Despite our best efforts, despite our planning, our yearning, and our needing, our lives are often beyond our control. For while we make our own decisions, from the trivial to the consequential, from when to cross the street to what career path to pursue, we have no control over the millions of other variables that impact on our choices: the car that unlawfully belts us, or the economic circumstances that render obsolete the jobs our education promised us. Control is an illusion, a construct of ego that helps us to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we hold destiny's reins, not the other way around. Mr. Whates harnesses this fallacy and uses it to hammer home our helplessness before grand events. The product that results from this abject lesson, while limited in vision, is quietly entertaining.
Thaiburley is a city of hopes and sorrows, magic and crime. The centuries-old vision of powers time has faded unto legend, Thaiburley has endured war and chaos, riot and despair, fire and nightmare to become a crowded home for humans and aliens who live, side-by-side, in a place like no other. For Thaiburley is a city of 100 stratified rows that reach for all of the promise of the heavens.
Though not initially designed to sort out the haves from the have-nots, these 100 stories (rows) have, over the years, sorted themselves into cliques, each row making a particular contribution to the Thaiburley whole. But while such specialization has its advantages, serving to leave no doubt in anyone's mind where citizens can find what they require, this form of stratification is wide open to abuse. For it is a simple matter to slowly but continuously compel the less fortunate onto lower and lower rows, into the forgotten and neglected depths of the city and far from the law and order of the Heights, where government resides, where law-enforcement patrols the streets, where the sun is yet visible.
In City of Dreams and Nightmares, the series' first instalment, we encounter the vivid consequences of this neglect in the form of Tom, a young street-nick whose short and difficult life has been marred by gangs, violence and darkness. Born to the lowest rows of Thaiburley, he is raised by the streets, welcomed into their thieving arms, and put to their purposes. He, like his brothers in the blue Claw gang, grift, steal and work to protect their turf against the other street-nick gangs that seek to take it from them.
The familiar rhythm's of Tom's dystopic life are shattered, however, when he is charged with making a long and daring climb to the heights of Thaiburley's fabled rows. Skilled in hiding and evasion, he is helped past the rival gangs until he is away and free to climb all the way to the top. But just as Tom is adjusting to the marvels of the lawful world around him, so rich with color, freedom and wealth, the likes of which he's never seen, his reverie and his mission are shattered when he chances to witness an early-morning murder. Brimming with jealousy and privilege, one of Thaiburley's senior officials has stabbed his student to death. Quickly, the murder is blamed on Tom, igniting a city-wide search for the street-nick which not only forces Tom into uncertain alliances, it compels him to flee into the strangest and darkest corners of the city in search of safety and salvation.
In City of Hope and Despair, the series' second volume, Thaiburley has settled into the calm eye of the storm that promises to shake its ancient walls. For though the immediate danger, for Tom and the city, has past, a deeper game is still underway, one that dredges up old nightmares. For while Tom is dispatched to an icy, northern citadel in hopes of fully realizing his talents, Katrina, the young, embittered independent operator who recently helped Tom avoid the wrath of the city's authorities, is forced to confront her grim past when her mother's killer re-emerges to stalk the sin-stained streets of Thaiburley's lowest rows.
How foul is a thing that prays on the unfortunate? Who devours what little hope they have? A thing that requires their sustenance to live, a thing that understands full well that the best victims are ones no one cares about. And so, while a strange and deadly flu sweeps through Thaiburley's most powerful assemblies, preoccupying the authorities, Kat draws upon old allies and friends to combat a nightmare that haunts her dreams with the ruination of her childhood.
In City of Light and Shadow, the most recent entry in the series, the war for control of Thaiburley finally comes to a climactic head when the animating force behind the chaos at its core is identified and engaged in combat by a steadier, wiser Tom. While the city's wisest minds continue to be felled by a mysterious and devastating illness, all of the remaining resources of the Prime Master's administration must be gathered and hurled at this threat lest the source of the city's power lose control of its agents and darken the city forever in powers beyond anyone's command.
Though it suffers at times from a lack of focus and imagination, The City of A Hundred Rows is solid fiction that, in delivering on many of the fantasy genre's legendary tropes, breezily entertains. Mr. Whates will never win any awards for his elementary prose, but he compensates for this lyrical shortcoming with a roster of familiar, charming characters and a story which, though unoriginal, serves the reader with a sizeable helping of satisfaction and amusement. Moreover, the extent to which he grounds his magic in some kind of logic provides the story some welcome framework for what is, ultimately, a mashup of the best elements of fantasy and science fiction.
While Mr. Whates' primary purpose here is entertainment, his tale is not without social commentary. The City of A Hundred Rows is best imagined as a series that the immature lovechild of Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien might have produced. Stratified Thaiburley strongly evokes images of Victorian-age megacities like London and New York which beseeched visitors and inhabitants to buy into the pretty fiction of their opulence and ostentation while ignoring the grim reality of the impossibly difficult lives endured by their forgotten underclasses. Law and justice exist only for those who matter, those who are visible, those who live in sunlight. The wretches, most in need of support, guidance and protection are beneath the notice of all but a rare, fairminded few.
Unfortunately, this attempt to speak to a broader theme is also the source of many of the work's flaws. For Mr. Whates in no way explains how a dystopian city could continue its descent into degradation despite having a benevolent and all-powerful ruler with legendary warriors at his disposal. The author clearly wished to burden Tom and Katrina, his two protagonists, with miserable backgrounds while also using the corruption and the moral decay within the city as a wellspring of enemies for his heroes to battle. But in choosing to cast Thaiburley's Prime Master as a force for good,and to grant him extraordinary powers, he leaves the reader wondering why the city's leader doesn't simply fix the problems endemic to this place when he's clearly capable of doing so. The conceit, then, that these are challenges only Tom and Katrina must face, as a means of serving the story and accelerating their maturation, is tragically obvious.
No doubt fans of heroes and quests will find the journey depicted in The City of A Hundred Rows enjoyable. Much of its plot reprises much of fantasy's most hallowed tomes. And yet there are too many disharmonious notes here to allow the reader to forget that he is in the hands of an apprentice playing a master's tune: too many characters introduced and forgotten, too many plot threads woven and then neglected, too many moments of deus ex machina for the victories to feel earned.
Compelling for its heroism in the face of corruption and the extent to which it mixes and matches science fiction and fantasy, but in every other respect derivative... (2/5 Stars)
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