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Kindling by Mick Farren
01/08/2005 . Source: Tom Lloyd-Williams 
pub: TOR. 416 page hardback. Price: $27.95 (US), $38.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-30656-5. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.tor.com
Alt-history novels with magic, demons and big armies - I'm sucker for them. They tend to be big and messy, chaos reigning on all sides and deliciously horrible things being done to all concerned. So it's a shame that the only one of the above descriptions appropriate here is messy, but those of you with delicate sensibilities might not want to hear my full opinion on this book and certainly shouldn't use some of the words I'm thinking in front of your mothers. However, I still feel a need to express some sort of emotion so how does 'crap' work for you? OK then? Well, how about 'poorly-plotted and simplistic'? Excellent, now we're getting somewhere.
So what's this gem about I hear you cry? Well, we're in the Americas in a post-Industrial Revolution-type period, following four characters who are destined to become 'The Four' (see what he did there?) who've been foreseen as the people who can save the Kingdom of Albany and the rest of the free world from the evil tyranny of a despotic eastern empire dominated by its bloodthirsty religion. It's not actually called Islam, of course, but for some ridiculous reason I can't shake the feeling that this is a book targeted at the uninformed majority of our dear friends across the pond.
So, white people from America or Europe - good. Brown people from the Middle East who're pretty much all crazed religious fanatics - bad. Are you starting to realise why I felt rather soiled after reading this? What it did remind me of the media coverage of Saddam's allegorical novel and all the mocking it almost certainly deserved. Now I don't want to go too far in the comparison for obvious reasons, but if Al Jazeera does have a Richard and Judy's Book Club equivalent they might just preface their commentary with 'Now I know it doesn't actually say George Bush on the cover, but...'
Told from the alternative perspectives of The Four, the plot consequently progresses very slowly, with really only two significant passages of action at the end of the book. Because the opening is divided into the four personal stories of each of the main characters, none has the space they need to grow into a person the reader would care about. They all have different lives at the beginning. Argo is a rural American, Cordelia is a well-born slut in the Albany military, Jesamine is a whore owned by a Mosul (the bad guys who're of course completely different to Muslims) Colonel and Raphael is a forced conscript in the Mosul army. Thus, they all spend a lot of time spiralling closer until they meet up, release their magical powers by screwing each other (honestly) and then save the day. That's end of part one and I was delighted to reach that point, and even happier to see that the author gives you a helpful 'TO BE CONTINUED...' there in case you hadn't felt sufficiently patronised and irritated.
Instead of finishing on a small rebuttal to mitigate what I've just said and put it in perspective as I would normally try to do, I'm just going to list more stuff that annoyed me but please don't think these are the only ones. So, first we have the modern crudity of language, which aside from being grossly over-used in a period setting is nicely juxtaposed by an occasional bizarrely supercilious tone. The littering of irrelevant or inappropriate comments throughout the book. The character Yancy Slide's habit of making references to visiting other worlds and realities which are nothing more than a wink to the reader and serve no actual purpose at all. The fact that Albany has an old Prime Minister called Jack Kennedy who was a bit of a ladies man in his youth. If that's just a coincidence, much-loved late queen was called Diana - a far better and kinder person than her husband the author is at pains to say and the trade union leader is Vincent Corleone. I can't even decide whether I have cause to be bugged about the name Queen Diana or whether the book has simply wound me up to the point where I'm being oversensitive. Fortunately, I've concluded that I don't care and should just chalk this up to experience, in the hope that a few others won't now have to.
Tom Lloyd-Williams
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