In the Third Age of Flight, Cade Quarter is a refugee from Great Glade, one of the three major cities of the Edge. The nephew of Nate Quarter - and thus similarly a descendant of the sorry bastard sons of destiny who shaped the Edge in the First and Second Ages (Quint, Twig and Rook) - he is hunted for his father's heresy in seeking to learn what lies below the Edge. His flight takes him aboard a mighty skytavern, and thus to the heart of the Deepwoods, where he struggles to find a place amid the beauty and peril of the wild Edge.
In terms of the books that have gone before it, The Nameless One is oddly sedate, reading more like a fantasy version of Little House on the Prairie (or more accurately, I suppose, Little House in the Big Woods) than the swashbuckling adventures of the other Edge Chronicles. That being said, change is not automatically a bad thing, and Cade Quarter's travails are no less gripping for his enemy being the unwitting hostility of nature rather than a guild of corrupt merchants or a dodgy skyship quartermaster.
As ever, the real star of the show is the Edge itself, with its fantastical flora and fauna and array of strange people. Strangest of all is the titular Nameless One; a 'half-formed' giant from the dark lands around Riverise, this powerful, yet pitiful creature is the emotional core of the novel. More than any other installment, The Nameless One feels like the introduction to a story, incomplete in itself, and I am definitely intrigued to see where it will go next.
No comments:
Post a Comment