The Rage Of Dragons

It’s time for one of my roughly annual attempts at reading a big hefty fantasy brick. This time we’re looking at The Rage Of Dragons, a self-published(!) novel turned normally-published novel. Can it overcome my well-known antipathy towards dragon-based literature?

Almost two hundred years before the start of the story, the Omehi fled their home and crossed a supposedly-impassable sea to settle the land of Xidda. Unfortunately Xidda was already inhabited, by people who both weren’t keen to share and who possessed terrifying magical powers that the Omehi had never seen before. The Omehi managed to conquer a large peninsula with their own gifts--chief among them the ability to call down dragons--but they’ve been fighting a constant, bloody war to hold onto it ever since.

Our protagonist is Tau, a Fantasy Sword-Boy who’s getting ready to head off to Elite Sword-Man School to finish his military training. After getting a taste of real combat during a coastal raid, Tau decides he’d prefer to stay home and marry his teenage sweetheart rather than get cut down in battle, this being the most common outcome for all conscripts save the very few who are born with magical gifts (and even the gifted don’t have the best mortality rate). But when his friends and family are affected by the violent wrath of a cruel noble, Tau changes his mind and decides to embark on a quest for revenge.

The only problem is that in order to legally duel the higher-caste men responsible for the killings, he needs to join the ranks of the military elite--and to do that, he has to prove himself against a multitude of stronger, better-trained and more privileged fighters. 

The Rage Of Dragons is kind of a hybrid between the older, more whimsical style of fantasy yarn about wide-eyed lads heading off to war and adventure in order to save the kingdom, and the modern post-Game Of Thrones style of fantasy yarn about wide-eyed lads heading off to war and adventure and then getting unceremoniously murdered due to political intrigue among squabbling nobles. I suspect--although I’ll admit I haven’t checked--that the latter half was added in the transition from self-published to commercial fiction; the prologue involves a vengeful Dragon Queen losing the respect of her courtiers and allies by incinerating an opposing army over a personal vendetta, which is a bit similar to a certain infamous moment from the last season of Game Of Thrones, which aired after the original self-published release.

I’m going to split this review into two sections, mirroring my experience with the book being very sharply delineated between the first twenty percent or so, which is bad, and the remaining eighty percent, which is Good Actually.

That first twenty percent is a slog. The story trundles along at a languid pace, wandering between random incidents that don’t seem to be building towards anything resembling a plot. I’ll admit that this might be due to my foreknowledge of the book’s self-published origins, but the opening chapters have all the hallmarks of unedited amateur fiction: the lack of conflict, the glacial pacing, the over-abundance of characters, the refusal to get to the fucking point.

It doesn’t help that Tau is a protagonist-shaped void with no discernible motivation. His initial decision to get himself out of fighting via injury seems to pop into his head ex nihilo, and since the plan would have involved him going away to Sword Fighting School for several years anyway, there’s absolutely no urgency to the situation at all. The story at this point in the book is utterly lacking in tension or drama.

And then the revenge quest kicks in--via what basically amounts to a random accident, admittedly--and things suddenly get interesting.

Our protagonist rapidly develops a personality. The plot jumps into warp-speed and doesn’t slow down again for the entire book. Tau goes from a complacent puppy floating along towards a distant end-goal to a bloodied, scrappy underdog taking on a parade of seemingly-insurmountable odds. The story is no longer a far-off suggestion, it’s immediate and present on the page.

One can’t help but make comparisons to a certain other fantasy series about a young man embarking on a quest for revenge. Ahem.

The story is basically Tau’s ascension from innocent sword-boy to awesome sword-man who has a cool scar and who uses two swords because he’s just that much of a badass, but the book avoids the bad habit of some other fantasy novels (ahem) of stacking the deck too heavily in his favour. He has to work hard for what he accomplishes. In fact, he doesn’t even pass the initial test to become an Ihashe Initiate, only getting in because a maverick instructor decides that his suicidal determination might yield interesting results.

There’s a particularly fun scene early on where Tau sneaks into one of his targets’ bedrooms to deliver an edgelord Batman speech about how someday he’s going to return and challenge him to a duel, and until then Tau will be the shadow that stalks his every waking moment, crawling in his skin, and then Tau is almost killed because his opponent grabs a knife and attacks instead of sitting there listening to him prattle on like a teenage Vampire: The Masquerade LARPer. The scene is a promise that the book is only going to indulge the power fantasy inherent in its premise up to a certain point, and the story that follows mostly keeps that promise.

And while I was down on the opening chapters, I have to admit that I did like how they handled aspects of the setting. Omehi society is, it quickly becomes apparent, an incredibly unjust place where the lower-caste’s lives are utterly worthless, to the point that they can be summarily hanged for raising a hand against a noble. Your average YA novel about downtrodden Commoners rebelling against powerful Nobles (so in other words, your average YA novel) would thrust this fact into the reader’s face on page one, lest they be in danger of not immediately understanding the story, but here it’s initially downplayed because as someone who grew up in this society and considers it normal, Tau just doesn’t find it particularly noteworthy. It’s only when he has some of his childhood naivety blown away and the inequality of the caste system affects him personally that it starts to take center stage in the story.

I even like how the book handles dragons: despite their prominence on the cover and the title, they only show up very sparingly in the actual story. And interestingly, they end up being more important to the central conflict as political bargaining chips than as weapons.

I’ve been heaping praise on the book for the last few paragraphs, but I don’t want to overstate things. The Rage Of Dragons is still popcorn entertainment at the end of the day, and if you’re any kind of fantasy reader then nothing here with the possible exception of the African-inspired setting is going to surprise you in the slightest. 

The plotting is at times very messy, with lots of obvious back-fill in the form of arbitrary magical rules and new world-building factoids, and the writing is for the most part merely functional. It gets the job done, but not a whole lot beyond that. This is fine--maybe even an asset--when it comes to describing sword fights and battles, which are communicated in unusually sharp detail, but for setting description and Tau’s inner world I found the writing consistently lacking.

Also, despite supposedly being about a character rebelling against unjust authority, the book ends up having the same fawning attitude towards royalty that a lot of fantasy does, which is deeply annoying. You really can’t portray the power structure of a society as being top-to-bottom oppression and violence and then have the Queen at the head of it all be a benevolent magical sparkle-being, as ends up being the case here. I’m hoping the sequels address this.