2 out of 4 stars
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Advent of Darkness by Gary Caplan is the first instalment in The Chronicles of Illúmaril series and is an epic fantasy novel. Some have compared it in style to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so this would appeal to readers who love larger-than-life fight scenes, magic, the age-old battle of good versus evil and sagas filled with many characters.
“You are in grave danger. They have breached the barrier, and the three-headed Hellhounds are after you.” These are the words that John Gideon hears from a cloaked stranger who stops him on a road one night. John is an archaeologist and ex-military, so what on earth could the mysterious stranger mean? He is transported to the land of Illúmaril where he finds that everything about his upbringing was a lie. John is actually of the Elven line and has been hidden on Earth to protect him. As he learns more about his new home and impressive lineage, he realises he is the means to protecting the key world of Illúmaril from the evil entity who is Dormas. This Lord of Entropy was banished from the lands of Illúmaril, and is using his darkspawn to try to regain a foothold in the land. A lot rests on John’s shoulders now as he is the only one able to wield the ancient Sword of Order and those around him must intensify his training to get him ready for battle on time. They have faith in John, but does he?
While no stranger to epic fantasy, I admit that I struggled through this book until close to the end. Firstly the sheer number of characters in the story with names that didn’t exactly trip off the tongue made for a complicated web of connections to remember. Titles like ‘the Gilthanal Pyne Calandon of Noordlindian, archmaster, a morphander of the Order of the Platinum Griffon, and one of the blessed among the high wardens of Ashkelion’ as well as the character’s placements in the military or lodges added to the confusion. The prologue started well where the book throws you into the danger John is about to be introduced to, but when he wakes up naked in a strange land and a young lady walks in with food for him and the first things he says are “Thank you. I’m famished!” I have to raise my eyebrows. The pacing of the story was very slow until the end battle and since the book has multiple points of view, you see the same scenes repeated through the actions of different people. I felt that the world building took too long, and emphasis was placed on trivial things like buying an outfit which took up pages of the 491-page novel, whereas important scenes like where hidden memories were restored only warranted four lines.
The style that the book was written in made the flow of reading rather uncomfortable. There were far more passive verbs than active verbs which slow down the comprehension of a scene. There were a number of editing mistakes which included missing words or punctuation and sometimes quotation marks thrown into a sentence for no reason. Often the author seemed to want to explain a scene when it was not required like this example: “What are those?” asked Gideon. “They are skyships,” replied the Cordlyer, who seemed to intuit that Gideon had never before seen these types of craft. Why else would Gideon have asked otherwise? Even a sentence like ‘He arranged to have his horse fed as he sensed her growing interest in food’ was really drawing a thought out unnecessarily. A lot of blow by blow action took place where it would have done a scene better to have made it succinct. I was irked by the use of the word ‘stated’ so many times. Out of a page of dialogue, almost 75% of the responses were that the person ‘stated’ or otherwise there was too much embellishment like a person answering ‘sarcastically but honestly’. There were also silly mistakes like a person pacing around the room and then standing up, and head-hopping in paragraphs happened quite a few times. It can be tricky to describe a character’s facial reactions and expressions but when someone looks at you ‘respectfully and rather humorously’ or ‘in a grandfatherly way’ I battle to imagine it. And when “...extrapolating further then...” crops up in a character’s thoughts about himself, I find it difficult to believe in the character.
Even though I struggled with the book, I found the concept intriguing, and as I reached the final battle, I finally found the author’s stride just starts to begin. The introduction of a much bigger picture and where the key world fits in definitely leads into the next instalment. I also enjoyed the way the author was able to convey how the forces of good banded together and were willing to fight to the death, while the forces of evil were quick to scatter when the tide was turning against them.
With the editing mistakes and the readability issues affecting my rating of the book, I score Advent of Darkness 2 out of 4 stars and I don’t feel it was on par with the sweeping saga that is Lord of the Rings. The action scenes do not contain violence or gore and there is no swearing or scenes of a sexual nature so I would recommend this book to mature young adults and up who are possibly interested in epic fantasy, enjoy this style of writing, and like a character-filled story.
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Advent of Darkness
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