freckles_and_doubt | and we become silhouettes when our bodies finally go

My Bookshelf of Unread Reproach still stretches lone and level, diminishing not one whit despite two weeks of holiday and, actually, a fair amount of reading. Mostly I'm going to have to get out of the habit of buying the damned things if I'm ever going to get on top of reading them. It's doomed, frankly. Given that I'm also busy packing up the several thousand volumes of my collection so that the Son of the Bride of the Revenge of the Army of Reconstruction can knock the wall out of my study next week, I'm forced to contemplate with lawks and gosh the extent to which the dratted things accumulate.

What I did read, however, was Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains, lent to me lo these many moons ago by

mac1235, and wimpishly avoided ever since because it looked a bit fierce and I had no brain. Richard Morgan is better known for his cyberpunky/military fictionish/sort-of-space-operatic trio of novels starting with Broken Angels, and featuring a plethora of body-hopping and a predominance of grit and grim. The Steel Remains is both similar in tone, and rather different. Should you ever require a loose approximation of the sword-and-sorcery genre to whack you between the eyes with a bloodstained hammer as a distraction from the fact that it just knifed you in the nuts, I thoroughly recommend this book. I mean, I don't even have the relevant equipment - I suspect the novel made me grow some just so it could rip them off and chew them with its iron teeth. It doesn't re-invent or even invert the classic fantasy tropes so much as it bloodily disembowels them.

I loved this book for the way in which it apparently starts halfway through an epic trilogy, with acres of invasion, warfare and politicking as a backstory you have to construct for yourself, and whose significance shifts and twists with every new character who contributes to it. Its heroes are postmodern, retired, embittered and unexpected - unexpectedly gay, for a start, and in an intolerant world, which does some amazing things to the heroic stereotype. You could say it was Tolkienesque in some ways, if Tolkien elves were mad and dark and twisted and given to savage sex with mortals, and if their fey other-realm lived in the bloodshot corner of your eye. It's probably more Robert E. Howard, only nastier, more decadent and far more intelligent, its sword-wielding heroes damaged, brutal and foul-mouthed, and horribly aware that they fought and survived only to find themselves victorious and empty.

Absences permeate this book: not just the absence of meaning for the characters, but the lost powers of the older civilisation who simply up and left, the terrifying other races who tried to invade and were thrown back at horrible cost, and the quick, pitiless degeneration into corruption and decadence of the civilisations for whom these heroes fought. These are warriors who hate war, who have come to realise that it's endless and meaningless and inevitable and necessary and that they're terribly, terribly good at it.

All of this makes it sound like a dark and twisted read, but while it is, it's also enjoyable, in a weird sort of way - real, satisfying, gripping, the first in a projected series but perfectly able to stand alone as a gut-punch read. Above all, this book confronts you with the sickening realisation, deep in your entrails, that you'll never have to fight anything as bad as the thing you have the potential to become.