In turning over the “currently reading” section of my sidebar I realized that I haven’t said anything about The Judging Eye. Profuse apologies to Scott Bakker. Thankfully I can still remember reading it. (And you’d be surprised how quickly you can forget a book when you read lots of them.)
Fans of Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series will not be disappointed with the new trilogy. While it is set 20 years after the events of the Prince of Nothing books, it very much carries on the story. Having consolidated his rule, Anasûrimbor Kellhus raises a vast army for a crusade against the Consult, and Drusas Achamain inevitably finds himself needing to work against this. But the fact that it is familiar and, to some extent, predictable doesn’t take anything away from Bakker’s skill in putting together an absorbing novel, or torturing his characters. He also does something very naughty indeed, for which he probably deserves to be spanked but which actually works surprisingly well. Saying any more than that would give the whole game away.
My quibble with The Judging Eye is that it didn’t seem quite sufficient as a novel. I’ll be terribly pained actually waiting for the next volume to come out, whereas I only discovered The Darkness That Comes Before after all of PoN was on shelves.
I’m also kind of nervous that his second trilogy gets to launch in the midst of our recession, as I’ll be righteously annoyed if the completion of the Second Apocalypse sequence were to become a casualty.
Jason:
I shall keep buying books in the hope that the publishers stay in business.