Swordheart is a comic fantasy with a kind-of-late-medieval setting with third-person POVs from two main characters, one of whom is at first sight your standard strong-man-with-a-big-sword albeit he’s also a strong man in a big sword, and the other is utterly unstandard – a woman of middling years, not especially pretty or intelligent, and not at all magical, rich, powerful or of high standing. Full brownie points to Kingfisher for giving us an alternative kind of heroine, even if the story around her isn’t particularly compelling.
Halla, a respectable widow (as we’re repeatedly told), inherits the entire estate of her Uncle Silas, a wealthy eccentric who has amassed an eclectic assortment of antiques and miscellaneous junk, and for whom she has acted as housekeeper and general dogsbody for some years. But he’s only an uncle by marriage. To ensure his wealth comes to them, his family plan to force Halla to marry another of his nephews, and she’s locked in her bedroom to be starved until she capitulates. One of the antiques littering the house is a sword, conveniently situated on Halla’s bedroom wall. Having decided to kill herself, so Silas’s money will go to her otherwise penniless nieces, she unsheathes the sword, but this releases Sarkis, a former mercenary captain who has been imprisoned in the weapon for hundreds of years and who is compelled to protect whoever owns and wields it, though he's forcibly returned to the sword whenever it's wholly sheathed.
Needless to say Sarkis, albeit after some confusion and misunderstanding, easily gets Halla out of the house and the rest of the novel comprises their attempts to ensure she receives her full inheritance, with the aid of a friend and fellow antiquarian of Silas’s, an apparently non-binary/gender-pronoun-free priest-cum-advocate of the Temple of the White Rat, three handsome and heroic but somewhat dim demon-killing paladins of the Dreaming God, and a strange badger-like creature on whose ox cart they journey up and down between Halla’s village and the other towns. And that last bit is one of the problems. The bulk of the story actually takes place on the road, and I lost count of the times they travelled it, complete with repeated unpleasant encounters with bandits and menacing priests of the Motherhood, yet another religious order (think Puritans but without the giggles) and the characters' boredom with the road barely exceeded mine.
As might be expected, Halla falls for Sarkis and vice versa. But even allowing for the dictates of romantic comedy, and the lack of other vaguely suitable partners for either of them – the husband proposed for Halla by Silas’s family is a mother-nagged drip with clammy hands – the relationship never seemed realistic or believable. Worse, pages are taken up with each of them lusting after the other while trying to keep his/her feelings secret, because each thinks the other won’t be interested, which becomes tedious and repetitive.
Naturally enough Halla’s path to getting her hands on Silas’s estate and Sarkis’s body doesn’t run smooth, and there are deceptions, treachery, bloodshed and murder. Nor is Sarkis himself all that Halla thought him to be – though we’re well ahead of her in discovering that, thanks to his regular hints of a Dark Past and Not Being Good Enough For Her, all of which again overstayed their welcome.
The opening of the book is hilarious and there was a great deal of humour in the rest of it, not least in Halla’s long-winded and convoluted monologues which she uses as a weapon to confound those more powerful than she is, ie everyone. As well as being funny, this cleverly makes the point of how women are regarded by the powerful in a patriarchal society, and the few ways they have to defend themselves.
However, for me the humour couldn’t make up for the novel’s deficiencies in structure. Great swathes of the book – the interminable mopings and pinings, long going-nowhere conversations, the road journeys and regular gags about the slowness of the ox-cart, the repeated interruptions from the bandits and priests – could be entirely eliminated without harming the story or the actual plot, such as there is of it. Things happen, resulting in other things happening, but few of the incidents actually affect the outcome. If I were to be generous I might call those elements picaresque-esque, but I can’t help feeling they’re there to bulk out an otherwise thin story.
The novel is also likely to disappoint anyone seeking in-depth magical systems and/or intricate and interesting world-building. Beyond the sword itself, and how Sarkis is bound in and healed by it (and even this, while intriguing, is ruined by long-winded experiments as to what happens to him when the sword is sheathed and he's returned to it) there’s little in the way of magic. We encounter the so-called Vagrant Hills which apparently wander the countryside with their strange creatures and stranger perils, and we hear of clockwork creatures, but that’s about it.
Overall, Swordheart is a light-hearted comedy romance with a fantasy setting that has some very funny passages and an intriguing central concept, but which for me was not wholly satisfying – my overriding impression is of a wonderful short story that’s been expanded far beyond its natural length.
Halla, a respectable widow (as we’re repeatedly told), inherits the entire estate of her Uncle Silas, a wealthy eccentric who has amassed an eclectic assortment of antiques and miscellaneous junk, and for whom she has acted as housekeeper and general dogsbody for some years. But he’s only an uncle by marriage. To ensure his wealth comes to them, his family plan to force Halla to marry another of his nephews, and she’s locked in her bedroom to be starved until she capitulates. One of the antiques littering the house is a sword, conveniently situated on Halla’s bedroom wall. Having decided to kill herself, so Silas’s money will go to her otherwise penniless nieces, she unsheathes the sword, but this releases Sarkis, a former mercenary captain who has been imprisoned in the weapon for hundreds of years and who is compelled to protect whoever owns and wields it, though he's forcibly returned to the sword whenever it's wholly sheathed.
Needless to say Sarkis, albeit after some confusion and misunderstanding, easily gets Halla out of the house and the rest of the novel comprises their attempts to ensure she receives her full inheritance, with the aid of a friend and fellow antiquarian of Silas’s, an apparently non-binary/gender-pronoun-free priest-cum-advocate of the Temple of the White Rat, three handsome and heroic but somewhat dim demon-killing paladins of the Dreaming God, and a strange badger-like creature on whose ox cart they journey up and down between Halla’s village and the other towns. And that last bit is one of the problems. The bulk of the story actually takes place on the road, and I lost count of the times they travelled it, complete with repeated unpleasant encounters with bandits and menacing priests of the Motherhood, yet another religious order (think Puritans but without the giggles) and the characters' boredom with the road barely exceeded mine.
As might be expected, Halla falls for Sarkis and vice versa. But even allowing for the dictates of romantic comedy, and the lack of other vaguely suitable partners for either of them – the husband proposed for Halla by Silas’s family is a mother-nagged drip with clammy hands – the relationship never seemed realistic or believable. Worse, pages are taken up with each of them lusting after the other while trying to keep his/her feelings secret, because each thinks the other won’t be interested, which becomes tedious and repetitive.
Naturally enough Halla’s path to getting her hands on Silas’s estate and Sarkis’s body doesn’t run smooth, and there are deceptions, treachery, bloodshed and murder. Nor is Sarkis himself all that Halla thought him to be – though we’re well ahead of her in discovering that, thanks to his regular hints of a Dark Past and Not Being Good Enough For Her, all of which again overstayed their welcome.
The opening of the book is hilarious and there was a great deal of humour in the rest of it, not least in Halla’s long-winded and convoluted monologues which she uses as a weapon to confound those more powerful than she is, ie everyone. As well as being funny, this cleverly makes the point of how women are regarded by the powerful in a patriarchal society, and the few ways they have to defend themselves.
However, for me the humour couldn’t make up for the novel’s deficiencies in structure. Great swathes of the book – the interminable mopings and pinings, long going-nowhere conversations, the road journeys and regular gags about the slowness of the ox-cart, the repeated interruptions from the bandits and priests – could be entirely eliminated without harming the story or the actual plot, such as there is of it. Things happen, resulting in other things happening, but few of the incidents actually affect the outcome. If I were to be generous I might call those elements picaresque-esque, but I can’t help feeling they’re there to bulk out an otherwise thin story.
The novel is also likely to disappoint anyone seeking in-depth magical systems and/or intricate and interesting world-building. Beyond the sword itself, and how Sarkis is bound in and healed by it (and even this, while intriguing, is ruined by long-winded experiments as to what happens to him when the sword is sheathed and he's returned to it) there’s little in the way of magic. We encounter the so-called Vagrant Hills which apparently wander the countryside with their strange creatures and stranger perils, and we hear of clockwork creatures, but that’s about it.
Overall, Swordheart is a light-hearted comedy romance with a fantasy setting that has some very funny passages and an intriguing central concept, but which for me was not wholly satisfying – my overriding impression is of a wonderful short story that’s been expanded far beyond its natural length.