The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

"Was a secret being held from them, or were they the secret?"

The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles (Angry Robot, 2022)

"Comfort reading" is a loaded term, coming as it does with a kind of implication that whatever's being read is in some sense not proper. A bit childish, a bit soft, a bit safe. 'I have decided to drink hot chocolate, not the hard stuff.' Perhaps hot chocolate is all those things. But life would be a cold place with only the hard stuff, and the fact that The Last Blade Priest ended up feeling like comfort reading doesn't mean that it wasn't good. It was.

But it was that comfort that snagged me, if that makes sense. This is, if you hadn't already guessed from the title, or the front cover, or the fact that the author goes by two initials, fantasy. In fact that probably deserves a capital letter: this is Fantasy. There are grand empires, there is dark magic, there is war. Characters make grand pronouncements like "Yisho will want to regain Mal Nulalus. But she will not rush, not into battle against the Elves, not along hundreds of miles of exposed road." And yes, there are Elves, though not the usual decaying poet-supremacists. The slow reveal of what they actually are is cutely done, so I won't spoil it here.

I used to eat this stuff, almost from the moment I could read. One of my earliest book-related memories is sneaking off to read The Two Towers in an attic. (Why sneaking? Why an attic? I think I was supposed to be in bed.) Over the years of childhood and adolescence I chewed my way through the fantasy section of every library I went to, book after book, trilogy after trilogy. I can’t remember half of it now, it all blends into one great smooshy uber-text called The Something of Something: Volume Something in the Something Somethilogy. It was a habit and, like a lot of habits, I grew out of it. 

I suspect a lot of people grow out of this particular habit. I daresay my reasons weren’t particularly interesting or intellectual or noble: tastes changes, horizons shift. Perhaps I read "Epic Pooh" at a crucial juncture. In the introduction to the Fantasy Masterworks edition of Patricia McKillip's The Riddle-Master's Game - which I bounced off last year but may attempt again this - Graham Sleight suggests that "One way of understanding how fantasy works is that they're stories where meaning is unusually close to the surface." I think I started looking for murkier waters, ones in which meaning might only be a shadow, a shifting thing, or perhaps not there at all.

I'm going to quote another introduction now. You can't stop me. I love introductions. After I finished The Last Blade Priest I read Joel Lane's The Witnesses are Gone, which was republished this year by Influx Press with opening remarks by M. John Harrison. The central character, Martin Swan, spends the novella searching for the films of a director called Jean Rien, whose work and indeed life is a tangle of hoax and rumour that, when pulled apart, only reveals new tangles, new hoaxes. "Under this kind of logic it's impossible to construct a working hermeneutics," Harrison writes. And for Swan, "Reality itself is no different … Every life under capital - and especially any record or remains of it - is a solutionless mystery, a nagging epistemological problem for those who come after."

This, it seems to me, is exactly what capital-F Fantasy is not, and that's why it's so comforting. However baroque or grotesque the monsters, however shocking the twists, however grim the violence, however strange and Other the peoples and places - however fantastical the fantasy - the work interprets itself as it goes. There is history and geography and logic; the epistemology doesn't scrape but soothes. The world is built, and that means there is an architecture that keeps it from collapsing.

I'm in danger of blundering into an argument that's been rumbling on for ages, about epic fantasy and conservatism and the long shadow of Tolkien. And that's probably for people who read (and write) a lot more fantasy than I do, so I'll leave it. But it's interesting to note that W.P. Wiles, who also writes literary fiction as Will Wiles, started on this book while struggling with the other stuff. "I started writing TLBP as a way of refreshing my 'literary' writing … I wanted to reconnect with writing for enjoyment, with the passions that had turned me into a writer in the first place." Not just comfort reading, then. Comfort writing.

I don't mean any of the above in a particularly negative way, incidentally. The cover quote says that Wiles "Embraces and transforms the archetypes of epic fantasy with impressive ingenuity," and I'd go along with that, although with the caveat that none of these transformations fundamentally destabilise the genre. The embrace is just as important.

However, the first page reads "BOOK ONE OF The Holy Mountain". That's right, there is too much fantasy going on here for just one book. Wiles has explained that although it's been planned as a trilogy, and the second book is part-written, "TLBP was sold as a one-book deal and so the sequel will have to be proposed and sold on its merits (and the record of TLBP) and nothing is guaranteed." But will it get here before The Winds of Winter?

It’s intriguing, this potential for incompleteness, this sense that the book might be left forever untethered to the rest of itself. As a writer there are presumably all sorts of exciting things that can be done to trouble the hermeneutic satisfactions of epic fantasy. (Viriconium seems like the obvious first thought here; presumably proper fantasy fans will have plenty more suggestions.) As a reader, I wonder if one can do the work regardless of authorial intent. If it would be a worthwhile exercise to take a relatively traditional epic fantasy trilogy, one that's been well reviewed and is at least adequately written, and then deliberately read the second book only. No beginning, no ending. An elaborate bridge entirely unmoored, that comes from fog and disappears into fog.

Might be boring. Might be interesting. Might even be funny. If I can find a good candidate, I'll try and give it a shot later in the year. Be the destabilisation you want to see in the worlds.