Future Indefinite: Round Three of The Great Game | ||||||||||||
Dave Duncan | ||||||||||||
Avon EOS Books, 476 pages | ||||||||||||
|
A review by Jean-Louis Trudel
On Nextdoor, Exeter discovered that visitors from other worlds
could accumulate powerful mana by winning the natives'
respect or, better yet, their adulation. Such strangers to
Nextdoor thereby gained god-like status, and the first ones had
indeed chosen to impersonate gods by manipulating the faith of
Nextdoor's inhabitants. Opposing the old gods were a new sort
of strangers, working for a Service not unlike the British
Colonial Service known to Edward. Very much in spite of himself,
Edward started on the path foretold, fulfilling prophecies and
growing into the role of the Liberator appointed to rid Nextdoor
of the bloodthirsty god known as Death.
In the second round of the "Great Game", he headed back to Earth
to extricate himself from the prophecy. However, he was betrayed
and dumped in the middle of Flanders, in the thick of the Western
Front's worst battles. It took the help of a school chum, Julian
Smedley, an old schoolmaster, David Jones, and a distant cousin,
Alice Prescott, to rescue him and send him back to Nextdoor for
the final round of the "Great Game", finally determined to carry out the prophecy.
However, the first part of Future Indefinite tends to
drag as Duncan juggles a few too many secondary plot lines and
subplots for his own good. In a novel, building up suspense can
be fostered quite mechanically by simply delaying the telling
of the main story. While some of the early story threads do
reveal hidden meanings later on, others don't. In fact, the
story's intrinsic suspense is somewhat undermined by the fact that
Exeter is now doing his best to fulfill the prophecy in all
particulars, instead of getting out from under it. The author
does introduce a slew of traitors and characters with rather
ambiguous motivations to make things interesting, but the only
question tends to be "how will they fail or be converted?", just
like we wonder "how will Exeter succeed?" instead of asking
anxiously whether the Liberator will succeed...
The first two volumes conjured up more than a few memories of
Kipling ("The Man Who Would Be King", Kim), with a sprinkling
of military derring-do and a dash of Zelazny's Lord of Light,
in a setting halfway between the usual backdrops of generic
fantasy and a storybook version of the Far East. For those who
might expect something similar, The Great Game has
a few surprises yet in store for unwary readers, and the main one is a doozy.
The greatest story ever told has been a surefire crowd pleaser
for about two thousand years. However, it's only in the third
book that things snapped into focus and it became clear that
this is Duncan's own "Great Game".
Yet, Duncan's gift for misdirection is such that it only shapes
up as such fairly late in the book and, when it becomes obvious,
he toys masterfully with the reader's expectations.
Tackling it within a fantasy setting is something that isn't
exactly new. The quest of Tolkien's Frodo incorporated some
definite echoes, and Aslan's self-sacrifice in The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis comes very close to
outright allegory. More recently, Elizabeth Moon brought a
feminist angle to the retelling in the Deed of Paksenarrion.
In the end, Duncan's version is the control freak's version. Tolkien
chose to illustrate the workings of Providence, while Moon decided
to emphasize the power of a free sacrifice and resignation to divine
will. But Exeter stage-manages most of his march into Nextdoor
history with the help of the prophecy's directions. (It feels like
a wry comment on our own world's version of the same story...) In a
way, he brings to mind the crippled hero of Duncan's SF novel
West of January, who finally snatches victory from defeat
and powerlessness.
Though Duncan sticks closer to the original story than Lewis, the
meaning of Exeter's mission depends much more on the context of
Nextdoor and its system of magic.
However, the novel is unafraid to tackle head-on the ethics of
Exeter's situation, who must sacrifice human lives to gain the
power needed to challenge the god known as Death. The book's
most powerful moments are those where the characters come to
grips with the impossibly hard choices entailed by Edward Exeter's path.
The author's dry sense of humour saves such scenes from turning
into lectures. Duncan is not reluctant to play on the oddly
appealing contrast between the proprieties of Edwardian England
and the cruelties of a medieval society.
In the end, one may appreciate the clever plot twists that keep
readers guessing till the end or the sly commentary on such diverse
topics as the British Empire and Christianity. While the first
part of Future Indefinite is something of a slog, the
ending is a definite nailbiter. The key to our continued interest
is that the characters remain quite engaging. Readers who cared for
them in the first two rounds should not be disappointed by this
third round of the game.
I'll conclude with a full disclosure. Attentive readers may note my
name in the acknowledgments of Past Imperative, the first
volume in the trilogy. My involvement was in fact limited to a quick
translation of a few lines that appear in French in that book. While
I don't think this invalidates my review of the final tome, readers
are free to draw their own conclusions.
Jean-Louis Trudel is a busy, bilingual writer from Canada, with two novels and fourteen young adult books to his credit in French. He's also a moderately prolific reviewer and short story writer. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
If you find any errors, typos or other stuff worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide