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Light Stealer
by James Barclay, introduction by Stan
Nicholls
(PS Publishing, £8, 89 pages, signed, numbered, limited edition paperback,
also available as signed, numbered, limited edition hardback priced
£25, published December 2002.)
Harry Potter and the A-Bomb is my lasting impression of this
prequel to James Barclay's  'Legends
of the Raven' series. Septern is the greatest mage ever -- and doesn't
he know it -- and to prove this to the world, he's devised a spell that
could end all life. Not for practical use, you understand, but just
for the kudos, and to open up the doctrine of magic to new avenues.
What he fails, or refuses, to grasp is that the four internecine colleges
of magic and their old enemies, the Wytch Lords, are going to want the
details of this spell for their own military purposes. So riding out
to give a lecture on his discovery to invited representatives of the
four colleges, and uninvited agents of the Wytch Lords, is possibly
the worst thing he could do. The second worst thing he could do is to
leave his four ambitious student wizards behind to guard his lodge against
the aggressors that follow.
Having not read Barclay's novels, I can't say whether knowledge of
them adds any richness to this novella, or vice versa, although my ignorance
was certainly no impediment to following the story. That said, it's
pretty clear that this is a prequel rather than a self-contained tale,
since the spell Dawnthief, nominally central to the story, remains peripheral
right up to the end. The idea of it sets events in motion, but the spell
itself barely figures at all. Then again, I imagine it has a lot more
to do in the novel entitled Dawnthief. The idea is posited that
magic is a sentient thing, which might have made for interesting developments
here, but this isn't followed up at all -- again, perhaps this features
in the 'Raven' novels. And the novella's conclusion, while neat, did
strike me as somewhat anticlimactic. (Yes, you'll say, of course it's
anticlimactic, it's a prequel ... ) Overall, Light Stealer left
a little too much lacking to entirely satisfy me. This is undoubtedly
a danger with prequels, but not an inevitable one.
Characterisation varies. The trainee wizards are an interesting, well-rounded
bunch to start off with, but later developments see two of them undergo
such an abrupt change that it's hard to believe they're the same characters
-- given the situation, my initial thought was that they must be impostors
from one of the rival colleges, but no such luck. Septern himself, meanwhile,
is a guignol of such grand proportions that I began rooting for his
downfall barely a chapter into the novella. It's easy to see him as
a metaphor for Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow atomic bomb engineers,
but if this was intended, the metaphor is a little oversimplified --
Septern's ego is too great, and his detachment from political reality
too implausibly absolute. The split of point-of-view between Septern
and his students means less opportunity to round Septern out, while
the student POVs only bolster the confusion over their later change
of character.
Light Stealer is an interesting introduction to Barclay's fictional
world, but the execution doesn't quite match up to the ideas.
Review by John Toon.
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