Firethorn - Sarah Micklem > Reviews > Touched by Ardour

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Absolutely
Story	Good
Characters	Good
Listenability	Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to similar audio books?	Excellent
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Not applicable

Advantages:	Romance, passion, and bloody encounters  -  all skilfully rendered
Disadvantages:	None if you can ignore the pretty cover

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

To create a world that is apart from our own, but could conceivably exist - out there, or back then - you need to create a place that we recognise. A place that for all its differences has aspects of our own world that make us feel at home - or perhaps on an adventure - but certainly not in a place so completely alien that we cannot relate to it. Sarah Micklem has learned this lesson well.

She has learned also that for a world to be real it needs a history, and more importantly, it needs a mythology. These she gives us. The history drip-fed through the story and told only in so far as we need the justification for the war that is coming.
The mythology is intrinsic - to the extent that we enter the world via the divining compass. It will be a while before we get to the point in the story where the compass is drawn and the bones are thrown, but the full pictogram is there before we read any of the tale. The twelve constellations - in Firethorn's world, the twelve gods, each with three incarnations: Prey for instance shows itself as hunter, hunted and hunger….Hazard as peril, chance and fate.

The use of the trinity is no accident - it is not unique to the Christian - father, son & holy ghost - the Hindus for example have Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva. Three is one of the magic numbers the world over. Many religions invest their deities with three incarnations.

The twelve also is significant: reference not only to the zodiac but also to the 12 honoured gods of Rome: Juno, Minerva, Vesta, Ceres, Diana, Venus, Mars, Mercurius, Neptunus, Volcanus, and Apollo.

Micklem has taken our own myths and magic and recast them…but barely. The herbs and potions will be used as they might be. The auguries are cast as they once were: by bones, or entrails. The gods are appeased by sacrifices…or sometimes not.

This, then, is Firethorn's world. It is a pre-mediaeval world in Anglo-Saxon human terms. A world where myth and magic still rule. A world where being born of the Blood gives you status and a genealogy stretching back to the gods…being born of the mud means you keep enough track not to couple with those you shouldn't. The Blood have the money and the power…the Mud do the dirty work, or they subsist on the scratchings of poor crofts.

A child was brought to the Dame's house and became the Dame's handmaid. There she learned, and had a partially privileged childhood. As a foundling she was lodged with the drudges and taught her place. As handmaid to the Dame she learned the high speech and the ways of the nobility. She learned also the gifts of the natural world and the ways of healing. When the Dame died, she learned that despite all she was still a drudge.

Raped by her new master and ill-blessed by a pride that will not allow his 'taking a liking to her' to lead her to an easier life than might otherwise be - she escaped to the Kingswood. A year's life of solitude and hardship. Past-half-starved she eats of the Firethorn from which she'll take her name and puts her existence into the hands of the gods. On the year-day of her departure she returns to the fold…intending to resettle, but marked now by the gods, how can she? Willingly chosen as a carnal indulgence during the Upsidedown Days by the knight Galan, she finds he will not let her go when the festivities are over - nor does she want him to…and so from drudge to maid to camp follower…

So far, so feminine.

This is undoubtedly a woman's tale. Firethorn is our narrator, and her focus is not allowed to shift (except on a couple of magical excursions) from what her sex and her position would allow her to see and experience and understand. But it is also a tale of war and the men who make it. The politicising - not all male to be sure for one of the warmongers is the dowager queen - the petty squabbles, the actions of men in the company of men only, the rigours of the trail and the splendour and deprivations of the gathering ground are told in all their squalor. It is a dangerous place for a woman alone…especially one who has enemies in high places.

We follow the camp as she does - and meet the characters who inhabit such places, and those who serve them - the augurs and priests, the marketers, the whores - and eventually too the families who in such times trailed after such campaigns. We watch the nobles trying to control their armies and in-fighting that arises when the common enemy is yet to be engaged. We learn of honour - and how fragile it can be.

If anything, though, is to recommend this book across the gender divide it is the battle sequences. The men fight from horseback and on foot…in the olde worlde way - with lances and daggers and short-swords and shields that are more weapon than protection. There are rules and conventions - but it is far from quaint and chivalry is sometimes forgotten, or ignored. The fight on the field is bloody and long and harsh and men forget reason in the thick of it. Micklem's detailed description of the play across the field of battle is engrossing in a page-turning uncertainty of who will survive. The confusion and chaos are evident as she switches from one viewpoint to another.

I suspect she is also technically correct in her use of weaponry - if that's not a strange concept in a made-up world.

In keeping with Firethorn's lowly status, the language used is simple and to the point. If a somewhat lyrical quality imbues it at times, that is because it is Firethorn's nature to think in such terms at times - for that is how the tale comes across: as a reminiscence. Dramatic impact is heightened in places by the switch to the present tense in the telling, but this is deftly handled and does not jar.

The mythological setting flows through the story as naturally as a river down-vale. Sacrifices and curses, charms and healings. All happen as would be so in a closed camp, in the shadow of war. And as ever when one entreats the gods, one cannot be sure of interpreting the response correctly.

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Definitely not one to judge by the cover. Rostant's illustration adorning the paperback edition suggests a very different Firethorn from the one you'll find in the pages. A romance? Yes, perhaps - but a fantasy of passions beyond what that pretty picture suggests… This is a harsh world and our heroine was not born to Blood, her pride sits less easily upon her than the cover portrait suggests.

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Published in paperback by HarperCollins
pp 383
ISBN 0-00-719306-8
Cover price £6.99

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hiker@Ciao!
21.8.06