Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

[Werthead]

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.



Wolfhound Century has picked up a fair bit of advance buzz as a novel to watch for this year. It's easy to see why. Coming over as the result of a genetic experiment splicing the works of Chine Mieville, Ian Fleming and Robert Holdstock into a single entity, but with a few twists of the author's own invention, it's definitely a refreshing change from Generic Epic Fantasy #312. The book is set in a world where revolvers and airplanes exist alongside nature spirits and giants, a sort-of Soviet Russia that never was but where honest cops still have to get on with foiling crimes, even crimes involving alien space entities and objects of transdimensional quantum power. It's a glorious mash-up of genres and styles that works very well.

Higgins is telling a big story here, but by tightly restricting the points of view to just a few characters and by using short, sharp chapters he is able to get through the story with an enviable economy. Even better, that economy does not prevent the prose from being more ambitious than the SFF norm, with evocative flourishes and place and character undertaken in just a few deft sentences. The writing is superb and the characterisation excellent, with Lom and his nemesis Kantor both shown to be complex, damaged characters, and also both more than they initially appear.

Even more impressive is the melding together of different ideas and genres. There are SF ideas about quantum physics and alternate realities existing alongside rural fantasy notions of nature spirits and living woodlands. In the middle of this lies the alternate-Soviet tropes of secret police and investigations where the truth is subservient to perception and politics. It could be an unruly mess, but Higgins makes it work with aplomb.

Where the book not so much stumbles but falls flat on its face is the unexpectedly abrupt ending. Wolfhound Century has been advertised as having a sequel (already written and submitted, thankfully), Truth and Fear, due out in a year's time, so it was already known that this would probably not be a completely self-contained book. The problem is that at no point is it stated that Wolfhound Century is functionally incomplete as a novel. It doesn't so much climax as just stop. This isn't the first in a series, but the first chunk of a much longer single novel being published in multiple volumes. Some forewarning of this would have been appreciated. Also, given that Wolfhound Century is only 300 pages of pretty big type in length, the question arises of why this story is being published in such small chunks also arises.

Still, whilst Wolfhound Century (****) may be just the first chunk of a bigger story, it is still a finely-written and compelling story. Higgins has created an engrossing fantasy world which is a million miles away from the more played-out ends of the genre and all the better for it. The book would have simply benefited from either being held back until the entire story was complete, or a mention of its heavily serialised nature was given on the cover at some point. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

 

[HareBrain]

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.

 

[Nerds_feather]

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.

 

[HareBrain]

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.

 

[The Judge]

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.

 

[Brian G Turner]

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.

 

[HareBrain]

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.

 

[HareBrain]

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.