"The Steel Remains" by Richard Morgan

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The Steel Remains
Richard Morgan
352 pp. Gollancz. ₤12.99

Reviewed by Paul Stotts

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“They fall down just like men! Stand with me! STAND!” – Ringil Eskiath “The Steel Remains”

In Richard K. Morgan’s new fantasy novel “The Steel Remains”, Ringil Eskiath, the legendary hero of Gallows Gap, often has trouble getting others to stand with him. You see Ringil is homosexual, a fact that Morgan rather graphically publicizes from the first page of the novel. For this reason alone, people despise Ringil, viewing him as a disgusting degenerate whose entire existence is a blasphemy against all that is holy. In their eyes, Ringil should immediately be put to death. Only the high standing of his father and his heroic past deeds, which include nothing less than saving humanity from the Scaled Folk, allow Ringil to evade a death sentence (the Trelayne government tortures and kills homosexuals in the book). He feels betrayed by an ungrateful dystopian society, having mistakenly fought thinking he could make the world better, only to see things get much worse. This is a world where poverty abounds and slavery has recently become legal after previously operating in the shadows. It is where husbands must sell wives into bondage to get out of debt and criminals make up the wealthy upper class.

Morgan creates a world in “The Steel Remains” that is brutal, ugly, dirty and mean, and ultimately real. This is the society you’d expect when your populace is uneducated, ignorant, prejudiced and only understands settling scores with steel. Morgan has created an entirely new type of fantasy in “The Steel Remains”. Forget “dark fantasy”, this is “nihilistic fantasy”, a confrontational antithesis to “epic fantasy”, a deconstruction of the world and the self. There is no hope here at the end of the day, no sign of progress, only individuals struggling to scrape out a nasty existence. This explains why the novel is essentially character-driven. The drama and tension arises not from a struggle between good and evil, but from the battle between men and their surroundings. The question is: what does it mean to be a hero in a world like this? Or is the whole concept of hero meaningless in this context, since that would imply one could make the world better. What happens when you can’t make the world better?

The story begins with Ringil living in the small backwater town of Gallows Water, earning his room and board at the inn by regaling the inn’s guests with stories of his heroic deeds. For the most part, he lives a dull, quiet existence, occasionally playing exterminator with his legendary Kiriath sword to the town’s corpse mite population. Then one morning, his mother Ishil shows up at the inn, and enlists a reluctant Ringil to search for his cousin, Sherin. It seems that Sherin had recently been sold into slavery by her husband Bilgrest in order to lessen his debt. Ringil accompanies his mother back to his hometown of Trelayne where he immediately sets about searching for his cousin, unmindful of the dangerous toes he is stepping on.

Egar the Dragonbane, a steppe nomad and slayer of dragons, is the clanmaster of the Skaranak tribe. His disrespectful attitude toward the tribe’s old traditions is perceived by Poltar, the tribe’s shaman, as blasphemy and certainly to invite divine punishment on the Skaranak by the Sky Dwellers. Poltar believes the tribe is better off without Egar as its clanmaster. After having lived in Yhelteth, a monument of civilization in comparison to the steppe, Egar feels constrained by the Skaranak’s simple way of life, rebelling against it, while yearning for something more. Soon Poltar gains assistance from an unlikely source in his quest to rid the Skaranak of Egar.

Archeth Indamaninarmal is the last remaining Kiriath, left behind in Yhelteth when the rest of the Kiriath race abandoned the world. Her understanding of Kiriath technology and ways makes her an indispensable advisor to the Emperor Jhiral Khimran II. Soon the Emperor sends Archeth to investigate the mysterious attack on the garrisoned port of Khangset. When Archeth arrives at Khangset, she discovers that the Kiriath fortified defenses of the port have been obliterated and the townsfolk slaughtered. She can’t even imagine what kind of force could be capable of such destruction. Her only clues to the identity of the mysterious assailants are an odd statue and a survivor named Elith.

Soon Archeth, Ringil and Egar find themselves reunited in the backwater marsh town of Ennishmin, long years having passed since they’d fought together in the war against the Scaled Folk. Here the trio confronts a menace unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, a magical race called the dwenda who are not bound by the normal rules of time. Can Ringil and company save the world once again from this frightening new menace?

“The Steel Remains” is gritty, hard-edged and brutally bloody. The battle sequences are absolutely fantastic. The last fifty pages features a stunning final battle that alone makes the novel worth the read. These are the high-octane and adrenaline pumping scenes we expect from Morgan, though “The Steel Remains” contains a somewhat sparser amount of action than Morgan’s previous novels. Foremost, Morgan concerns himself with character development here. And it is quite successful as Ringil, Archeth and Egar are some of the most complex and detailed characters you will see in fantasy. Not since R. Scott Bakker’s “Prince of Nothing” trilogy have I encountered fantasy characters this fully realized. The downside for some readers may be that the emphasis on character development slows down the pacing of the story. This is, however, a necessary trade-off when you get worldbuilding this good. What readers will undoubtedly take from “The Steel Remains” is the setting and characters, rather than the plot. Pure and simple, this is a setup novel, an introduction to Ringil and his companions and the screwed-up world they live in. I expect Morgan’s early emphasis on character and worldbuilding will likely pay handsome dividends in the remaining novels in the series.

The language is brutally honest and profane (another Morgan staple) as well as being more current and anachronistic than some readers may like. In many ways, “The Steel Remains” is attacking fantasy clichés. The aspect most likely to seem genre-breaking will be the aggressiveness in which Morgan presents Ringil’s homosexuality. It’s in-your-face and deliberately confrontational (because that is how Ringil is), but at times I thought it was overreaching and unnecessarily theatrical. In view of the genre, Morgan knows Ringil’s sexuality will be shocking, so it seems almost juvenile the way he keeps belaboring it. Ringil needs to be more than just his sexuality, and a more subtle approach by Morgan may have helped achieve a more even-handed presentation. In comparison, Archeth is also gay, but the portrayal of her sexuality is much more restrained. (While Archeth is gay, her character is not attacked in the story with the same venom that Ringil’s character is. Sure Ringil is more outspoken about his sexuality than Archeth is, but the discrepancy is noticeable. By portraying male homosexuality as the pinnacle of degeneracy in the novel while at the same time showing more tolerance for Archeth’s lesbianism, Morgan is in danger here of falling into a male perspectivalism. In other words, some men are likely to make a harsher value judgment against male homosexuality as opposed to female homosexuality since they find lesbianism arousing. Inevitably this suggests that one is less offensive than the other, and this is the root of prejudice.)

Last Word:
Featuring a dystopian world that is hard, confrontational and ugly, “The Steel Remains” is a unique and true genre-bending novel, in essence establishing its own new genre: the bleak and destructive “nihilistic fantasy”. Morgan imagines a full and complex world and fills it with richly imagined and emotionally profound characters. The action sequences are brutal, bloody and fantastic, though the novel suffers a bit from not having more of them. But “The Steel Remains” is ultimately a character-driven affair, an introspective art house film rather than the action-packed summer blockbuster. It deserves being distinguished as fantasy literature with “literature” being the operative word.

Final Grade: 84 out of 100