Until physicists unearth the fundamental truths that underpin reality, philosophers will continue to debate the nature of the universe. Does fate rule our lives, our every action predetermined since the dawn of time? Or does chaos hold sway, our choices guided by nothing more omnipotent than free will? Each novel in the Psalms of Isaak series has, in its own way, struggled with this question, as characters fight to exert their wills upon the seemingly olympian powers that have proscribed their destinies. And though Antiphon does not give us an answer, it does go a long way to entertaining us as its author builds towards a final, revelatory crescendo.
Thousands of years from now, Earth is nothing like the world with which we are familiar. Numerous civilizations have risen and fallen in the intervening millennia, so much so that the humans who persist on this future, desertified planet barely even remember us, referring to our time simply as the age of the Younger Gods. Though details on what precisely befell Earth are scarce, its inhabitants know this much. Terrible and powerful spells, couched in the form of songs, empowered its destruction. They know this first-hand, for it was one such song, thought long lost, that rose out of legend to obliterate windwir, the world's last, great repository of knowledge. The ramifications of this annihilation, having occurred in the opening pages of Lamentation, the series' first novel, are still reverberating in this third entry.
In the chaos of Windwir's fall, darkness invaded the land. In the north, the rightful queen of the marshlands is usurped by a woman claiming to be her elder sister. This new, dark queen is the harbinger of a bloody faith that, until recently, has only been worshipped in secret. But now, with Windwir's fall, they have emerged from the shadows, heralds of the Crimson Empress who promises to conquer the land and restore it to the ownership of the family that ruined it so many centuries ago.
But while darkness is ascendent, the light is not without its champions. What remains of its army has consolidated under the banner of the gypsy king of the Ninefold Forests. King Rudalfo is not without his own darkness, but, for his infant son, the wife who bore her, and the people he's sworn to protect, he will never surrender to the dark. Alongside him stand figures vital to the resistance against the Crimson Empress. Neb, the home-seeker, was once just a boy who witnessed Windwir's destruction. He is now a man who has accepted his destiny as a power in and out of dreams. Petronus, a pope in self-imposed exile, returns to give counsel and to absolve himself of guilt. And Winter, the deposed marsh queen, fights with Rudalfo until she can win back her throne and deliver her people back into the light. Together, they are a band overwhelmed, souls who hold only the most insignificant of threads to the tapestry being woven around them. Will they prevail, their goodness powering their ignorance, or will the dark eclipse them and return them into the hands of powers thought long banished from the world?
There can be no doubt that Mr. Scholes is a storyteller of the first order. In Antiphon, he perfects a system of fragmented points of view that lend his tale wonderful potency. The narrative is divvied up between half a dozen characters, each of whom capture the novel's focus for ten or 15 pages at a time before handing it onto the next character in the sequence. In this, the author is able to transmit his plot in discrete packets of knowledge that are, in effect, stories within a story. This shared P.O.V. is not unique to Mr. Scholes, but few have mastered it to this extent.
In this, Mr. Scholes is fortunate. For Antiphon, though exciting, suffers from being the third instalment in a five-novel sequence built on the core mystery of who destroyed Windwir and why. The author must bridge the story he's so meticulously \established in the first two novels to the conclusion that will play out over the next two. But while this is understandable, the reader is now 1,500 pages into an epic which, so far, has only offered portentous clues to the core mystery. Mr. Scholes is great at injecting his chapters with drama and promises of revelations to come, but a scarcity of concrete details leaves Antiphon high on style and low on substance.
This is a beautifully crafted novel, but I am only willing to be teased for so long. Here's hoping Psalms of Isaak does not fall prey to the same sins of perpetual promise that crippled The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. (3/5 Stars)
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