Customer Reviews

Paladins (The Paladin)

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

 

 

Joel Rosenberg is a master of low fantasy, a genre where magic doesn't solve all your problems, battle is deadly and our heroes only human, after all. This kind of gritty writing style is very realistic, but not as escapist as many prefer in their fantasy. Be warned!

Paladins is a departure from Rosenberg's popular series, "Guardians of the Flame". It is set in a 17th century world where magic is real and history changed when Mordred the Great defeated King Arthur the Tyrant, thus changing English history considerably. All this is just a teaser, however, that bears little impact on the story a thousand years later and is really just backdrop for the main characters, knights of the order that served Mordred. Armed with sentient magical blades, they turned England into the world power it was in the 17th century, competing with the Dar al-Islam and the Holy Roman Empire. With the great wizards dying out in the last great war of magic, the art of making new swords was lost - or was it? A new sword turns up in the hands of a small fisherman, a sword that can only be a few years old, at most.

As always, Rosenberg's characters are fully fleshed out characters with human desires, weaknesses and doubts. They come alive on the pages in his masterful prose. However, it is hard for any hero to stand up under such a microscope, and it is hard to truly sympathize with the characters.

My main complaint with the book is that many issues are left unresolved at the end; the young knight errant Niko still lives in fear that his pagan beliefs will be uncovered by the other knights, and his childhood love interest remains behind in his homeland with barely a mention, despite his burning desire not to see her marry his rich local rival. The Dar al-Islam may have the upper hand for a while, and it is obvious that the knights as an order are floundering, with the American colonies beginning to seek independence. All these tangled threads pave the way for an obvious sequel, but readers interested in a standalone book may find the ending unsatisfying.

As always with Rosenberg, readers who want a little more realism in their fantasy will love his work, while those who just want to have fun will end up disappointed.

I'm about 2/3rd of the way through Paladins and this review does not give away any plot material.

I've read all the "Guardian of the Flame" series, and while I always enjoyed them, I thought that the writing style and complexity were for a younger audience while the content was for a more mature audience (such as what really happens to a person's body when they die ... versus the sanitized description most novelists give).

With "Paladins", Joel Rosenberg has married a writing style and complexity for adults with content for a more mature audience. "Paladins" takes a major step closer the "Tom Clancy" style of complexity within a novel.

After he had overthrown his uncle, Arthur the Tyrant, Mordred the Great's armies had united Britain and gradually conquered the western world. Centuries later, the Kingdom (England?) has expanded through western Europe. Only the diminished Empire of Byzantium, and the powerful Caliphanate remain unconquered. But evil is not always associated with a state. And the Kingdom's powerful Knights of the Order of Crown, Shield, and Dragon exist to defend Mordred's Pendragon kingdom from all enemies--including supernatural enemies.

Order Knights Gray and Bear recruit disgraced ex-Knight Cully to help them deal with a dangerous discovery--a new magical sword has been discovered. These magical swords are the core of the Knight's power; in the wrong hands, they could do horrible damage. Together with fisherman Niko, Cully and the others thrash around the Mediterranean, trying to provoke whoever is responsible for creating these new swords into a response.

Meanwhile, Kingdom Admiral DuPay plots for the war he knows will eventually pit the Kingdom against the Caliphanate. When the Caliphanate's representatives tell him that they are equally concerned about the outbreak of evil magic, he doesn't know whether to believe them--but he isn't afraid to take whatever chances he needs to if it will help the Kingdom.

Author Joel Rosenberg creates an intriguing alternate history world--one where magic works, where an Anglican version of protestantism developed independently of Henry VIII (who never lived because there was never a Norman conquest), and where gunpowder has never replaced traditional weapons of war. His morally conflicted Gray is a powerful and compelling character, while Niko gives the reader someone young and heroic, yet imperfect, to identify with.

After a strong opening, though, much of the book seemed spent by our heros (and DuPay) wandering around thinking, talking with each other, and not really doing much. In addition, possibly because PALADINS is the first book in a series, a number of loose ends remained--certainly the shadow creatures seemed to be stuck in rather than integral to the plot.

Rosenberg is adept at manipulating reader emotions. When he lets himself go, as he does at the beginning and end of this story, he creates superior fantasy. But too much of this book was sailing around, going nowhere. I'll look forward to seeing where he takes this series, but for me, PALADINS fell short of its potential.

There's a good story, characters that have more than one side to them, and best of all, it has an ending. Yes, this is a book in a series that you could pick up, read, enjoy, and not feel compelled to read the next one to find out what happens. While there are some loose ends (not wanting to spoil anything, it *is* a series), the book is written so that those ends don't need your reading to get wrapped up.

Did I mention that he didn't explain *everything*? For me, that's a plus. He may explain it in later volumes, or maybe I can just use my imagination about what drove Arthur to start killing babies...

It's a young-man-coming-of-age story, historical fiction, naval fiction (as someone pointed out, we get to see O'Brien's Aubrey after he's been forced into a desk job) and parallel universe all thrown in one.

The characters and the plot of this book were fairly interesting, so I finished it. But it was a wade through the cluttered writing, which would have benefited greatly from a thorough edit. Most of the text consists of the interior reflections of various characters giving far, far too much unnecessary and irrelevant detail. This is written in rambling, complex sentences which frequently end up not making grammatical sense (often because the author has inexplicably included a "not" which is not logically required). As a former technical writer, I'm surprised that former technical writer Rosenberg did this; as a former book editor, I'm surprised that his editor let him. Perhaps they were both under time pressure.

An annoying side effect of this overdone interior-monologue technique of exposition is that the dialogue between characters is often broken up - two consecutive sentences of dialogue can have a page or more of interior monologue between and you have to flip back to see what question the second character is answering. Sometimes the answers don't match the questions very well, and several times Rosenberg makes out that the characters understand each other so well that the second character answers what the first one was thinking instead of what he said. How often does this happen in real life?

A good setting, reasonable characters, I found the plot fairly engaging - but could have been much better written.

Okay, while this is a well written book, I did not like all of the Christian elements of it. I understand it is part of the story, but it just took me out of it.

If you are Christian or enjoying reading about their faith, I say pick it up, because the writing of Joel Rosenberg is always superb.

I read different mediums and genres for distinctly different reasons. I have typically read fantasy for pure escape, yet what piques my interest about Rosenberg's stylistic evolution is that, for me, it moves well beyond the genre's norm. Whereas I can for example find a youthfully narcissistic escape in the bent of Zelazny's Amber series (and I do!), or perhaps a suffering hero's escape in Jordan's Wheel of Time series -- both of which contain not entirely unsophisticated characters but definitely ones written with enough characteralogical simplicity that I can easily slip into them -- Rosenberg has come to write characters that are truly complex, unique and psychologically gritty like the worlds he creates. Thus they are to me less comfortable in the escapist sense. That said, if all he did was write increasingly complex characters, I would indeed wander off to read my U.S. News and World Report as the real world is already filled with this complexity. But he has become increasingly skilled at using these characters to intelligently explore fascinating psychological contrasts in particular and the interaction of vastly differing philosophies, value systems and worldviews in general, all within the framework of a well crafted adventure. Thus I may not be able to easily identify with (and slip into) his characters in Paladins, but I still find the story stimulating despite the loss (at least for me) of the usual escape mechanism because I have always found myself to crave greater perspective, and Rosenberg certainly explores human experience and provides new perspective against it even if he does so from a fantastical place.

I found Paladins to be valuable in this sense and I look forward to where he takes the series.

I found this to be a great read, as is usually my experience with a Rosenberg novel. The concept of the 'live' swords is not fleshed out in minute detail, which allows the reader to fill in details from imagination. A similar treatment is used for the "alternate history" aspects of the story. I found myself stopping here and there while reading to wonder what bit of real-world research had just been alluded to.

Notwithstanding those comments, the concepts are not the primary attraction for me. As is usual with a Rosenberg novel, the characters drive the narrative, with viewpoint switching from one to another as the story is developed. Paladins does not disappoint the long time reader in this aspect. And while the priestlike Order Knight characters are unlike any others in Mr. Rosenberg's work, I didn't find them to be either too alien or unsympathetic. The depictions of retired sea-captain Admiral DuPuy alone are worth the purchase price.

Finally, I must disagree with the reviewer who wanted Mr. Rosenberg to immediately return to his older series, perhaps meaning the "Guardians of the Flame." While I've read that there is another book or two planned for the 'Guardians' and would delight in ordering them as soon as they were announced, the quality of this work is rock solid and well worth following.

I have read several of J.R.'s books with satisfaction. This book is much more ponderous than anything I have read by him to date. The book attempts to be the light hearted adventure of his previous series (Guardians of the Flame) but falls way short. The basic story and premise are interesting, but the story itself is lackadaisically written requiring me to make a concerted effort to finish the book. It feels as though the characters are going in circles and the story randomly jumps from one character to the other, making it very tiresome to read. Typically I would rate Rosenberg's work as B to B+, this one is a D-.

I rarely don't finish a book that I paid good money for. I tried really hard with Paladins, slogging on well after I felt like quitting, but in the end I just couldn't take it. It just inches along at a terribly slow pace, the characters meandering around, crossing and recrossing their own paths without apparently making any headway or having much of anything interesting happen. Rosenberg keeps introducing pointless and uninteresting subplots and characters all over the place even as the overarching plot goes nowhere, and the whole thing steadily devolves into a confusing mess. Then suddenly the mystery they were trying to uncover is explained by a highly convenient villain who pops out of nowhere. The reveal was so random and underwhelming that I finally quit reading right then, at what was supposed to be right before the climax of the novel.
What can I say? Don't bother.