The Scroll of Years by Chris Willrich (Gaunt and Bone #1)
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Pyr on September 24, 2013
Source: Purchased
It’s Brent Weeks meets China Mieville in this wildly imaginative fantasy debut featuring high action, elegant writing, and sword and sorcery with a Chinese flare.View Spoiler »
While The Scroll of Years is the first full-length Gaunt and Bone adventure, Chris Willrich introduced these characters – and some very important context – in short stories, the most famous of which is The Thief With Two Deaths. For some inexplicable reason, Pyr chose to include this story after the full novel rather than before; thankfully many of my blogging friends told me that I should read the short story first.
For it’s in The Thief With Two Deaths that we are introduced to the enemies of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, two adventurous ne’er do wells who are falling in love. Unfortunately for the lovers Bone manages to royally piss off the infamous kleptomancers, the dark sorcerers of Palmary who gain their power by literally stealing hearts. From people’s chests. These baddies are powerful enemies who vow to make Bone and all those he loves suffer.
Which brings us to The Scroll of Years, in which Bone and a very pregnant Gaunt (the irony is too good) must flee mercenaries sent by the kleptomancers they wronged in The Thief With Two Deaths. One of these things doesn’t really make sense without the other, so try to bear that in mind. The mercenaries chasing Gaunt and Bone are called Night Auditors, creatures who can erase your memories and turn you into little more than a dried out husk.
If Gaunt and Bone are to outwit the Night Auditors, they must befriend the people of Qiangguo, the Eastern province where they now find themselves. Qiangguo is a wonderful setting, clearly influenced by traditional Chinese culture: subsistence farmers work on rice paddies, and they abide by the Way. The Way is a philosophical ideal of behavior and consciousness, so of course it creates a lot of tensions among the people of Qiangguo. But this nation is far from a cultural melting pot: people of all races, religions, and linguistic backgrounds converge in this great empire to trade – and to influence the tide of a nation. For Gaunt and Bone soon realize that their presence in Qiangguo was born of more than just desperation, and that their unborn child may be the real target of those who pursue them.
As they meet new friends and allies, their fates converge with those of two other pairs of lovers. These three couples are all in different stages of both life and love: one pair dances around their potential courtship, one is expecting a child, and old wounds and pride have separated the final pair. Of all the couples my favourite was youngsters Next-One-A-Boy and Flybait. Their whole shtick as bickering adolescent bandits who live among the urban poor was very Dickensian and I loved every second of it.
Unfortunately Willrich’s commitment to representing a traditional view of yin and yang, like and unlike through these couples meant that he missed an opportunity to explore a nuanced same-sex relationship. In fact there wasn’t a single queer character in the whole book – and there are a LOT of characters thrown around. Many of these characters also tell each other Qiangguo’s famous legends, which often feature love stories, and none of these involved LGBT people either.
This absence of sexual diversity really irked me because I felt like Willrich could’ve done so much with a queer couple. His impeccable writing is highlighted throughout The Scroll of Years as he describes countless cultures; for this to be a five-star book I needed him to push the envelope a bit more and it just didn’t happen. I don’t need a queer character or couple in every book, nor do I need a cishet romance, but for a book that’s so reliant on romantic relationships to exclude sexual diversity was a pretty big wasted opportunity.
Hetero-normative relationships aside, The Scroll of Years was a delight to read, with its unique world building and lovable characters. It’s no wonder that the art of storytelling takes on such an important role in The Scroll of Years, since Willrich himself is a wonderful storyteller whose lyrical prose elevates this novel from a fun quest book to a thoughtful examination of ancient philosophies. Another awesome element was the different magics that Willrich introduced. Wulin warriors can manipulate chi, allowing them to perform otherwise impossible physical feats; dragons from both the East and the West fly through the skies, their mating rituals causing fiery explosions; and of course there is the titular scroll of years, a landscape painting that allows people to hide inside its canvas. SO COOL!
The final chapters of the book were chock-full of action, and the last few pages revealed a secret that actually made me gasp. Call me oblivious but I did NOT see that one coming at all! It was the perfect kind of ending: some plot threads wrap up, but not too tidily, and there are exciting developments without any god-awful cliffhangers. I can’t wait to see where these new developments will lead in the sequel, The Silk Road. Bring it on!