★★★☆☆ Making it up as we go along

Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead

KJ Parker

The hero of this novel calls himself Saevus Corax. (Google translate tells me that is "fierce heart" in Latin, though I'm pretty sure nuance is being lost.) Saevus himself would object to the word "hero", but he is. He makes his living by profiting from war and the suffering of others. He's a liar and, as he himself says

...arrogant, callous, selfish and utterly devoid of any redeeming qualities; all, I’m sorry to say, perfectly true. I’m leaving out devious, because I happen to believe it’s a virtue.

This is mostly true, except the "utterly devoid of any redeeming qualities" part. I will leave it to you to discover what those might be. Except for this one: he's clever and often funny.

K.J. Parker's Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead reminds me of the beginning of Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber. As Nine Princes begins, we meet our hero Corwin (although he doesn't yet know that is his name) in a state of profound amnesia. Corwin bluffs his way into the confidence of his brother Random and his sister Florimel until he discovers who and what he is. I mention this because Zelazny tells us that when he began writing, he was just as much in the dark as Corwin. He wrote, let things happen to Corwin, let Corwin discover his world, and at the same time Zelazny himself discovered it. This obviously worked for him -- Nine Princes in Amber is the first novel in Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber.

I mention this because Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead feels to me as if it was written the same way. Of course, I don't know how Parker wrote it -- it is possible that he started with a 50-page plot outline detailing every twist. But if so, he disguises it REALLY well. Saevus, while not literally suffering from amnesia, has a dark past that he doesn't like to think about or tell his readers about, a kind of voluntary amnesia. What's more, he is repeatedly surprised by events. In fact, the words "I wasn’t expecting that. The worst thing a general can possibly say," are a running joke. As a result, through virtually the entire book he improvises.

In my opinion, this doesn't work quite as well for Parker as it did for Zelazny. I enjoyed Saevus as a character. But the novel ends up feeling just the way you might expect such a story to feel -- somewhat random and directionless. At times I lost track of the various plots and counterplots going on. (Which is fine -- that's par for the course in modern Fantasy and Science Fiction.) And in the end we didn't arrive anywhere I really wanted to go.

I took up Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead because I saw that two succeeding books of the Corax trilogy were available for request on NetGalley. I thought I would read this, the first book, then decide whether to request the next two. I have decided I will not.

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