"Lamentation" by Ken Scholes (Tor)

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Lamentation
Ken Scholes
368 pp. Tor. $24.95
Pub. Date: 2/17/2009
ISBN-13: 978-0765321275

Reviewed by Paul Stotts

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A cataclysmic event. A city vaporized—instantaneously. One moment a city filled with bustling, teeming life: people strolling down wide cobbled avenues; vendors hawking their wares, shouting; children laughing; scholars poring over vast tomes in the Great Library, pensive, scribbling notes in the margins; then: nothing. A city gone. Destroyed. Eradicated. Replaced by a cloud of ash, dark as death’s panties, polluting the air, like a crematorium burping out an entire city. Only a dirty smudge left, as if a child suddenly dragged their eraser across the map, destroying everything.

As the ash settles—a glowering sun browbeating it to the ground, regaining its aerial supremacy—the aftermath is revealed. Once there was a vibrant city, the seat of the Androfrancine religion, the home of the Great Library that collected and housed most of the world’s knowledge. Now: dust. Buildings razed, blackened, shimmers of heat roiling across the ground; random fires dotting the landscape, crackling and hissing, orange embers swirling in the air like fireflies. Charred bodies are everywhere. In the streets, near the town squares, under the buildings. Everywhere. There are no survivors; no one to care for the dead, no one to say a prayer, no one to bury the bodies.

But there are two witnesses to this atrocity. This Desolation. One is a teenage boy, and one a mechanical man. Both are instrumental in the war that comes next.

Some stories end with a bang, some start with one. Literally. Wars are often the same way, starting with a pivotal event, a defining moment, a casus belli. Pearl Harbor. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The Gulf of Tonkin. 9/11. Ken Scholes’s debut novel Lamentation starts with such a cataclysmic event—the obliteration of the city of Windwir—before documenting the many-sided war that arises out of this event.

That’s not to suggest that Lamentation is a novel-length description of a massive war campaign. Because it’s not. It’s better. More intelligent, more insightful, more intriguing than a typical sword-thrust-by-axe-blow description of a battle. Scholes’s novel concentrates, instead, on the politics of warfare, on the real power, the puppetmasters behind the scenes, controlling the players, guiding events and people. And their mysterious motivations for doing this. It’s court intrigue, amplified to a Spinal Tap-approved eleven; it’s powerbrokers wheeling, dealing, and, most importantly, stealing, with a grin on their face and blackness in their hearts. It’s the Usual Suspects meets K Street, where the biggest crook lurks in the shadows, hidden, unknown. A ghost.

The narrative is told mainly through the points-of-view of four central characters, with a few additional character perspectives tossed in along the way. It’s an effective way to document the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering without bogging the story down with too many characters doing too many things. Which makes the novel more personal than epic; more about a group of characters dealing with an extraordinary incident rather than the incident itself. More a view of the individual trees, and less of the forest.

The downside to such a tight focus on the characters is that there’s only moderate world building that can be accomplished. Still Scholes creates a full world, filled with religion, culture, and history, we just don’t get to see much pass the surface. It’s a shame because what is there is tremendous, and had me only wanting more. Hopefully future volumes in the series will give us a deeper plunge into this magnificent pool Scholes has envisioned.

This year has already seen some memorable debuts. Lamentation is definitely near the top of that pile. If not for Peter Brett’s The Warded Man, it would be in the conversation for best debut of 2009. An auspicious start for Scholes.

Final Grade: 85 out of 100