Customer Reviews

Gate of Ivrel (Thorndike Speculative Fiction)

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is one of the small handfull of books which I have kept for years (decades?) and read repeatedly. It hovers just below THE LORD OF THE RINGS on the scale of great sci-fi/fantasy. Nobody who has read this book on my recommendation has been anything less than 100% pleased. Including my Mom.

Though this is the first of a series, it stands well on its own -- perfection just as it is. A real classic which can be read by people who don't usually read or like sci-fi. Loan it to your own Mom after you are finished and you will see.

The "heroine" is a traveler through space and time named Morgaine. But the entire tale is from the point of view of Vanye, a youth from a primitive and superstitious warrior culture who regards Morgaine as a witch. He is forced by a sacred oath to serve her, even though he believes that serving a witch will cost him his soul -- a LITERAL "Damned-If-I-Do and Damned-If-I-Don't" situation.

The book is science fiction, but reads like sword and sorcery, because that is how Vanye sees the world. He is a wonderful character, probably one of the BEST CHARACTERS EVER CREATED, imho. Cherryh's gift for realisticly portraying the psychology of a superstitious, obsessive, highly traumatized, warrior-caste teenager is so spot-on it is almost creepy. Morgaine isn't too shabby either.

Give it a try. I tell people to read the first three pages of Chapter One. That is all it takes to get them hooked.

Oh, and don't be misled by the the cover art. This isn't remotely cheese-cakey. The heroine wears clothes and everything.

This whole series, consisting of "Gate of Ivrel", "Well of Shiuan", "Fires of Azeroth", and "Exile's Gate", is my favorite of any author's, and I've read A LOT.

Cherryh's style is clean and dry, but at the same time very intense and passionate. Instead of using flowery words and melodrama to spoon-feed emotion to the reader, she uses common words and short, almost aggressive phrasing. The tension and passion and danger are drawn with a sharpness and clarity that is almost painful. A deceptively simple word or glance between these characters, whether friends or enemies, will at times bring that tension to a breathless peak, but without the expected release afterwards.

This is not an easy, exciting Harlequin-esque roller-coaster of peaks and valleys. This is a sharp ridge on a bare mountain with an occasional rock slide.

This is not a graceful Puccini aria that makes you want to weep and feel melancholy. This is avant-garde jazz where a single painfully high note is drawn out in the background for so long that you find yourself begging for a release that you fear may never come but then again do you really want it to?

It's exhausting, but in the best sense.

And about the 4th time I read the series, I found that it was funny too! It is, of course, a very dry humor, but it's there. And not a joke or eccentric comedic bit player to be seen.

It's easy to fall in love with these characters. They're very different from each other, but they're both excruciatingly familiar!

Cherryh creates the perfect male characters for a straight female audience. Cherryh's men are the kind many of us would create for ourselves. (Which is very different from the men male writers create.) Cherryh's men are capable of great valor and honor, but also of very deep emotion and affection, and self-reflection.

Also, her men often feel strong love and affection and respect for other men, without there being any sexual element to it. This is not only unique, but very difficult. The ability to create tension between male characters who love each other without it reading like sexual tension or a Sunday night "family drama" is something I rarely see. I appreciate it when I do.

My circle of friends has a shorthand way of expressing our reaction to this exhausting mix of physical danger and emotional tension, just by groaning "AAAAAHHHHGHHHHGHGHHHHHG!!!". If one of us starts off a conversation this way, another might say "Are you dying, or did you just finish a Cherryh?"

_Gate_ is a great beginning to the Morgaine novels. Morgaine is an excellent heroine, breaking a lot of the lame stereotypes that lesser writers have fallen back on when it was too much effort to create a strong, unique female protagonist. If you appreciate a heroine who is all business and only fleetingly vulnerable, Morgaine is the genuine article. Vanye makes the perfect foil to her: fallible, afraid, loyal, and very human.

To give just one example of Cherryh's descriptive talents without spoiling the book, if you close your eyes and visualize when Morgaine draws her primary weapon, a shiver will probably go down your back. Rare indeed is the author who can scare you without resorting to grossness.

You could save time by ordering _Well of Shiuan_, _Fires of Azeroth_, and _Exile's Gate_ at the same time you order this one. If you order this one you are going to want the other three anyway.

I have been a fan of fantasy for years now. The Morgaine Cycle is my favorite. It's an intense epic and I still get giddy at my favorite parts. There is more feeling and tension in one of C.J. Cherryh's conversations than I have read in some 6-book series. She creates worlds with these amazingly real characters stuck right in the middle. Morgaine and Vanye are very well matched as comrades, with a twist or two... I love that Ms. Cherryh gives them so many facets and even insecurities. I find it refreshing that even world-weary Morgaine doesn't have all the answers. And Vanye is easily the most convincing male character that I've ever read. The swordfights are breathtaking and it's easy to tell that Ms. Cherryh knows her horses. She has such incredible attention for details. It may sound pathetic, but as a potential writer, my ultimate goal is to write a series half as great as this partcular C.J. Cherryh original.

I forced myself to read the whole thing, because I really wanted to write this review after the 3rd chapter. But it's totally not worth reading for pleasure.

The whole setup is a lousy piece of infodump. Obviously an attempt to set a swords & sorcery novel in the greater context of a scifi universe (nothing like keeping your sequel options open, eh?), but it's conveniently forgotten except for lip-service references here and there throughout the rest of the book, and then magically there at the end.

The presentation is very uneven. The middle of the book is not a bad journey/adventure story, except that the hero really seems to have a knack of getting himself captured with great frequency. In fact, Morgaine really could've chosen a better native guide. The first and last two chapters, however, are terrible.

The secret of the gates, how they are used to prolong life, is of course never explained. There is some *science* behind it, and by *science* I mean *magic*. How the gates can be used to transfer consciousness is just another example of the sort of throw-everything-in-and-see-how-it-works mentality that permeates the whole novel. It's depressing to learn there were 2 or 3 more "Morgaine novels". Yuck.

But the worst part of the book is this: ludicrous misuse of the singular informal objective pronoun "thee". Does Cherryh even understand English? Obviously supposed to impart the archaic nature of Morgaine's speech, but it's used completely incorrectly as the nominative form over and over throughout the book (ever heard of "thou", Ms. Cherryh?). It's awful, and I cannot believe it made it past the editors. Cropping up as it does an average of about once per page, it's truly horrendous.

I've only ever read 2 other Cherryh books: Paladin and Hammerfall, the Dune knock-off, and they're both just as lousy (and full of plot holes you could drive a truck through) as this one. Too bad she was so prevalent in the early days of DAW - I'll probably end up with more of this kind of drek.

I love the Morgaine trilogy, but this comparatively slow-moving adventure story doesn't really compare with the high quality of the next two. It's not bad, but the style is frankly a little dry. This coupled with the book's brief length (under 200 pages) makes it almost like Hemingway tried to write a fantasy novel. But the book slowly improves over the course of several chapters, as we learn more about Vanye's culture and family, which Cherryh does explore in intense detail. Interesting, and worth reading if only because you get to read the next two, truly excellent books in this series.

This was my first Cherryh book. I read it and promptly read it again. I was flabbergasted by the power of it. I read it again. What it is that Carol Cherryh did, I am not certain. I can describe it as powerful,yes, heavy, profound, clever, astute, but I am not yet getting close. I've often thought of the role of a modern writer as the same as that of the ancient tribal mythologist, the preserver, interpreter and creator of frontal lobe symbol-stories that hold a culture of creatures such as us together, thrill us and explain our urges and dreams. This book reads like that. Joseph Campbell with his heroes and Carl Jung with his archetypes would have much to say of it. But it is also a damn good read. The style smacks slightly of the best of Tolkein with a strong dose of Old Testament, maybe. Good writing anyway. I was glad there were other "Gate" books to continue with though none whacked me in the head and heart like this one.

Of course I have gone on to all the other Cherryh books, I have a shelf that is as long as I am tall that won't contain them all. She is master of "worlds" and master of her own unique style of "steam of consciousness." She's now tops in straight S.F. as well. She's changed a lot since Ivril, but she went way back there once to do another Morgaine book, and I wouldn't be surprised if she did it again. When I was a kid, the Lone Ranger was number one, but he never made mistakes. The whole point of most of Cherryh's books are the mistakes that people make. My reader's Tee-shirt reads "Morgaine Yes' as per C.H. Cherryh." and most everything else by her too.

The Gates of Ivrel started strange. It is written from the perspective of the Hindu Culture. It is confusing with references to Hindu gods and goddesses that are bewildering to someone who is not of that culture. If you stay with the book until the 3 or 4th chapter, the story and the characters become interesting. By the end of the book you are hooked. I ended up having a deep desire to continue with the main characters in the next of the Morgaine Cycle. While the book is no epic along the line of Tolkien, it is a great read.

I purchased this book in the late mid-1980's after the fourth book in the series came out - Exile's Gate - which I had bought, knowing nothing of the author, but liking the cover to it. I wanted to start the story at the beginning and it turned out to be a good idea. On the first read, Ivrel will probably seem fairly basic, but it sets up the characters for what happens later, in Azeroth and Exile. I like to think of the first three books in the series as one whole book (and its published in an omnibus that way too) because there are some story lines that don't get resolved until Azeroth.

Ivrel starts with a shocking event: Vanye has killed his oldest brother in self-defense and his father exiles him. Vanye grew up being teased excessively/tortured by his two brothers. He is the illigitimate son of a captive - a high-born woman who was kidnapped from her clan and raped, she died soon after he was born.

Two years after his exile, Vanye is camped at a lesser Gate, and he is remembering the myths of Morgaine, the witch-woman who betrayed thousands of men into a Gate (and to their deaths, everyone believes). When he kills a deer and it stumbles into the lesser Gate and Morgaine herself rides out on her horse, he is shocked. No less than she is, for a hundred years have past since she went into the Gate (she's been in suspension), as she learns from Vanye.

He is sworn to serve her and he hates it. But she needs him to guide her through his world to achieve her mission - the destruction of the main Gate, so that none others can pass through it and warp time and space.

One of the first places they come to is his mother's people's clan - the Chyya. Here they meet his cousin Roh, a leader and close to Vanye's own age and appearance. This is one of the best and most heartbreaking parts of the book. Roh confronts Vanye several times in one evening and in the last he tells Vanye to come back to Chya when he is finished with Morgaine and her mission. He is offering a home to Vanye who never really had one.

But it is not to be. The forces that Morgaine sweeps up in her wake descend on the Chya and destroy them and a vengence-filled Roh follows Vanye and Morgaine and he meets a horrible fate. If he had died that would be one thing, but what happens to him is so much worse than that.

When I first read this as a teenager I found it hard to get passed Vanye's negative opinion of his own abilities. But I've realized in rereading the series lately, that he doesn't see himself as he is. There are many people who try to follow and help Morgaine in all four books, and they always do poorly.

Vanye is quite successful at getting her what she needs, protecting her from others, protecting others from her at moments of extreme anger, and at respecting what she is, even the part of her she rarely shows - the young, sometimes vulnerable woman, who hates that she must sometimes kill innocent people to achieve her goal. He tries to make her burdens less, and after several books she learns to trust him to do that. Personally I love Vanye, but it took me reading all the books to get there.

As a writer I consider this book an excellent template on how to write fantasy. There is not one erroneous word, or self-indulgent scene. The book is maybe 170 pages, and the complicated rituals, people, history and beliefs are so simply explained that the reader DOESN'T have to wade through pages of meaningless explanation that would drag the story down. Probably her original drafts of this novel were 3 or 4 hundred pages long, but it didn't need to be did it?

My recommendation is for new readers to READ ALL FOUR NOVELS before deciding if they like the series or not. This is the tip of the iceberg, people, you MUST read all of the books to understand where the story is going and why.

After her two "Hanan Rebellion" novels, the Morgaine trilogy, of which this is the first volume, was Cherryh's first major project. It's the story of Vanye, bastard half-brother of the heir to Morija, whom he kills in self-defense and finds himself outlawed as punishment. Now an "ilin," a warrior without a clan or anything else to protect him, he is subject to Claiming by any lord who claims to put him under obligation for the period of a year. But Vanye, barely alive on a frozen mountainside, meets Morgaine as she exits a Gate -- only a short time, subjectively, after she entered it, but more than a century has passed by Vanye's calendar. Morgaine's task, as the last survivor of a party sent out by the Science Bureau, is to close the Gates all across the universe, to prevent a time-change enacted in the ancient past from destroying the present and the future. All the story is told, though, from Vanye's POV, so it has more of magic to it than science as he tries to understand what's happening. And it's a chase story from the first page, with Morgaine and Vanye, now bound to her to what he expects to be his death, forcing their way through a series of clan-chiefdoms as they try to reach the mountain upon which stands the Master Gate. Honor is a major force in this world and Vanye suffers greatly because of it, trying to balance the needs and demands of his "liyo," Morgaine, his remaining half-brother, whom he crippled, and his cousin, lord of another territory nearby. Even this early in her career, Cherryh was a master at spinning a magical narrative and dialogue, and you will want to have the other two volumes of the trilogy close to hand before you finish this one.