Customer Reviews

Past Imperative (Round One of The Great Game)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is volume 1 of "The Great Game." I read the whole series and liked it tremendously, though as an American I wasn't very familiar with the British imperial culture that makes up so much of the books. (Edward Exeter grew up as the son of a British administrator living overseas, and the magical world he visits has a similar colonial outpost of Brits, plus in many ways is like India.) I didn't really get it entirely. Then, just recently, I read Rudyard Kipling's novel "Kim" for the first time, and it all made sense. "The Great Game" is how Rudyard Kipling (and maybe others) referred to espionage in the service of the British administration in England. Like the character of Kim, Edward Exeter is an Englishman who sympathizes completely with the local population, and wanders among them disguised as a holy man. I now view Past Imperative and the following two books as sort of a really wacky and cool tribute to Kim, though I don't know if it was meant that way. I strongly recommend that you read both the series and Kim (which is an outstanding book in its own right).

First the bitter, then the sweet.

Only madness could have driven Dave Duncan to choose the opening he did. Three out of five opening chapters are told from the perspective of characters that turn out to be either very minor or never show up again. I had to keep reading the back of the book to remember where the story was actually going. By the time the reader figures out who the protagonists are, the urge to throw the book in the fire has already come upon her.

This is unfortunate, because after a while, the book picks up pace, even if it never really escapes the lethargy and fogginess of those early chapters. They make it difficult to get too invested in the characters, because Duncan has introduced them at a distance--through the eyes of others.

He also introduces far too many characters onto the stage to really keep them straight. I wasn't shedding any tears over any deaths, and wasn't shocked except once. And in a 450 page book, well, Robin Hobb would have had me bawling.

The truth is that maybe none of the aforementioned problems would be that serious were it not for one overarching problem. The pacing is off. By the time you feel the story is really starting, you're almost at the end of the book. Now, it's a trilogy, so a certain amount of that kind of feeling is fair. But not quite to this extent.

The transitions between Twentieth Century Earth and the fantasy world slow everything down. I admit that I was far more interested in the chapters on Nextdoor than I was about Earth. Moreover, in some respects, the Earth world seemed more foreign. Duncan tries to get across the naive view of warfare pre World War One. And he captures it while leaving us unable to really relate to it emotionally.

We can feel the anxiety of Eleal on her foreign world. Those emotions ring true for us. Edward's obsession with fighting Germany while he's being pursued for murder just doesn't feel realistic, whether it is or not.

In the end, I'm not sure people would be dying to read the sequel. As for myself, I'm curious about his deities and the magic system that he put into place. That's fun for me, but I prefer to read a book for reasons other than it concept and mechanics.

On the whole, it was an interesting read with likable characters and a dry Brit wit. The writing is also crisp and clean, the setting interesting, and I even marked one page of description that is particularly vivid. It's good solid fantasy with a well-envisioned magic system. Insofar as it's an epic, it's off to a sluggish start. Insofar as it's a concept story, it's dazzling. The author is obviously learned and talented.

Yet another worlds-encompassing work from David Duncan, "Past Imperative" is a great read. Pairing World War I England with an alternate universe, Duncan spins an involving tale that easily suspends disbelief.

Choosing subjects wisely, Duncan manages to fill the reader's mind full of engrossing detail in fewer words than one would think possible. Similarly, the characters are fleshed from the inside out and the reader is left with his own understanding of who each character is.

Fans of Duncan's earlier work will recognize the trademark world scope of his writing. The story takes place not in a setting, but in a world.

In "The Great Game", Duncan reveals some interesting thoughts about human nature, society, and our faith. All of these interesting things occur while you enjoy a great story.

This is the kind of book that makes you want to read more, both of the trilogy itself and of the author. The story was a bit confusing in the beginning but I soon became riveted to my comfy reading chair and couldn't put the book down. The people in the book are believable and the story is great and colorful. I really look forward to reading more of the Deities of the Vales and beyond.

Good story teller with an intriguing plot. I look forward to learning more about how everything ties together. The future books in this series should be even better

Really loved this, and its sequel. Enjoyable for anyone, but especially lovely for people who love Edwardian fantasy---A Secret Garden, Kim, Puck of Pook's Hill, Peter Pan, Wind in the Willows, any honourable British schoolboy hero of fiction, Rider Haggard.... Anyway. There are several science fiction/fantasy writers, including Mercedes Lackey and Shirley Rousseu Murphy, & murder myster writer Elizabeth Peters, who take full advantage of this background, but Duncan strikes me as exceptional. Not everybody can write a followup to Kipling, but these books could almost be sequels to Puck of Pook's Hill.

This is an unconventional and imaginative fantasy/parallel world series. Duncan develops a parallel Earth with rather different astronomy, geography, and history. Some forms of magic allow talented individuals to move back and forth from our Earth to the Earth of the Vales, the society next door. The key feature is that strangers, people from our Earth on Valia or Valians in our universe, can acquire substantial magic powers through the accumulation of 'mana' stemming from acts of worship or sacrifice by the natives of that world. On Valia, this results in a society dominated by 'strangers' who have set themselves up as deities. The Great Game series describes a complex challenge to one of these deities in the form of the actions of the Earth born protagonist of this series, an idealistic Edwardian youth. Duncan's parallel universe is constructed well and his writing is solid. In several of his books, he has dealt with issues of duty and sacrifice, and this is no exception. There is a particularly nice use of the confrontation of youthful Edwardian idealism with harsh political realities. The plotting is clever as well, making creative use not only of the magical themes but also of the great influenza pandemic of 1917-18.

Duncan creates a great new parallel world, reminiscent of Mythago Wood or the Little Country (both great books). The characters are intelligent and compelling...for the first book at least.

Unfortunately, by the end of the series, the characters act in increasingly bizarre ways, plotlines are completely dropped and forgotten, and the whole story is wrapped in a completely unsatisfying and boilerplate way.

Earlier this week, a fire broke out near where I live. So, being a volunteer for the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, I was asked to help out the Red Cross by providing communication between a shelter and the Red Cross headquarters. However, I was assigned the shift from midnight to 6. I've done this sort of thing before and I knew it was going to be slow. So, I grabbed a book at random. Obviously, it was "Past Imperative". After the first few chapters, I was worried, because the book didn't seem like something I'd be interested in and it was moving pretty slow. Nevertheless, I kept reading because I didn't have anything better to do. By the end of the second night shift, I had about 1/4 of the book left to read. Instead of going home and sleeping, I went home and finished the book. In short, it's a great book if you can make it past the beginning. Sorry there are no paragraph breaks in this review, but my web browser is very old.

What a strange book! The concepts are so completely strange when you first start to read - the Five Great Gods?!? But it was a wonderful read, and I give it a two thumbs up. Besides, Duncan writes better than I do. (Ha-Ha.)