Bookchats on Fantasy: A Look into Garth Nix's Abhorsen Series

Welcome to bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us, this time we will take a little trip into the fantasy genre. 

Garth Nix is an Australian fantasy writer, author of several different series targeted to young adult readers and other works for adults and teenagers alike. Garth Nix’s Seventh Tower series was one I read in Middle School, and I adored it as an exciting, fast-paced story, and so when a close friend from High School bought the original Old Kingdom Trilogy as a present for me back in 2011, I bought it and read the whole thing in a week or two. The Old Kingdom Series became one of a number of fantasy series I picked up after my Freshman Year in college, where, after a 5 year period of reading almost nothing but dense and impressively literary/historically important texts, I dived back into fantasy and children’s literature headfirst, reconnecting to the types of stories that brought me into reading as a small child. The original trilogy, as well the collection of short stories with a teaser for the trilogy's continuation published a few years later, established Garth Nix for me, as one of those criminally underrated fantasy writers.

Nix’s imagination, suspenseful intrigue, and his ability to craft unusual-yet-not-bizarre-or-edgy, high fantasy settings established the not very famous writer in my fantasy-reading pantheon. I always regarded Nix as on the pulpier side of the genre, and I wouldn’t argue the original Old Kingdom trilogy deserves great laurels for beautifully crafted and carefully constructed writing. Yet, in all his earlier books Nix brought a simple but tremendously effective ability at vivid characterization alongside a thrilling fast-paced, swashbuckling adventure. The unexpected happened without feeling trite, and the world he created, with necromancy at the center, was fascinating. Nix creates an entire detailed and original system of necromancy consisting of nine gates to the [final] afterlife, magical bells sending dead back past said gates, after which the river of death grew gradually more and more powerful, culminating in the final gate, a beautiful starry sky that if watched too long, causes anyone to desire to float through it and leave the world behind. The Abhorsen (a powerful, unique semi-divine bloodline tasked with maintaining the boundaries between life and death), and the whole duality between “free magic” and the Charter (“charter magic”), the infinitely complex, autonomous system governing most magic, was all so interesting that the series left me thoroughly addicted. The Creature in the Case, a 2005 short story, left me on the edge of my seat anxiously wishing to read the continuation hinted at by the ending.

Garth Nix though, appears to have lost interest in the series around that point, as Clariel, an unasked for prequel about Chlorr of the Mask, who was the illusory number 2 baddie in the later two books of the original trilogy, came out a full ten years later, and Goldenhand, the sequel suggested by The Creature in the Case finally came out in 2016, a full four years after I had read the original books, and eleven years after the story that set it up. I caught a cold back in mid-July (which cleared up without any COVID19 symptoms and I got my first Moderna shot July 25th), but for two days I was feeling particularly poor. I took a little time off work; the kids were at school, my fiancé was at work, and so I was alone for two days and feeling generally anxious about it all, COVID or not (I also had a  kidney infection and was on antibiotics at the same time), so I turned to books and ended up buying both Clariel and Goldenhand for Kindle and reading them on the family IPad over the course of two days, heavy with anticipation at returning to the series after meaning to for years. Perhaps I had, over the course of the long wait, built my expectations too high, or possibly been too kind to the original series to start with (I am not particularly more picky or snotty than I was ten years ago, if anything, my standards are probably lower), but the general underlying reaction I had to both books throughout reading them was: disappointment; the two novels were so underwhelming it was disappointing.

Both novels are written so half-heartedly, as Nix’s normally furious pace of plot development and adventure stumbles and becomes simply rushed (particularly in Goldenhand). I had the recurring sense that the books felt like a disinterested author going through the motions for a quick buck, with minimal editing to boot. I mentioned before that I wouldn’t hand Garth Nix awards for excellent prose, but the writing in the last two entries of the Old Kingdom series is sloppy and downright unprofessional at times. Because I was reading on the Kindle Cloud reader, and on an IPad, I didn’t put in my typical sticky-notes and did not read the books setting out to review them, so I don’t have exact examples or page numbers, but there various grammatical and stylistic mistakes littering the books. For instance, a sentence would go something like “The day was hot, but it was sunny” where using “but” makes no sense in context, as well as a number of stylistically meaningless and unnecessary incomplete sentences.

At other times scenes drag on too long, extraneous details are repeated excessively, and at the beginnings of both books the reader is subjected to an entirely unnecessary and heavy-handed narrator giving introductions to basic concepts of the story and reintroducing characters. “Lireal looked at her Golden hand, made of millions of the tiny symbols that represented the Charter, constructed to replace the hand she lost to Orannis the Destroyer. The brilliant crafter was none other than her own nephew Sam, son of King Touchstone and the current Abhorsen Sabriel, though it still felt strange to call him her nephew, after she had just discovered her older sister was 20 years her senior and the Abhorsen, and she herself both the Abhorsen-in-waiting and a Remembrancer.” This is not a literal quote and I did write it facetiously, but it is not at all far off from the off-putting, lazy, explanatory narration in both books, wherever Nix seems afraid that readers’ might be as rusty as he must have been when returning to the series for the first time in ten years. A key ability in fantasy is knowing when not to explain stuff, and how to introduce new topics you explain, something the inventive worlds and plots of the early books did well, but which in the latest entries Nix felt he couldn’t risk readers (or alienate new readers) being confused by anything and so matter-of-fact transmitted chunks of background information with zero finesse.

Having picked at the general problems both books have in common, I want to give each book its due and address the underwhelming qualities of each book as a story.

Clariel

I wish to express one thing before I begin any discussion of this book, which is that I don’t think it should have been written. I was hugely disappointed when I initially read Nix was returning to the Old Kingdom series after nearly a decade hiatus...to write a backstory about Chlorr of the Mask, the assistant antagonist from Lireal and Abhorsen. Considering the main threat in both books is from the sealed Destroyer, Orranis, and they serve to flesh out the origins of the Charter and fantasy world of the series, this makes Chlorr more of an assistant to the assistant antagonist, given that Orranis’s main servant is a different necromancer named Hedge. This assistant-assistant antagonist gets one-shotted by Sabriel in Lirael (the middle book of the trilogy) and resurrected again in the last by the main assistant antagonist, the aforementioned Hedge. Imagine if, in 1997, after a decade hiatus from Star Wars, George Lucas announced he was finally releasing a continuation of the story in cinema, and...it was about Darth Vader’s Fleet Admiral, Admiral Piett. That was essentially my reaction, not least because I didn’t find Chlorr to be that interesting as a character. She was Kerrigor-lite (the terrifying villain of the first book of the series), and while mysterious, with hints of her being a past Abhorsen, she wasn’t really interesting and her presence in the books and importance to the main conflict was rather minimal. Hedge, the main assistant to Orranis, was far more unique and interesting, and his backstory was more intriguing. So the fact that Nix decided to restart the series with the backstory to this character, was baffling and disheartening.

The book doesn’t live up to the challenge in any number of ways. The entire potential for it to be a poignant gut-punch was kinda ruined by how Garth Nix advertised it openly from the start as a prequel about Chlorr, and hinted that it provided essential backstory to the continuation of the main storyline from the earlier novels, which it simply doesn’t. Even with Chlorr, (spoiler, back again for some reason as the main villain in Goldenhand, like Nix was really out of plot ideas for the series), Clariel has absolutely no pertinent plot relation to the latter book, save as superfluous detail on a few things explained sufficiently in the book anyway; in fact Chlorr’s book reveal in Goldenhand was better and more interesting without reading Clariel, because it has both shock value and adds to the mystery. The book’s case was not helped by Nix’s plotting decisions. Chlorr of the Mask had been repeatedly hinted to be an Abhorsen, and instead Garth Nix makes her the daughter of the most skilled Goldsmith in the Kingdom, granddaughter of the Abhorsen, and a distant cousin of the King. Yes. A sufficiently complicated set up, made more complicated by the fact the King is old and depressed, has no living children, only one grandchild, (who disappeared some ten years before) and has completely withdrawn from governing affairs. This has allowed the balkanization of state power between the guilds and other moneyed interests in a fattened, rich, and overpopulated Kingdom at the height of its prosperity and the end of a long era of stability. Perhaps Nix wanted most to show us this vision of the oft-hinted at heyday of his world, though even in this period, knowledge of charter magic has declined concurrently with prosperity and stability, and many of the greatest ancient techniques for magic have already been lost.

The one set-up I thought could save this book, initially, was a story about an Abhorsen, more powerful than most that came before and after her, who is gradually corrupted by the power of her office. The series establishes the Abhorsen as unique, a bloodline intertwined with one of the demigods that created the Charter to bind rampant and destructive free magic and allow life to flourish. The Abhorsen has unique powers to battle death, the ability to go far into the realms of death freely, immense magical power, control over and resistance to the fearsome bells of necromancy, and carefully preserved ancient knowledge available to no one else. In the first books of the series, the Abhorsen is practically a demigod to the common people themselves. So, given the hints that Chlorr had been an Abhorsen, I was expecting a story about the slow corruption of power, maybe someone who had responsibilities they didn’t wish for foisted on them, and then slowly grew more and more afraid of Death as they fought the dead and other necromancers—stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back into you, to paraphrase Nietzsche's aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil.

Instead, we get a complicated mishmash, a protagonist who is completely inept at charter magic, knows nothing of the lore or knowledge of the world’s magic, and who simply wants to be a hunter, managing a forest she grew up on by the edges of the kingdom. Clariel is a country girl forced to move to the capital city and seat of power by her mother’s ambition to surpass the ancients in her goldsmithing. The main character is somewhat tragic, in that she has no agency and the whole plot progresses because no one allows her to make decisions for herself, and she shunts between being used by one group or the other for some purpose or another. The plot is poignant in its own way, but it felt a bit like being bounced around like a pinball. The novel asks us to believe that Clariel is both a rational thinker who learns quickly and knows some caution, and yet continues to rush head first into each development with little thought, a useful pawn for all those around her, seemingly never learning from the experience. She is a “berserker” who has a fierce anger problem in her (a form of free magic apparently), but no talent with Charter magic. A loner who is also asexual, Clariel spends the novel trying to escape from various bonds, but never seems to get anywhere, partly because she never seems to have a back-up plan or any sense of suspicion. I always found it odd how practical she is at making excuses not just to run away, how she wants to plan for money, disguises, etc, and when she does move, takes crazy action and fails to account for anything.

The plot is not so much the issue in Clariel though as the relative tedium. Rather than breathless and exciting, the plot becomes rushed. Perhaps the most disappointing element is the lack of any surprises; all the characters are exactly what they seem to be, except for Clariel’s mother, whose character is a series of contradictions (not interested in politics, but interested in putting her daughter on the throne and plotting for power despite being a fanatic who spends all their time crafting), right down to an explosive dinner scene that jumps out of nowhere. You have antagonists like Governor and Goldsmith Guildmaster Gilp, who seems to be another over-confident useful fool hungry to take over the kingdom, and is. Clariel suffers from a lack of interesting characters. Belatiel, the young member of the Abhorsen family destined to take on the role in the future, gets almost no page time for how important a role he plays in the story, and his almost immediate infatuation with Clariel is forced and heavy-handed. At its heart the book is all Clariel, and she is interesting, but not up to the job of carrying an entire novel.

Goldenhand

Goldenhand is the weaker of the two novels, despite being the novel I most desperately wanted upon reading the thrilling short story, The Creature in the Case. That short story saw Nicholas Sayre kidnapped and used to resurrect a free magic creature known as a hrule (another interesting, horrific monster) far south of the Wall, in the southern country where magic doesn’t exist and the hrule by all rights shouldn’t be able to function. Only Sayre’s blood is too powerful and it makes the creature go on a rampage. At the end he sends the beast into a stupor at the foot of the wall dividing the two countries, overfeeding it his too-potent blood until the creature collapses into a food coma of sorts. But not before it says, cryptically, that he is great, and questions why he wears flesh when he should be free and be so much more. This tied closely to the last two books of the original trilogy, wherein Nick Sayre was inhabited by a fragment of Orannis, the destroyer and greatest of the Eight Bright Shiners (the highest class of Free Magic Creatures, whose other members created the Charter and bound Orannis). This left his body heavily saturated with powerful free magic (antithetic to life), and finally, he died, only for another of the 8 Bright Shiners, Kibeth, to send him back into life again and baptize him with a charter mark, making him part of the Charter itself. Kibeth, having taken the killing blow to seal Orranis, had said her farewells to Lireal, and left the world to “wander the walls between life and death.” I know, that’s all a mouthful of convoluted plot information that is meaningless to anyone who hasn’t read the series (in which case I wonder why they would be reading a long criticism of the 4th and 5th books in the series), but there is no way for me to express my principle criticism without this background.

So, the short story sets up a very interesting story. To me it seemed no question that the short story was setting up a novel new story arc for a continuation to the Abhorsen trilogy. Nick seemed to have taken the place of Kibeth, (who had left the physical world) and become something akin to one of the Eight Bright Shiners, the demi-god like creatures who are by far the most powerful of the beings who inhabit the Abhorsen world, and who again, created the Charter system that largely regulates magic and keeps it from interfering with the natural order in ways that are not conductive to life. The idea fascinated me as it naturally continued the progression of earlier stories, which both featured protagonists discovering new powers and new destinies in that most basic of fantasy archetypal tropes. What the Sayre story seemed to build up also upped the ante on that formula and added some additional layers of complexity, given Nick Sayre wouldn’t be fitting into any pre-existing role like the Abhorsen who regulates the boundaries of death, or any of the other characters in past books. He would have to find his identity and fight against the temptations to abandon his humanity in favor of power and primeval freedom, while also dealing with the anxieties and suspicions of those who view him as a dangerous irregularity.

Goldenhand initially follows those expectations at least with regards to Nick, before abruptly lopping off any drama, mystery or complexity with his character arc by having the mystical researchers who also have visions of the future, the clayr (another part of the Charter and another one of the Bright Shiners interwoven with human bloodlines), briskly declare that Nick is akin to a living Charter Stone (large stones set through the Old Kingdom that serve as pinions for the Charter system and both absorb and redirect magic to keep the charter system running, almost like modems and cellphone towers), not dangerous, and an academic intrigue nothing more. That provides some convenient and all too obvious application later in the novel, and ties up the Nick Sayre mystery and provides him with minimal story development afterwards. Nix though, from the beginning begins building up a main conflict elsewhere, and lord, is it dreary and boring. Nix brings Clariel, Chlorr of the Mask, back again to serve as antagonist.

Chlorr, whose soul is still tethered to her physical remains hidden in the void area (which lacks even oxygen, and magic doesn’t exist), now returns purely as a creature of pure magic and untethered to any physical form, raising an army of the scattered northern tribes of the steppes (think Mongols) who have never really been mentioned before in the series, but have apparently been in her thrall for centuries. Furious and seeking to destroy the Old Kingdom (all of a sudden), Chlorr, who no longer needs a body, tries to kill all the girls she had the tribes raising as hosts for her body, and musters all tribes in the north for a sneak invasion of the South. Tedious details for a tedious storyline, but a major early storyline features a new character, one of Chlorr’s replacement bodies, a sacrifice, being set free by her tribe to flee and warn the south, but is followed by tenacious trackers who seek to kill her on Chlorr’s orders. The reason of course, turns out to be that all of Chlorr’s replacement bodies have a small piece of her original body implanted in them, giving them a connection with her and helping her guide them to her original body (which is needed to transfer her soul) without anyone else learning its location.

The storyline for Goldenhand is neat, self-contained—too neat; everything ties together with little knots and bows and and feels like puzzle pieces falling into place. As Nix starts with a wide introduction, this means it was easy to guess what the middle of the puzzle would look like, given a complete and well-crafted ring around it and the story’s lazy simplicity. This is why the story feels so trite, tedious and simplistic; reading it feels like reading a work of quick and orderly plotted developments written out as is and with considerable speed. Nothing is particularly surprising, and nothing feels very inspired, but, as is the problem with all far-flung and long-fantasy series, the story begins to feel like a recycling of old pieces, the same kinds of conflicts just repeated, by the same villains and the same protagonists. I wonder if Nix considered making a messy, complex story without any real clear “baddies” and more exploration of the charter, free magic, and the boundaries between human being and soul, soul and magic, and then just didn’t have the courage to break the formula and do something relatively risky. That would explain how half-hearted and procedural Goldenhand feels.

The novels highlight what seems to be a crux position for contemporary fantasy. You [the author] are either formulaic and stick to fun but simple story developments, or you are weird, bizarre, and brutal. The non-formulaic fantasy exists, but uses edginess in place of creativity and profundity, brutality and shock value rather than storytelling. The only good fantasy around is increasingly in the short story format and in weird (speculative) fiction venues, often of non-Western writers adopting a lineage of stories heavily impacted by racists like Lovecraft, and crafting stories out of their own cultures and communities; that pull on both Lovecraft, traditional modern fantasy, various folklore, and even Sci-Fi. Garth Nix always struck me as a good author, on the pulpier side, who managed to balance the formulaic, fun fantasy story set up with adept and non-intuitive plot settings that managed to be interesting without being weird and edgy. Nix has always written for a child or young adult audience, which has specific demands on the market and editorial side, but I, perhaps a little biased, felt like Nix balanced it better than many other popular fantasy authors, and the Old Kingdom series is his one adult-oriented project, so I feel he had more room to take risks than he did. Maybe these two books represent an anomaly and in his other work Nix will return to form, or perhaps, like the genre in general, the easiest veins to mine in the mountains of storytelling have been exhausted and the genre will continue stagnating until new sources are discovered.

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