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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Blood, death, starvation, conspiracy and war, August 10, 2005
This is the second book of what Bakker envisions will be the first of two consecutive trilogies in his fictional world of Earwa; the first was also in the 500-600 page range, so know what you're getting into.
The set-up is a more complex rendition of standard fantasy fiction fare: Two thousand years ago the ultimate evil, Mog-Pharau the No-God, walked the earth and created an Apocalypse that halted only because of the power of Seswatha the sorcerer and Anasurimbor Celmonas, wielder of a great talisman, the Heron Spear.
Presently, the Apocalypse is a distant memory and the secret cabal of magi (The Consult) who plot the return of the No-God and use the demonically lustful skin-spies as soldiers, is a child's ghost story to all people except the Mandate Schoolmen -- a sorcerous group who are the heirs to Seswatha. The "schools" of sorcery are divided such that the Mandate possesses sorcerous knowledge that the other schools seek, but which only the Mandate can be trusted to use.
The lands themselves are divided into two main religious groups, the polytheistic Inrithri and the monotheistic Fanim, whose names derive from their prophets. The Inrithri beliefs are a polyglot of Muslim, Catholic, Hindu and even some Judaic lore. The Fanim are essentially unexplained, but most closely resemble Crusades-era Muslims. The Inrithri "pope" calls for a holy war against the Fanim, and that war is the near-exclusive backdrop of this book.
Bakker is a philosophy doctoral candidate, and it shows. He also ruminates about religion. The semi-subversive theological question Bakker asks in this series is: what would have happened if an impure Jesus (put aside the potential contradiction of that characterization) hijacked the Crusades?
Bakker peoples the story with innumerable names, the vast majority of which mean nothing. Only about four primary characters are ultimately important: Achamian the Mandate Schoolman who worries that the Consult has returned and the Second Apocalypse is nigh; Esmenet, the whore who is the Mary Magdaleine figure of the series; Cnaiur the savage, who is filled with self-hatred and seeks to destroy the man who destroyed him; and Anasurimbor Kellhus, the titular Prince of Nothing -- a Jesus figure (33 years old, bearded, prophet, origins mysterious, from a faraway land, searching for his father, with the power of persuasion through his voice and sermons), who is as much anti-Jesus as Messiah, whose destiny and desires remain somewhat mysterious throughout and whom Achamian believes is both the Harbinger of the Second Apocalypse and humanity's potential savior.
How Kellhus manipulates the holy war, and how others are in turn manipulated by events they have no knowledge of, is the main plotline as the holy war moves closer to its destination, the holy city of Shimeh.
Bakker recounts a lot of the story as a history (battles and other events), leaves Achamian for about 100 pages at a critical point, and concentrates entirely too much on the viewpoint of Esmenet. The story is full of death, blood, famine, thirst, plague, torture and the interwoven themes of sex-as-love, lust for power with sexual manifestations, sex-as control, sex-as-torture, sex-as-physical or emotional dominance, sex-as-identity. Get the picture?
Overall, the book is interesting, disturbing, occasionally challenging, and ultimately nowhere near as good as either the first entry (The Darkness That Comes Before) or the much better Malazan Book of the Fallen series by another Canadian, Steven Erikson.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
strong three, improves on first though a few flaws, August 15, 2005
The Warrior Prophet picks up from The Prince of Nothing (which must be read first) and mostly improves on that first book, which in itself was a solid read. Where Prince of Nothing suffered from lengthy exposition, now that the basic storyline and world have been set, Baakker can focus on moving things along more quickly, if that can be said about a 600 plus page book. Though the book could be cut by a hundred plus pages, that's a critique that can be made about almost any recent fantasy (heavy sigh) and so can be relegated to the minor "I've grown resigned to this" sort of thing. Despite some padding, the book moves along fluidly and at a good pace for the most part, with only a few lagging areas. Part of the reason for the better pace is that while in book one the Holy War (with clear connections to the Crusades) has to be laboriously prepared, here the War is literally on the march, so while there are still scenes dealing with politics, religion, philosophy, and other non-battle elements, because the army can't just camp out for months on end to deal with these things, Bakker has to settle them quickly or on the run. This self-limiting facet of the plot therefore helps quite a bit. The battles themselves are well-done, though I confess I tend to glaze over such things a bit the second or third time around.
The book also improves on Prince of Nothing in that there is left shifting among multiple characters and setting. This was less a problem of complexity than of emotional impact in book one--the constant shifting among so many characters diluted any single character's impact--so while Prophet may be equally complex in plot, the reader cares more about how that plot affects the characters thanks to the welcome sharpening of focus. Characters from book one aren't simply dropped; we just don't spend as much time with some of them.
The ones we do spend time with vary in their degree of interest and depth. As in book one, the most compelling character remains the sorcerer Achamian as we see him wrestle with a variety of issues, among them: his nightly dreams of the first apocalypse, his fear that Kellhus is the harbinger of the second one conflicting with his hope that perhaps Kellhus is more, his love for the whore Esmenet, his tattered relationships with former pupils who consider him a blasphemer. These don't even include his time being tortured or his attempts to track down the "skin-spies" of the Consult. The story is always strongest when it focuses on Achamian, and luckily it does so for most of it.
Unfortunately, however, that means that it does move away from him and it is in these moments that the book tend to lag a bit. None of the other characters are of as much interest. Kellhus, who is the second point of major focus, lacks the depth and conflict of Achamian. He is portrayed as just too good at everything. We're constantly told that when Achamian teaches him math, Kellhus stuns him with how he goes beyond the historical math geniuses. Then we're told the same with regard to philosophy. And then . . . And then . . . I kept waiting for someone to comment on how he cooked the best goat and mended breeches best and so on. Not only was this sort of thing repetitive, but it robbed Kellhus of a sense of humanity (needed even if characters aren't necessarily human) as well as robbing the book of some suspense as one never doubts that Kellhus will achieve what he sets out to. There are a few moments of internal conflict but they are grossly outweighed.
The women characters don't particularly stand out, nor do the other noble characters. Cnaur is mostly a one-note character who doesn't grow all that much. Other characters flash some potential, such as the leader of the Spires (a rival school of magic to Achamian's) but are usually cut away from too quickly.
Finally, Bakker needed to reset some of his character inter-relations and develop them a bit more here as some major plot movement of the latter half of the book revolves around those relationships--ones we haven't seen for about 500 or so pages back to the previous book.
Despite these flaws, Prophet is an enjoyable read. As mentioned, the plot moves quickly and at a good pace despite its 600 pages and the philosophical discussions, rather than slow the pace, complement the more militaristic "action" scenes nicely. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they were my favorite parts, making Prophet not simply enjoyable but thoughtful as well, something that can be said all too rarely about much recent fantasy. While I still wouldn't rank it at the top or in line with Erikson's Malazan series of Martin's soon to be completed trilogy, it is different enough and intelligent enough to recommend strongly if not wildly enthusiastically. Though if book three improves as much on Prophet as Prophet did on book two, that may change.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dissapointing Sequel to an excellent start, September 1, 2006
Let me preface this review by saying - 1) I loved the first book in the series, gave it five stars and thought it was not only well written but quite original, with new and complex characters and themes and 2) I will be reading the next book in the series. That said, the best I can say of this installment is that it was inconsistent. Unfortunately I found a great deal of it repetitive and boring. I guess my best analogy is that Bakker is like the lawyer who cleverly forces the witness into a damning admission and instead of saying "Your honor the prosecution rests," continues questioning to the point where the jury is unimpressed and the witness has been able to repair his credibility. Bakker seems intent on beating us about the face and neck with the characters' flaws, gives them little in the way of redeeming qualities and does all this while dragging us slogging through a depressing and squalid environment. His writing skill is such that I felt at the end that I had been dragged through the desert with the characters, but unfortunately I was also fed up with them. How many times, in how many ways, do I need to be reminded of the characteristics of a character before he thinks I get it? I also believe that because so much was made of their negative characteristics, characters who in the first book were real and complex became simple and one-dimensional. Maybe it was poorly edited, but in my view this second installment was too long and although it had its moments, in the end it flattened out what was a complex world and a set of complex characters.
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by R. Scott Bakker
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