Every genre has its well-worn conventions and its overused tropes, devices that were once innovative and groundbreaking and have become hollow and dull through repetition. High fantasy is especially prone to this, perhaps because of its connections to mythology and folklore and its nostalgic recreations of an imaginary European past. An air of being "twice-told" is an advantage for a high fantasy tale, not a drawback. This has the unfortunate effect of encouraging authors who use the conventions and devices of the genre indiscriminately, not understanding why those devices were created in the first place, the purposes they serve, or whether a high fantasy novel might be better off without them.
Thus we have The Heir of Night, a novel that starts putting up red flags before the first page. For instance: there is a map. This is never a good sign. In general, maps mean journeys, quests, travel, often described in tediously minute detail; maps mean worldbuilding that the author has worked on for ages and will eagerly show off regardless of how interesting it is or how relevant to the story. Yet The Heir of Night proves an exception to this general rule, since the protagonists spend the first 320 pages (of 435) in the same keep. This raises the question: why bother with a map at all? Surely the point of including a map is to make it easier for the reader to follow the characters' movements, especially when there are multiple groups of characters in different locations. When the characters all stay together in one place for three quarters of the novel, then travel a relatively short distance in the last quarter, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that The Heir of Night has a map not because it needs one, or because the map adds something of value, but because it is the kind of fantasy novel that has a map.
Likewise the glossary. The Heir of Night does not use a lot of setting-specific words, whether new coinages derived from English or the kind of small fragments of constructed languages to be found in many high fantasy novels. There are a few nonce-words whose meanings are either explicitly given or can be deduced from context, and that is all. And yet there is a sixteen-page glossary, which consists mostly of proper names, and might perhaps be useful or interesting as an appendix to a novel a great deal more complex than this one.
Still, sometimes warning signs like these are misleading. In any case, they would not matter if they did not point towards a larger problem with the novel as a whole.
As the novel begins, Malian, the heir of the title, is wandering through an abandoned building in the Keep of Winds, which is both her family's ancestral home and a fortress built to defend against the Darkswarm, a supernatural enemy her people, the Derai, have been battling for centuries. After a brief character- and backstory-establishing sequence of Malian wandering through the old halls, imagining the legendary heroes of the Derai and risking her neck with great leaps and climbs, normal life reasserts itself in the form of a formal dinner welcoming her father, the Earl of Night, back from his travels. But, as is the way of such stories, normality is soon disrupted by an enemy attack. Malian goes missing in the course of the attack, and the point of view duties are split between Malian herself, Nhairin, the steward of the Keep, Asantir, one of her father's guards, and Kalan, a boy from the Keep's contingent of magic users (called "priests" here, although they don't seem to perform any religious functions), who runs into Malian as she hides from the enemy, and joins forces with her to defend against the enemy's magic.
The fact that they can join forces proves problematic in the aftermath of the attack. Malian is her father's only child, and thus she is the Heir of the House of Night and a member of the Derai's aristocratic caste, known as the Blood. She is supposed to inherit the leadership of the House of Night from her father, but a long-standing oath requires that no member of the Blood with the kind of magical abilities she displays in the course of the attack can stay in the house of his or her birth. Indeed, Kalan himself is just such an exile, born to a noble family but cast out as a child once his powers began to manifest themselves. So Malian must be exiled. Though she's not exactly happy about this fate, she accepts it, because a vision she and Kalan shared during the attack has revealed that she is the subject of a prophecy, the One who will destroy the Darkspawn for good. But The Heir of Night is the first of a trilogy, so the fulfillment of the prophecy will have to wait.
This was a dispiriting book to read. The novel's good qualities (such as they are) are obscured by a mist of vagueness that surrounds the setting and the action, so that it is often difficult to figure out exactly what is going on, and even more difficult to care. There is barely a single vivid image to be found throughout the novel, and very little is described with any degree of specificity; we are told, for example, that the Derai are "dark" in their coloring, but how dark is "dark," exactly? Dark like Rudolph Valentino? Dark like Idris Elba? The Darkswarm, the enemies of the Derai, are generic evil monsters with no character or backstory to speak of; in terms of their development, they compare unfavorably with the similarly named Darkspawn from the Dragon Age video games.
There is a lack of economy in the story's telling that makes it drag; there are far too many scenes in which the characters talk about what they're going to do before they do it, or talk about what they just did after they've done it. The clunky awkwardness of the prose doesn't help. There is no excuse for a published novel being so liberally littered with epithets, so that characters who have already been introduced are referred to as "the Heir," "the steward," "the honor captain," as if we were in danger of forgetting who they were. And yet, in a way this is appropriate, because even the major characters are so flat and bland that adding a single adjective to those epithets would summarize them perfectly: Malian is the plucky Heir; Asantir, the determined honor captain; Nhairin would probably have to be the anxious and bitter steward, because she has two traits, which makes her the most complex character in the novel.
Even Lowe's most original concept is so poorly executed that it makes for a frustrating read. One of the ways in which Malian and Kalan's magical powers manifest is as an ability to slip between dimensions into a dream world in which ancient heroes and gods walk the earth and can give them guidance and help. These are the same ancient heroes the two have learned about in stories and seen depicted in tapestries, so it's natural for them to be awed and humbled in their presence. But when the ancient heroes speak in riddles for no adequately explained reason, to such an extent that even Malian and Kalan are baffled and annoyed, it's hard not to feel toyed with:
He wondered who they were and why—since this meeting was not chance—they had sought him out?
"Who are you?" Kalan asked for the second time. "What does it mean, to be the Huntmaster?"
The black mask looked down at him, expressionless. Then the harsh voice said, "Every question must find its own answer, every questioner his or her own."
"What kind of answer is that?" demanded Kalan, exasperated, but only the echoes of his own voice answered him. (p. 251)
This is neither the first nor the last time that either Malian or Kalan complains about the dream world people being unnecessarily opaque. Withholding information is one way to maintain an aura of mystery, but it only works if it isn't obvious that this is what you're doing.
To be fair, there are other interesting ideas here. In particular, there's something unusual about the suggestion that the Derai, who are not native to the world in which the story takes place, brought the Darkswarm with them from their original home, which is probably why the neighboring peoples distrust and dislike them. It's also good to see a secondary world fantasy that focuses primarily on female characters; apart from Malian herself, there is Asantir the honor captain, the steward Nhairin, the priestess Korriya, the herald Jehane Mor, and the Earl's consort Rowan, who is a powerful woman in her own right. The presence of this many women in the ranks of the powerful is not belabored or even explained, but taken for granted, which is refreshing.
Unfortunately, that is the only refreshing thing about The Heir of Night. The shallowness of the worldbuilding is signaled straight away by the presence of the Standard Fantasyland Map; this wouldn't be an insuperable problem if it were not echoed and reinforced by a shallowness in the characterization and a dullness in the prose that does nothing to dress up what is, after all, a retread of a story any high fantasy fan will have read many times before. It wouldn't matter that The Heir of Night is not original if it were at least enjoyable to read. On that score, it has its moments, but not nearly enough to justify the rest of it.
Katherine Farmar is a writer based in Dublin, Ireland. She blogs about the arts at Pansies and Nettles.