# Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins



## Werthead (Mar 31, 2013)

*Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins*





> Investigator  Vissarion Lom is summoned to Mirgorod, capital of the Vlast, to help  investigate a series of terrorist attacks in the city. Josef Kantor, the  son of a famous revolutionary, is the chief suspect and Lom is soon on  his trail. But a simple manhunt turns into something more serious. An  angel has fallen to the earth in the vast forest thousands of miles to  the east. A devastating war between the Vlast and a grouping of  island-nations to the west is coming to an end. And a spirit of the  forest made manifest arrives in the city, seeking a young woman who may  hold the key to the world's salvation.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## HareBrain (Apr 1, 2013)

Interesting. I read the first chapter in a shop this morning and found myself really drawn in, and I love the premise. Despite the warning about the abrupt ending and the ludicrous price (£15 for a 300-page paperback) I'll probably go back and buy it, just because fantasy I actually want to read is as rare as hen's teeth at the moment.


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## Nerds_feather (Apr 22, 2013)

Nice review, Werthead. Interestingly enough, one of my fellow bloggers just read and reviewed the novel and came to many of the same conclusions you did.


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## HareBrain (Apr 23, 2013)

I thought this was a bit of a missed opportunity. For me, it might have been a brilliant book if Higgins had treated it more like sci-fi and less like fantasy. Assuming the angel and the forest power have the same metaphysical source, then he could have concentrated wholly on this, got rid of the other fantasy stuff like giants, and had something interesting to say about the tension between nature and human progress, in a world much more like ours than he actually created. (I felt I could see echoes of Tim Powers's Declare in there, which despite its flaws I think is the better book, partly because of its real-world setting.) All that got muddied, in my opinion, and I agree with Nerd's blog that the end descended into bog-standard adventure with an over-the-top villain.

I also got annoyed with all the short sentences and fragments. I thought at once stage I'd detected a point to these, and that they were meant to reflect  the aesthetic harshness and brutality of the city, because his descriptions of the forest were much freer-flowing and more lyrical. But nearer the end this pattern seemed to disappear so it might have been coincidence.

My own rating: 7/10, partly through disappointment that it wasn't what it could and should have been.


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## The Judge (May 6, 2013)

I finished this at the weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Since I was forewarned of the unsatisfactory ending I wasn't too bothered by it (though if I'd come upon it unawares I'd have been a more than a bit miffed, I think).  I particularly liked the folk tale/rural fantasy aspect, which melded into the Soviet bleakness well, I thought, though the giants themselves were a bit of a missed opportunity, perhaps.  I caught a few echoes of 1984, not least with the war against the archipelago (there was no actual reason for the war as far as I could see, apart from creating an outside enemy), but I suppose that's inevitable in a story about a totalitarian state.  

I was annoyed with the coincidences that link everyone, especially Lom's initial meeting with Maroussia, and I wasn't wholly convinced by Kantor's characterisation, but otherwise no gripes.


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## Brian G Turner (Jun 12, 2015)

Think this is an amazing title for a novel. The description on Amazon - and the reviews - means that I've now added it to my wish list.

The only thing that puts me off at this stage is the reference to an abrupt ending - but do the sequels _Truth and Fear_, and _Radiant State_, compare? Do they round the story off nicely, or follow the same path? Spoiler-free comments welcome.


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## HareBrain (Jun 12, 2015)

The first book does end too abruptly, the second much less so. But since you can now go straight on to the second if you like the first, that's not as big a problem as when WC came out.

I haven't read the third one yet, but plan to soon.


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## HareBrain (Jun 29, 2015)

I've now read *Radiant State*.

I'm not sure what to make of it. It has some amazing writing and imagery, some brilliant ideas, and an extraordinary thematic vision -- except that the latter often gets lost behind characters who don't seem to serve the theme. I'd say it's a novel that's less than the sum of its parts, but many of the parts are so special that it's probably worth reading just to experience them. It does conclude, and resolve pretty much everything, in a way, but I don't think it does so very satisfactorily. I'd guess the resolution was not planned at the outset of the first book, and it shows. I'd be interested to know if Higgins would do it very differently if he rewrote it now from scratch. The trilogy could have been staggering, in my view, but it never quite is. Maybe it needed to be written by a Russian.


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