When the Heavens Fall (written by Marc Turner) is an enjoyable fast paced sword and sorcery novel with some intriguing characters and concepts, but it falls short of being great due to its absence of character development, exposition and world building.
I’ve mentioned on other blogs recently how I have found it extremely difficult to find new fantasy books to get into recently. The new ones either seem to be essential copy paste social justice pieces, social commentaries or shameless pandering to the crowd. For someone like me who wants escapism in a well-developed worlds the market is becoming increasingly sparse. Also, my local library has an annoying tendency of stocking book two or three in a series but not book one. It’s seriously annoying but what can you do? As a result, when I saw the chronicles of the exile series in the library in its entirety, I had to give it a go.
The first book in the series ‘When the Heavens Fall’ is what I call an umbrella novel. You have a central plot point with multiple other stories running into it and coming to a head at the end. Wheel of Time did something similar though on a much grander scale. Here the central strand is the theft of a powerful book on death magic from the God of the Dead and he rather wants it back. Now gods are a fairly common staple of fantasy books, but the idea of the ‘thing’ stolen from them being a book is different and also the fact that the thief cannot actually use it initially is a fun little twist. Running into this central plot pillar there is the story of Luker, a Guardian who may or may not be a renegade, who is sent to retrieve the book by an Emperor who absolutely does not give of Palpatine vibes. Romany who is a priestess of the goddess called Spider and is involved purely to help kill of the God of Death’s minions in some sort of divine power struggle. We have Ebon, a ruler whose kingdom is overrun by the thief’s undead hoards but is also afflicted by the voices of spirits in his head and finally Parolla, the child of the God of Death who wants to confront her father. Each of these characters has their own storyline and it all culminates with them being in the same place to confront the thief and Shroud, the death god.
There is a lot to like here. Each story feels valid and not like filler and each are sufficiently different to not feel repetitive or boring. Speaking personally, I found the Luker storyline to be the stronger of the three but none of them are bad or unpleasant to read. I enjoyed this book.
However, there is, for me a problem. This book falls into what I call ‘Game of Thrones syndrome.’ Since GOT debuted on HBO there has been an increasing sense of rush in fantasy novels. Get to the next fight, the next action, the next sex scene. The belief seemingly being that the reader will not stay with the story if they must wait a long time for the next bit of action and it’s something I hate. Now there is no sex in this book, but the story rushes you from story line to story line without really expanding the background (except for Parolla but her story line actually needs it). Who are these gods? What is a Guardian? Why does the Emperor have the book? All of these are skipped over, and I found myself having to regularly check back to the cast list and the map (which is excellent by the way) to reorientate myself in the world. It does not ruin the novel or make it enjoyable, but it does make it feel shallow. There is a great world here and the characters have real potential; but by not giving them any growth or fully fleshed out backstory I did not really relate or care about any of them. I don’t expect a council of Elrond level of exposition but give me something to make me understand this world.
I’ll certainly read the next two books in the series because the first book has been enjoyable experience with some interesting ideas, but the lack of depth will stop this series from becoming one which I go back and re-read.
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