Italy, and he expects Maeniel to do his bit in clearing the difficult passes and scouting the lands of the Lombard King, Desiderius. To throw a bit of spice into the stew, the spirit which Regeane encountered in the first few chapters follows on after her, intent on revenge and possession. Then again, her other cousin, Hugo, gutless but treacherous, clambers back into the story, intent upon selling her and Maeniel out as and where he can.

From these premises a book develops that is sadly tangled and flawed, written decently, but lacking in focus, full of vivid events, but somehow limping, without real pace or energy. I previously reviewed Borchardt's preceding novel (in what should never have been allowed to become a trilogy) The Silver Wolf, and praised it fulsomely. Here, regrettably, the very real strengths that Borchardt displayed in the earlier tale seem to have gone astray.

She has a masterful grip on the history and physical reality of ninth century Italy, but now it emerges in chunky passages of exposition, in the tone of a lecturer, not a tale-teller. She has a knack for conspiracies and political plots, but the ones twining through this tale are slow to develop, digress, wander and seem to lose themselves
in preparations for battles almost endlessly deferred. She has a wonderful ear for witty dialogue, sharply ironic or broadly crude by turns; where has it gone?

The Silver Wolf kept a tight, fine-tuned focus on Regeane as the protagonist. The Wolf King wanders from character to character, hops from storyline to storyline, never more irritating than when it jumps into the head of one of the villains. And the villains... oh dear! The central conflict in The Silver Wolf was Regeane's lethal struggle with her uncle Gundabald, as nasty a piece of work as ever stalked through the pages of a fantasy novel. Here... Well, 'brutal but stupid' is the best one can say about the human villains, while the spirit who lurks and connives is an odd, blustery, arrogant but mysterious creature... Its origins are permanently hidden from us, but we get access to its thoughts, and that's enough to rob us of any real fear of it.

Then again, when it comes to mythic resonance, access to Otherworlds and the distant past, Borchardt tries to do too much. Regeane has developed a facility for flitting in and out of reality, into ghost-realms and (perhaps) other parts of the world, even through time... but what does it all amount to? A device allowing the author to move her from place to place with suitable swiftness, or to hand her a few supernatural allies as the occasion demands. It certainly has no significant place in the plot of the novel, never genuinely contributing to the flow of events. Over-eager to make the book multi-layered, Borchardt throws in some irrelevant pieces of history from the life of Matrona, eldest of Maeniel's pack of werewolves. But this is just digression, not enrichment.

Lining The Silver Wolf and The Wolf King up side by side, one could almost believe they were written by different people. At the very least, I suspect a different editor had a hand in the sequel, or perhaps a publishing company keen to cash in on a vivid f
irst novel demanded a second, and demanded it fast.

Well, at least Anne Rice likes Borchardt's work. Her blurb on the back cover of both books oozes approval (which only the first one merits). Hardly surprising I suppose. After all, Rice is Borchardt's sister. Well, there's nothing wrong in saying nice things about your relatives' work, though... I do wonder if the phrase 'conflict of interest' might be applicable here?

Summary: