Flesh and Spirit

by Carol Berg

Roc; $15.00, 418 pp.

Abandoned, robbed and left severely injured in a soldier’s raid, Valen is found by some kindly monks and given shelter at Gillarine Abbey. A ne’er do-well, a soldier of whim and a nimble thief, Valen finds himself surrounded by the kindness of Karish monks who worship the god Iero and take him in and heal his wounds.

It’s the last place the irascible Valen ever expected to find himself.

Valen is a wonderfully layered character. On the outside: brusque and talkative, self-serving, impatient, intelligent and a great teller of tales. Inside, he struggles with his need to divorce himself from his true heritage, that of a diseased, cast-off “pureblood” one his world terms a sorcerer and magic user. In Valen’s specific case it is the ability to find his way anywhere, to read maps (though he cannot read words) and to read the earth, to find paths through untrackable wildernesses. He struggles with an addiction to nivat seeds which turn an unexplained flare-up of pain and agony into pleasure. We don’t know if this addiction is self-inflicted or the result of some kind of genetic problem. He is a loner, ever on the run and leery of everyone’s motives, having escaped an especially brutal, abusive father, a drunken ineffectual mother and indifferent siblings. His full name is quite a mouthful: Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine.

He does not want to be at the abbey but with the onset of a severe winter, it is better than being wounded and on the road facing the nasty factions of an internecine struggle between three brother princes for control of Navronne.

The world surrounding the abbey is an ugly place filled with roving soldiers and an especially nasty horrible sect called Harrowers. Led by a deranged woman, they want the world turned back to virgin forest, river and meadow---and that means destroying villages, towns, pasturage and tilled fields. Anything humankind has made or done to tame and order the earth to their needs must be destroyed. And they revel in torturing and killing people.

The decadent purebloods remain aloof from this growing stain upon the land while war and strife are destroying everything civilized.

It all eventually reaches the pacific confines of Gillarine Abbey.

Valen becomes a pawn amongst the factions because he has a book of maps given to him by his insane grandfather, a legendary map maker, which show a great many places of the world. And only Valen can read the spells that unlock the paths to these sites, particularly those of the Danae who sound as if they are earth spirits/elves of a very fey, wild and remote nature. They can appear and disappear at will, tend to have an unearthly radiance about them, go about unclothed but sporting markings: images of dragons and feathers and such on their pale blue skins.

Unhappy with mankind, the Danae have removed themselves from human affairs. A small group, however, including several of the monks of Gillarine Abbey believe the Danae might be able to stem the tide of destruction. But, so far, the Danae remain angry at humans for some old slight.

Once Valen has healed, circumstances fling him from the abbey and he finds himself in the central city of Palinur where things have come to an erupting head as the city succumbs to chaos.

The purebloods, locked in centuries-old societal rules and protocols, avoid the conflict where they can, the abbey brothers of Gillarine struggle to save civilization as they know it, and the princely brothers fight it out on the streets. All the while the Harrowers add disgusting scenes of nightmare-ish horror as they destroy whatever lies in their paths.

As grim as the story is, it is so saved by Berg’s excellent writing and her ability to really bring forth the nature of the world and the characters that inhabit it. And more importantly, Berg’s terrific imagination and ability to string together seamlessly such diverse ideas.

Make no mistake, this is a miserable novel (miserable in the sense that circumstances and people are miserable), very much in tone of “Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis. A tale almost consumed by utter hopelessness and endless horror.

And there is another book to come.

Though I am not really anxious to slog through the escalating destruction going on throughout this world, I so want to see the come-uppance of a specific character in this novel. An evil duplicitous slime toad that deserves to be staked and flayed and burned very slowly…. Oh, he is so hateful.

And just one of the reasons to await the next book “Breath and Bone” coming out in January 2008. - Sue Martin