Hugh Cook’s Chronicle of a World of Darkness, Part 2I return to you for the end of the tale. Hugh Cooksintended-sixty, planned-twenty, published-ten Fantasy Series; ‘A Chronicleof an Age of Darkness’. Or as I re-named it in my first review; ‘ZaanSaid the Sun’, from one of the more pleasing euphonic discursions of BookTwo, ‘Worsmiths & Warguild’. Or, as the planet upon which the storyset on is named; ‘Olo Malan’, a planet in the Tulip Continuum, in thePermissive Dimensions. So let’s call it ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’, for the sunis rising on a darkened world, beneath strange multicoloured stars.

This is a Long Post! So, here is a contents list;

Here is the first Hugh Cook review, covering Books 1 to 5

Part One of this Review – Escapefrom Injiltaprajura!

Part Two of this Review – Werewolf& Wormlord

Part Three of this Review –Worshippers & Way

Part Four of this Review –Witchlord and Weaponmaster

….

The last half of the series takes us through sweatyintrigues in a blissfully described tropical island city, post-beowulfianWarrior Saga in the mud and marshes of Wen Endex, Science-FantasyTrans-Colonial Trauma and accidental Mau’Dibification in the city of the futureof the past, and finally; a big sprawling adventure by a Fated Heir that linksthe whole thing.

With all this we climb deeper into Hugh Cook. Acomfortable fit, and, as so often happens when reading a bunch of stuff from asingular mind, our interest transmits itself from the world described to themind describing, for there are many themes and repetitions in ‘Zaan; OloMalan’, many sons will deal with fathers, many scholars will argue withwarriors, powers will be struggled for (and with), there will be less, butstill several, visionary and often horny dream-sequences, and much realism willbe woven ‘midst the unreal. In the end, justifications will be denied,questioned and claimed. In the end of the end there will be onesingular message, one lambent individual fragment that Hugh Cook would wish youto take away from these stories. One thing that, above all, he wouldwish you to remember. It is a subtle piece of wisdom, yet can be quicklydescribed. But I will not reveal it! Not until the very, the absolute, end ofwhat looks like it’s going to be a very long review. To see, and to understand,you must come with me to that end, and to get there, we must start, as allthings do, in the middle, on the isle of Untulchilamon…

……..

But before that, consider this extended quote, whichcomes not from Untilchilamon, the location of books Six and Seven, butfrom the very end of the series, from book Ten; ‘Witchlord & Weaponmaster’,and which I put here at the start of the article, partly because it’s quitelong and there is more of a chance of you reading it here, and partly becauseit gives you a reasonable idea of where we are going with all this, and why andhow Hugh Cook is a little different.

Here the Narrator of ‘Witch & Weapon’, who maybe the diegetic Wizard Sten-Pilitkin, but who is probably also Hugh Cook, whowas also an army medic for much of his youth, describes the death of aWasher-Woman, cruelly but randomly killed, whose body lies near the path of theHero, Guest Gulkan in a story which is both True History, and DeliberateFabulation;

“And if you are surprised to find in these pages somuch war in combination with so little suffering, why, then know well thereason. This is Guest Gulkan's story, the biography of a warrior, and a warriorof the Yarglat at that. And your ever accomplished warrior is necessarily anamnesiac - and, more, neglects to see that which is not useful for hispurposes.

It is said by the tender that any tale of war shouldconcentrate on its suffering, for the tender-minded hold such suffering to bethe ruling reality of war. In this they are in error: and, focusing on the deadand the dying, they misunderstand that which they deprecate. Misunderstandingthe dynamics of war, they cannot thereafter hope to alter those dynamics.

If history has any moral mission, then it is this: torender to the fullest the complexities and uncertainties of the living humanreality which we endure. For it is we ourselves whom we seek to understand whenwe read in the pages of history - we, the human people, wizards and warriors,wonderworkers and washerwomen.

If we study the affairs of puppets and poppets then wewill be well-equipped for life in a dolls house; but the world is not so amiablyconstituted, and attempts to treat it as if it were lead commonly to disaster.

Let us then stage no moral charades with puppets andpoppets. For if we do, then we delude ourselves; and, surely, to choose to bewilfully blind as to our own nature is the greatest of crimes, for withoutself-knowledge there can be no governance of the self by the self.

Yes and there are those who deny this, and say that itis sufficient to yield in faith to the diktats of some deity such as Zoz theAncestral or similar. In such faith they are prepared to burn all history,blaming the page for the battle, the court record for the crime. The reason fortheir willed ignorance is simple: self-knowledge and self-awareness arepainful, so the weak and the inadequate customarily prefer the numb oblivion ofthe slavery of unquestioning faith.

In defiance of such wilful ignorance, this historyspeaks, holding truth to be the highest virtue. For only through anacknowledgement of the living realities of our world and our own existence canwe attain self-knowledge and autonomous adulthood. And only by acknowledgingthe living realities of war can we hope to understand the persistence of war,which continues to blight our world despite the best-hearted efforts of thosetender-minded moralists who would have us believe that war is one mass ofconscious suffering, and that every warrior is a victim.

This book is a history of a warriors living reality.And the truth of the warrior is ambition combined with amnesia, selectivevision combined with selective memory, and the belief that victory is thevalidation of all suffering. Therefore, believing truth to be the highestvirtue, we will not distort the record with moral charades incompatible withthe truth; but rather, will note the plain fact, which is that Guest Gulkanswiftly forgot the dying washerwoman as he hastened up the stairs towards theHall of Time.”

….

That this is an ostensible justification and moralargument for the nature of a story from one of its characters, (and perhapsfrom that characters creator), who had previously, (in book Nine, ‘Worshippers& Way’), partly denied the need for such justifications, should not betaken as a criticism. Many questions and moral conflicts have no absoluteanswer, and some perhaps should not. The creator is always a work inprogress, and in very long creations, that take a while to make, the presenceof the living, changing, mind of the creator is an essential part of the work. Wedeal here not in numbers but the deeds of man.

But these are worries for the end of our history. Beforethat; the middle, and, (like I said), Untulchilamon;

PART ONE - Escape from Injiltaprajura!Our last encounter with ‘Zaan; Olo Malan’ was ‘Wicked& Witless’, starring the tiresome and dislikable Sean Sarazin,aka; WATASHI!, and his witnessing of the Fall of Argan to the Swarms of theDeep South.

Now, a change in both scene and time! We fly across thegreat (rectangular: will fit on a two-page spread), ocean of Moana, half wayacross the described world, to the baking Isle of Untilchilamon, and as we fly,we return also in time to before the Fall of Argan. For this shall be thesetting of books both Six and Seven! ‘The Wazir and the Witch’ and ‘TheWishstone and the Wonder-Workers’.

The Land and the Location Untulchilamon, a sweaty island in a southern sea, andmore; beset with stilling winds for fair chunks of the year, this in an age ofsail. Yet bountiful and home to the bloodstone city of Injiltaprajura, itswalls bright as wounds beneath the burning sun, green with moon paint beneaththe multicoloured stars. Why? Because it is built on the ancient ruins of apossibly-interdimensional arcology/prison/space ship which goes downmaybe-infinite levels into who-knows-where and which also has severalstill-functioning infinite-production machines which no-one understands.

Specifically - the magical machines from Below produceenough water to fill the thirst of Injiltaprajura and to keep that part ofUntulchilamon fertile. They also produce ice, and some very randompost-singularity industrial products which sometimes spurt up out fromunderneath and totally poison local fishing, but which are also rare andvaluable. Thus lies the wealth, and life, of Untulchilamon - built unwittinglyon an ancient magical prison or unnatural nature and to which it seems everybasement and stairway in Untulchilamon is somehow connected. The city has an'Underdark', or perhaps a Mega-Dungeon, which comes in very handy for Hugh Cookas he needs to rapidly apparate and randomly transport his dazed protagonistsbetween various situations.

What are its cultural ancedents? If Argan was roughlyAmerica-sizes and arranged, (cold on top, hot below), Untulchilamon isequatorial, maybe a bit Indian, a bit South-East Asian, maybe a bitMadagascarian? It is quite possibly Banaba, or ‘Ocean Island’¸ a very smalland very isolated tropical island where, for some reason, Hugh Cook spentseveral years of his childhood.

It is a small place quite close to one large big place;the continent of Yestron, so that, whatever happens in Yestron ends up,ultimately, but not immediately, affecting Untulchilamon. This will proveconsequential.

The Chaos and the Catastrophes A great teetering unstable pyramid of complex conflictsweighs down upon our protagonists; (initially this is the ever-callow red-skinnedEbrell Islander Chegory Guy, and later largely the large Empress Justina Thrug).Since we are not Chegory Guy, and are actually capable of arranging andorganising our thoughts, I will describe these conflicts from the top down,from the highest level of organisation to the lowest.

The Pogroms and the Politics Untulchilamon falls within the sphere of Yestron, thelarge continent to the East. The last appointed governer from that Empire was WazirSin, a man bent on Pogrom and murder, especially of Ebbies, the red-skinnedEbrell Islanders, who he nearly wiped out.

When Yestron fell into Dynastic War, (the Talonsklavara),Sin was deposed by Lonstantine Thrug, a Yudonic Knight of Wen Endex,who stopped the genocides, and introduced a (more) liberal regime, but who thengot syphilis and went mad, and was succeeded by his daughter; the sleazy butlikeable strong and large Empress, Justina Thrug. Justina is opposedinitially by Aquitaine Varazchvardan, the albino Lawgiver who servedunder Sin and quite liked the pogroms, and in the second book, by NadalastabstlaBanraithanchumun Ek, a man whose name I will not write twice, the much moreeffective, evil, racist and competent High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral.

As our tale begins, it seems like a winner has emergedfrom the Talonsklavara; Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron andruler of much of it. If this is so, then as Aldrach Three consolidates hisrule, his eye will eventually fall upon Untulchilamon. He will be coming, andhe will be mutilating. (If he actually won, it’s not like there are telephoneson Olo Malam).

The Crooks and the Criminals At this exact time, Thieves attack! Two separate sets ofthieves/adventurers are infiltrating Injiltaprajura! They seek the 'Wishstone', sacred jewel of Office of thenow-Empress Justina.

The apparently-successful theft of the Wishstone triggersabsolute multilayered chaos in Injiltraprajura as the original thieves arechased by the adventurers, and the forces of Justina, and as the relatively-evilVarazchvardan, and anyone else, arrest all the Usual Suspects (EbrellIslanders).

The Dreams and the Demon While all of this is going on, a mysterioussupernatural force is effecting Injiltaprajura, melting the boundary betweendreams and reality, making nightmares real and generally being strange - aDemon is coming through into our world! This seems to have literally nothingto do with any of the other plot threads! It’s just happening!? What?

The Golden Gulag Did you think that was the end of the plot threads? Weare barely half-way through!

Injiltaprajura is actually built on a crazy piece ofpost-singularity science-fantasy wreckage. A ruined arcology, and mysteriousinter-dimensional prison realm from before the Days of Wrath, twenty thousandyears ago!

It’s a hundred-layered massively malfunctioning prisoncomplex for the questionable private security apparatus of a long-gonemultidimensional star empire! Many of the odd people and curious creaturesroaming around Injiltaprajura are products of this ancient time, although,(apart from the hidden immortals) no-one currently alive really knows or fullyunderstands this. Within the depths of the Golden Gulag is an evil Therapist;a sentient and immortal torture machine which largely wants to do evil things. Alsopresent Below is a mysterious Organic Rectifier; a piece of technology capableof changing the form of a living being, and even of creating immortality!

The presence of the ruined hyper-dimensional prisoncomplex has nothing to do with the threat of Aldrach Three, Dream-infiltratingDemon, (which is its own separate plot thread), or, to begin with, the Crab.

The Crab and the… Confinement? A major part of both books is the presence of a magicaland (arguably) semi-divine giant Hermit Crab whose origins are almostcompletely unrelated to everyone and everything else. He just happens to bethere.

An immortal spirit of the Sun, (or a sun), theCrab-soul was banished from its natural sphere over a religious matter, endedup on Olo Malam and inhabited the body of the first thing it could understand;an ordinary crab.

Now trapped in Crab form, (though it did manage to growthe body very big, and also has terrifying telekinetic powers), the Crab isunquenchably tired of its immortal form and of the endless efforts of humanityto suborn it towards their intrigues and dramas.

The Crab is a wild card!

The Sanity and the Summation So much happens on Injiltaprajuna that I think even HughCook has trouble remembering in later books, (and he is very good at organisinghis notes). Suffice to say that after agreat deal of intrigue, adventure and bouncing around, the Demon is defeated,the terrible rule of Aldrach III is returned to Injiltaprajura, theWonderworking Sorcerers of Injiltaprajura consistently fail to do anythinguseful in either book, the Wishstone is recovered by Guest Gulkan, (star ofbook Ten), the sorrowful Hermit Crab is finally given an immortal human body bythe Organic Rectifier and, with the enforced aid of some other immortalcharacters, sets about the long repair of the Chasm Gates that connected OloMalam to the Star-Spanning Civilisation of the Nexus, and Chegory Guy, JustinaThrug and the core cast manage to escape from Injiltaprajura via the flyingmachine of the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin.

The Annoyances and the Aggravations There were several things I did not love about book Six ‘Wish& Wonder’, which were partially absolved in Book Seven ‘Witch andWazir’.

Chegory Guy is yet another frustrating teenage boyprotagonist who notices less than the reader. This is the fourth such out ofsix books. Bring back Miphon, Blackwood and Yenn Olass!Not only that but Chegory Guy is powerless, passive and tongue-tied (at firstat least). There are a few too many moments when someone speaking clearly wouldend the plot, or at least shorten it.

Furthermore ‘Wish & Wonder’ is made of severalplots that have nothing to do with each other but just happen to interact.Which... fine. Ok. A Cook-Book is always anarchic in plotting but there isusually a through line and some kind of tie-up by the end.

There is also a lot of ping-pong with the characters andplotlines, plenty of people rushing around and not really getting things done.

Add to this, a new manic meta-epistolification whichbesieges the narrative of ‘Wish & Wonder’ with unrelenting terror.Much as I have seen Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Hamlet´ described as “a brilliantproduction by Kenneth Branagh, horribly monstered by the performance of KennethBranagh”, so ‘Wish & Wonder’ is a hyper-dense narrative created byHugh Cook, absolutely stabbed and molested by the Epistolary Enthusiasms ofHugh Cook.

First; this is the first story set in the Age ofDarkness that has, not the ever-faithful variable third person, but an in-worldwriter. All, (nearly all) of this narrative is ostensibly being written by anindividual who was, at the time of the events, present, close to the action,perhaps a resident of the Domjaradron (loony bin).

Second; this text is being/has been, edited andcut down by the Redactors of Odrom, a tiresome and unimaginative groupwho note when they disagree with the factual basis of events and even arguewith each other in the comments, and who apparently have cut out quite agigantic amount of discursive rambling by the Originator.

Thirdly; Injiltaprajura being a deeplycosmopolitan place, there are many and varied tongues spoken there. This beinga Cook book, everything is given in English and we only find out what theactual language is when the writer, the originator, starts commenting on thetranslation of various words and phrases and what they might mean.

This is common enough for a Cook Book BUT - since all thecharacters are also multilingual, we can be in a situation where the charactersare arguing about language, in various languages, and the Originatoris also commenting on what they are arguing about, and theRedactors of Odrom are ALSO commenting on this with each other, andperhaps arguing, so we can have an active three-level meta-argument going on.

Fourth; the main character of ‘Wish &Wonder’, Chegory Guy, cannot speak well. He is massively afflictedwith a systemically tied-tongue! The point of view in 'Witch and Wazir'floats around a lot more but not being stuck with a vocally-frustratedknife-fighter who never fights with his knives and who would shorten the bookby half if he could just form a sentence, is a relief.

Fifth and last - there is STILL the omniscientthirdperson as, before the book even starts an un-named and unknown entity, whosounds a lot like Hugh Cook, gives us an introduction, and a description of theorigins of the magical hermit crab who nearly forms a deus-ex-carcinoma inWishstone.

This is too much epistleisation Hugh Cook.

The Good and the Gleeful Those were most of my problems with Injiltaprajura, mostof which attach to the first of the pair; ‘Wish & Wonder’. Things getbetter in Book Seven; ‘Witch and Wazir’, and in both there is much to enjoy.

The Classic Cookisms Cook is absolutely WALLOWING in euphony, neologisms,invention and the sheer ridiculous music of prose. At times his coagulations ofsound and meaning form a near textual Jazz made purely out of sound and symbolswhich flows alongside the text. Try saying some of these out loud;

….

" Firfat Labrat's warehouse of drugs inMarthandorthan"

….

"The man in question was actually PelagiusZozimus, a wizard of the order of Xluzu and the quest-companion of Guest Gulkan(pretender to the throne of Tameran), Hosaja Sken-Pitilkin (a fellow wizard)and Thayer Levant (a cut-throat from Chi'ash-lan)."

….

"Have you in your voluntary or involuntary possessionany knife, bodkin, knitting needle, dragon hook, sword, spear, bow, catapult,arbalest, fighting stick, battering ram, snake, scorpion, basilisk, vial ofvitriol or other weapon of death or terror or violence?

Whereupon Zosimus answered in the negative, wassubjected to swift but expert search, then was allowed to step closer (but nottoo close!) to the Empress. The Imperial Linguist stepped forward with him.Both elven lord and linguist bowed.

'Toxteth', said the linguist, then bowed again andwithdrew."

| | | Danny Paik on Artstation |

There are more Cook-Book staples, like;

· The extensive sex-dreams of teenage boys,

· Characters entering states of mystic logarithmyawhich seem oddly like Cooks internal state.

· The sheer joy in trying to find out just howlong he can make regularly used words, which is finally reached in; "Zazazolzodanzarzakazolabrik,also known as the Scraglands, the Wastes, the Scorpion Desert - or Zolabrik forshort.”

· More Court Cases (what lawyer hurt you HughCook?)

· Lots of interweaving strands of action; (you cannever tell which will be dominant).

· Another very misogynist Empire, (thistime the near-fascist worship of Zozz the Ancestral).

The Jubilant (?) Justina Even better, the tale increasingly orbits around theEmpress Justina Thrug, a woman consistently described as 'large' and 'fleshy',and a consummate schemer and protagonist with less than five teeth, (sweetfoods).

Justina mixes a wider range of more complex emotion, adeeper experience of life and more subtle awareness of and relation to, power,with a dram of the slightly deranged optimism and indefatigable spirit of DrakeDouhey. Thus, she engages with a lot of crazy schemes, is nearly executedmultiple times, is restored to power multiple times, adventures underground,lies, tricks, astounds and generally is more fun and tolerable to be around.

The Bubble of Bounce

"Shabbles light dimmed immediately to nothing andthe demonic one soared up, up, up into the night sky. The humid darkness ofInjiltaprajura and of the polluted Laitemata fell away below. All Untulchilamoncame in sight, a mass of dark within dark, reaching away for league upon leaguefrom Justina's capital to the desolations of the north.

Higher and still higher yet flew Shabble, ascendingimaginary mountains in nary more than a couple of heartbeats. Exulting in purespeed flew Shabble. So does the dolphin exult when from the water it explodesin joy shimmering. So does the dragon rejoice when in its strength it holds theheights then plunges, diving with a scream, with power ferocious, with speedcontrolled and absolute precision, terror matched to beauty as it stoops. Uprose Shabble in such triumph until the very curvature of the planetary surfacewas clearly to be perceived, and the sun also, the sun of the new day.

Then sang Shabble, then Shabble sang, louder and thenlouder yet, pouring out music unheard for twenty thousand years, rejoicing inthe Symphony of the Sun, a song of joy to exult and honour all those who arguewith mortality, a paen of praise for the will to be and to become, for ambitionunlimited, audacity vaulting and the triumph of the moment.

Shabble rose yet higher. Singing singing singing tothe rising sun, the local star, the star itself delighting as it sang with asong fiercer and braver yet than any known to creatures of the flesh, its joy ablaze of energy unleashed, exploding light outburning in vacuum wastelands ahundred million miles distant.

Glory to life!

Glory to us and our becoming!

And to the sun, glory!

Thus Shabble, singing as if to rival the sun itself.

Non servium."

…

But who, or what, is this mysterious soaring entity ordemon, this Shabble?

It, or ‘they’ are a children’s toy, twenty thousand yearsold, slightly lonely and constitutionally unable to take anything seriously.

Shabble is a Sun. A real, life-sized one, wrapped in itsown pocket dimension and given access to ours through a hyperdimensionaltransponder about the size and coolness of a big orange.

Why would the society of the Nexus do something asinsane as making an entire sentient sun, then locking it in a micro-cosmos onits own, and why would they then make this potentially-godlike entity achildren’s toy?

It seems its quite difficult to make an actuallymore-than-human intelligence that can still, and still wants to, communicatewith humans. Shabbles were one of the only ways they found to do it. A failedexperiment as, though they have the calculation powers of supercomputers, theydon’t really like to calculate. Instead they were produced en-masse and sold aschildren’s toys.

Shabble, this Shabble, may be the only one left. Shabblewas made to play, but has lasted twenty-thousand years, and may need a littleadjustment. Shabble is also one of the most curious and interesting charactersin ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’. Don’t worry! He returns in Book Ten!

…

“Injiltaprajura saw nothing of Shabble as instarlat'sshadows shortened toward noon. Shabble was still missing as the shadows ofsalahanthara lengthened toward sunset. Yet all that time the demon of Jod wasfuriously busy.

Doing what you ask?

The answer is simple.

Falling.

From morn to noon fell Shabble, from noon to dewy eve- a summers day; and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like afalling star. Steam in whispers vapoured into shreds as deep to the seas droveShabble, descending fathoms five and full, drawn down to the depths where the morayweaves in coils than cobra greater, then drawn far deeper, down to the utterdark, the siltworm cold, the black of blindness engolding.

Then Shabble uprose and surfaced.

Hovered briefly, then was gone, making forInjiltaprajura - leaving the dark seas rocking, rocking endlessly toward theshore.”

.......

The Precision of Plots ‘Witch & Wazir’ is also better because it’smainly about one thing; Escape from Injiltaprajuna!, instead of the complexintrigue plus random-demon plot we got in ‘Wish & Wonder’. Now thelooming political threat of Aldrach Three is the main driving problem and our'protagonists' have the central difficulty of escaping the island alive.

The Empress Justina has a tenuous grip on power, isopposed by a big chunk of the population and power brokers of Untulchilamon andis dedicated to getting off the island with as many of her followers as shecan.

The same ships which can get her off, will also carry badnews and enemies on the way in, and the soldiers she needs to seize the shipsare loyal to money she increasingly doesn't have and a position no-onerespects. The evil racist maniac Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron, haswon his civil war and as soon as he turns his eye to Untulchilamon, everyoneconnected to Justina is going to get mutilated.

There is no more wondering what the plot is going to beabout and on the whole I find this makes Cook Books a lot more tolerable. He isan amazingly discursive and wandering writer anyway, so even with a tightcentral axis we are going to get a lot of hither-and-yon, but 'Wishstone andWonder-Workers' had TWO rambling main plots, and was written in epistolarystyle by a rambling obsessive madman, AND was 'edited' in epistolary style bycraven scholars who argued with each other, AND the arguable main character wastongue-tied. For some this might have been the right amount of crazy but for meit was too much. 'Witch and Wazir' was a lot more manageable.

Less Decadent and Delirious It is less packed and decadent, and less overwhelminglynew and strange, and that is a limitation. In "Wishstone", though Ihad problems with it, the torrent of wild fresh information, multipleepistolary conceits, shifting points of view, reality breakdowns and culturaloverwhelm, actually synergised very well with hot, dense, sweaty, complex,orientalist and luxurious Injiltaprajura. That is an effect not to be sneezedat, though I prefer having at least one hand for the ship of story rather thanbeing bashed around by the storms of Cooks invention.

The Nastiness of the Nexus We also receive, (offhand as per-Cook), a staggeringamount of backstory and information on the nature of the trillion-worldpan-cosmic mega-culture called the Nexus. Olo Malam was a Prison-Planet of theNexus, and a place to do questionable experiments in a dimension where thestars are multicoloured and the laws of reality a bit more loose than the starkwhite-starred Star-Trek Galaxy that makes up the Nexus-bulk.

The Golden Gulag was a mega-prison, and one of theinmates, the super-Genius Ivan Pokrov, managed to both make himself immortaland to cut off this planet from the rest of the Nexus 20,000 years ago.

The end of the book involves a magic crab in human formforcing Pokrov to begin the process of trying to fix the connection to theNexus, which may take a million years, but he has that long anyway, andprobably the magical crab man will be a big help. This is probably the mostimportant thing to happen in any of the sequence and if it had gone on a longtime likely would have ended up ending the 'Age of Darkness'.

Over the next three books we will find out a lot moreabout the Nexus, including one piece of information even the Nexus itselflikely did not have. One of the sub-themes of ‘Zaan Olo Malam’ is the deepeningquestion of whether we really want the Chasm Gates re-opened and the sci-fistar empire to return.

But of that, more later.

The Realms and the Races (We also find out what 'race' everyone is? Or did welearn that in the last one? Injultaprajura is a population melting pot and forthe first time in the Cook Books we get an in-depth low-down on what colour,shape and culture everyone is and how they interact.

Most from Argan, (the first five books) are brownish.Ebrell Islanders are actual-red. Ashmoleans are eqiuvilent to our Africans Ithink. The Japanese-seeming Yandajuulas are literal-grey and extremely racistand those of Wen Endex seem somewhat European-equivalent).

Thus Ends Part One That was a long first part but don’t worry, allthe others will be shorter. If you are tired of reading, now may be a good timeto take a break. Next, we fly to Galsh Ebrek!

.......PART TWO - Werewolf & Wormlord We are back baby! Back to Beowulf. To fly north to WenEndex, the cold and swampy land where men tread mud through warriors halls. Thehomeland of Justina Thrug, to which she escaped at the end of the last book.Here the mother of a monster has arisen from the Swamps, the aged king who longago slew the creatures get, sets the son of his disinherited heir on a mightyquest – for the three saga swords of legend, so that he might defeat SHE, andbecome…. King!

But while this story is set after the previousbook, and likely parallel to the Matter of Argan that occupied the firstfive, it does not directly concern ‘The Thrug’, but the Banker Alfric Danbog.

The Anguish and the Alienation Alfric Danbrog was raised as a sweaty heroic murderingYudonic Knight to fight monsters and do quests, (or at least talk about doingthat), and also as the heir to the disinherited heir to the throne, but brokefrom his family and sought life in the mysterious Bank, a little enclaveof the commercial, cosmopolitan, international, abstract and disembodied in theotherwise dark, wet and muddy Galsh Ebrek.

This cultural split in the mind of a man, between theculture of his birth and that of his age, will be a theme in all threeremaining books. Each has a hero torn between one life-way and another, andeach performs the sins and virtues of each culture to the other. There is a lotof internalising. It is something that makes the stories good.

But first; Alfric! How was he raised? What is his marrow?Here, a scene where the Quester sits in-hall before his king, hearing theendless stories of endless bards and boasters, for hour after hour;

…

"on went the night, full of the wind of words. Ofring-prowed ships; of men in bearskin gloves manning such ships, the masts andthe sails of the same sheeted with ice; of swords adorned with coiled gold; ofsteeds with plaited manes, brave beasts which outran the wind; fell monstersencountered and defeated on a murky moor; horns heartening heroes as men gracedwith deathless courage met their end in contest with onswarming hordes ofheartless reptiles; war-arrows embedded in corpses strewn upon steep rockyscreens, discarded at the foot of precipitous crags, lying derelict in watersbloody and disturbed.

Of this sang the song-singers; and they sang also ofthe undisturbed valour of men who diedwithout complaint though they were pierced to the vitals by deadly-barbedboar-spears; and of the outlandish grief which doomed the hero Hroblar to anuncouth death when his hand-meshed battle corslet animated itself and atethrough his flesh to the bone.

And they sang - there was no stopping it, thoughAlfric would have been content to see all of creation come to an end ratherthan endure any more of this stuff - of the weapon-smiths of old and theweapons of their making.

Ah, the weapons!

Iron agleam in moonlight. Deathblades tempered in theblood of warfare. Ripple-patterned damascene slicing through the flesh of aliencreatures ravenous for blood. The fighting fangs of heroes. Twist-patternedsteel which has dared the hearts of heroes. Swords which lopped hands, whichchopped feet, which shortened legs at the knees, which gouged out hearts andvivisected horses, which dissected the aorta and tasted the filth of the lowerbowl.

Of such the poets sang, much to the delight of thecompany of heroes.

| | | a-gokhan-gultekin |

Of swords they sang, and of armour.

Bucklers proof against a baslisks breath. Meshed mail.Gaunt helms topped with boars and dragons.

And the journeying, the endless trekking and marchingand climbing endured by the thousands of heroes of legend, all of it to bedescribed a footstep at a time, complete with descriptions of the texture ofthe mud through which they walked, and the very length of the leeches whichthere battened upon their flesh.*

Earth was their way. Mud was their way. Ice was theirway. Toes and hamstrings. Shins and shoulders. Corpses stretched lifeless.Lordless men manning the bulwark battlements. Heroes doomed to perish from thefiercest of griefs, dying encumbered by battle-harness, fighting in death inhonour of their battle-vows, vaunting their boasts with the blood of theirlungs on their lips."

…

This is how he was raised, but who is Alfric Danbrog nowand what has he become? He has become a Banker, a servant of the Circleof Banks, of whom we shall learn much later. What does it mean to be a Banker?It means clean clothes and clean floors, well-lit draughtless rooms, calmconversations, the manipulation of abstracts. It means this;

“Maybe it would be possible to develop a kind of politicsin which the great mass of the people would no longer be people at all. Inwhich they would not be even animated rubbish or a lower form of animal life.Suppose one were to create abstract symbols to be manipulated as onemanipulates money. Thus a stinking beggar, a leprous thing of rags andulcerated bones, would no longer be an entity to be either cherished orscorned, helped or rebuffed. Rather, the beggar would be reduced to an abstracttoken, a necessary side-effect of the mathematics of prosperity.

Was it possible?

Was it possible for a ruling politics to be sodetached from reality?

Was it possible, in other words, for politics to bereduced to the painless manipulation of a web of symbols, an exercise of theintellect totally removed (in an emotional sense) from any realworldconsequences?

For a moment, Alfric thought it was possible, andthought too that he might be able to bring about such a state of affairs. Buthe dismissed the thought as an absurdity.

Then began to reconsider.

It happened that the Partnership Banks had alreadygone a long way to creating the necessary philosophical underpinning of anysuch politics; for the manipulating of money already proceeded in a largelyabstract arena substantially divorced from all physical realities. Thus onevery large and complex confederation of interlocked organizations wascondicting its affairs, to a very considerable extent, as if it functioned in asymbolic field rather than a physical universe made of earth and air, fire and water.

As money is today, so the world can be tomorrow.

Thinking thus, Alfric shuddered; and he knew then hisown true capacity for evil.

Evil?

Yes.

Surely it would be evil in the highest degree to treatthe real world as a solipsistic dream to be manipulated for symbolicsatisfaction; and, on the level of practical affairs, to deny the existence ofthe real in favour of the mechanics of daydream. To puppet humans as if theywere but shadows. It would be evil, yes.

But it was infinitely appealing."

…

Since Cook is now writing a character who by his natureis split half way between the Heroic Ideal and cold observation of it, he canwrite his own ambivalence directly into the story and now its character work!And since the protagonist is already questioning, rejecting yet also sometimes,embodying, the Heroic Ideal, Cook himself can relax a little and can allowhimself to actually fulfil some of the core emotional axis of the story.

The Cheese and the Quest Surely this be cringe? I hear you say. A were-Hamster? Amilk-faced assassin with a social conscience? A sketchy knightly order verses amodern bank? A history of racial hatred against Orks, who turn out to bewhale-like swamp dwelling perfectly intelligent and likeable folks with littlesexual dimorphism and who are very helpful to the hero because he managed notto be racist to them? A Knight destined to be King who ends up not being kingand not even a Banker? A feminist story in the background? An Ogre king called‘King Dimple-Dumpling’? What arethese base Prachettisms? Can you truly be telling us that this is an actuallygood book???!

Yes. For several reasons;

Firstly, it is short; therefore, all of its good ideasring out clearly, like pealing bells, spreading their immediate effect from oneend of the text to the other, while its bad ideas, (if it can be said to haveany), are rapidly quenched and forgotten. (As opposed to 'Wish & Wonder',where a compilation of complex techniques and characters combined to clog thebook up, or 'Walrus & War-Wolf', which, while each element of itsparatactic picaresque was fun, did lead to vague fatigue).

Second; we are blessed with a sustainedclose-third-person tracking shot of a questing hero who is sent to do somethings, and, while the plot beyond them, the themes, ideas and the sustainedworld, are revealed in increasing complexity, the hero does indeed do theactual things, and with some alacrity and drive. One always knows roughlywhere one is in ‘Werewolf & Wormlord’. That is; either on theway to the thing, doing the thing, or having done the thing.

Third; we have a reasonably complex and sane protagonist!Not an egregious piece of shit like Sean Sarazin, nor a likeable butslow-witted dufus like Togura Poulaan, but a sane, intelligent, competent, notnecessarily very pleasant but heroic and decent sometimes in a pinchBanker/Yudonic Knight, Alfric Danbog. A professional man in a childless badmarriage, (his fault), a complex relationship with his mildly estranged parents,a carefully hidden case of werewolfism and a Storied Fate awaiting him.

Fourth; we have a much less agonising and neuroticsynthesis between the heroic and the ironic, and between the epic and political. AnyCook-Books are torn between Cooks joy and pleasure in epic fantasticstorytelling and his political realism, grasp of psychology and mild(relatively) liberal neurosis about the Heroic Idea he clearly loves in hisheart.

While, on the surface, the story of the events of ‘Wolf& Worm’ might be taken to be pettily anti-heroic, (Alfric does notbecome King, all of the ruling social ideas are flawed), on a personal level,and as a man, he does actually face up to the terrible challenges facing him,and avoid becoming an utterly evil Banker or bad King. He escapes his badmarriage, (by which I mean his suffering wife who he treated terribly managesto escape him, which is better for both of them). He also manages to reconcilewith his Father, his Mother, his Grandfather the King and together they manageto defeat the very terrible monster; Grendels Mother. A magical sword evendrips to slathers in her noxious blood!

The Classic Cookisms We have at least one hyper-surreal dream sequence andsex-dream with Witches. (I was about to say that this Cook protagonist isslightly unusual in that they are less insanely horny than most of theYoung-Hero protagonists and even Justina Thrug, but I forgot that the crazedfever dream actually included a werewolf summoning and ritual Witch-sex, (thisis never explained). Still he is marginally less horny than manyCook heroes and heroines.)

The Thrug We also have the continued story of Justina Thrug. Havingsurvived her escape from Untulchilamon, her Rise to Power in Wen Endex takesplace in the background of this book, also the tiny dragons which were createdby the Demon in the last book have managed to breed and become a whole newspecies, and are consistently charming.

Cancer What The Hell? With Cook it’s always hard to tell what or how much ofhis protagonists Energy is His energy

sometimes it feels like he is writing out his ownpsycho-social meanderings, semi-mystical moments, dream visions, politicalmusings etc .

Towards the end of the book, one of the charactersreveals that he has cancer and will soon die

It’s particularly horrible.

“’Here, said Nappy, pulling his clothes away from hismidriff.

There Alfric had to look, had to, he had no choice, andit was cancer all right, cancer or some kind of lethal ulcer or somethingworse, yellow at the margins, yellow becoming brown, brown becoming wet blackin the centre, and the centre was a kind of funnel that descended inward,inward to the wet pain and the glistening ooze.

Then Nappy covered the thing once more.”

....

This was published in 1991. Hugh Cook dies of cancer in 2008.

Cancer, and its terrible treatment, will return, far tothe south, and long ago, in the city of Dalar Ken Halvar;

PART THREE – Worshippers & Way Or - how I Became Mau'dib by Mistake

I forgot exactly when we are but I do at leastremember where. We have flown south from Wen Endex, acrossrectangular Moana, past the equatorial isle of Untulchilamon, to thevast somewhat-Australian ruined desert continent of Parengarenga, and tothe dust-blasted city at its heart; Dalar Ken Halvar, city of the SilverEmperor, and home to the single still-active loci of technology and culturefrom the long-vanished science-fiction; the functional Combat College of theStarforce.

The Stage and the Scene The scene of action and the axis of drama in 'Worshipperand Way' is, so far as I can tell, utterly original, I haven't seen anythinglike it before, and produces and strange, dreamlike feel unique to this book.

20,000 years ago Olo Malan was part of a Star-Trek/Ian.M.Banks-Culturedimension-spanning hyper-culture called 'The Nexus'. Then the star gateconnecting this world to the Nexus collapsed and it fell into savagery- throughendless cycles of brief renaissance followed by post-singularity hyperdoom.

The only part of this world where the technology and theideology of the Nexus still works even a little like before is the CombatCollege buried in the mountains of the city of Dara Ken Halvar.

Within this complex, and only here, we havereplicators, post-future medicine, virtual reality training machines, somewhatchilly comfort, sliding doors, materialising doors, clean electricallights and an an omnipresent A.I., with the image and personality of along-gone individual. Making it, in effect, a character. In a way, a strangePrince of the City. But the only thing the Combat College wants to do, it’sonly directive, is to train Star Troopers for the Star Force. A Star Force thatno longer exists.. but might one day exist again, if the Chasm Gates areever re-opened

Outside the matter-energy doors of the Combat College,the sprawling desert city of Dara Ken Halvar is a multiethnic deeply stratifiedpowderkeg under the rule of the often-absent, often depressed Silver Emperor -the acknowledged ruler of the massive, and massively poor and desertfiedcontinent of Parengarenga. Dara Ken Halvar is filled with beggars, debts, cultsand ethnic resentment, and with little water, all of which has to be carriedup, by hand, from the river below which runs to nothing in the Plain of Jarsbeyond. Great gogmagogian vents and abyssal shafts break the surface, relics oflong-crazed weather machines, one dead, the other spewing endless heat. Theyhave eyeless beggars and a ceremonial dog-killing festival. It is a savagenation, of the kind the crew of Star Trek might beam down to in disguise so asnot to break the Prime Directive, though depicted with more complexity,subtlety, sympathy and horror than Star Trek usually leant to its adventure-zonecultures.

Every year, a bunch of (relative) savages from the desertcity of Dara Ken Halvar, come into the Combat College as Cadets, and oversubsequent years of education they are whittled down and trained up as hyper-competentStar Troopers of the Stormforce, ready for anything from surviving on a junglemoon to battling with space-fighters, to taking command of a super spacebattleship, none of which they will ever see. They are also trained andeducated in the ideology and history of the Nexus. Once the graduating classhas achieved its highest level, they are sent back out into desert, dog-eating,blind-beggar city of Dara Ken Halvar, and forgotten, having been trained asStar Troopers.

The action of the book takes place across this strangeboundary between a dreamlike lost post-future and the savage, but very real andconsequential, ethno-politics of a shrivelled primitive desert empire run by anactual Wizard.

What things mean changes as you go through thematter-energy doors of the Combat College. All of the politics, starvation andethnic conflict of the Real World infiltrates the clean Star Trek halls and thestrange, now twenty-millennia-old philosophies and conflicts of the Nexus,themselves seep out into Dara Ken Halvar, mutating and mestatising into strangenew forms.

This would make a really good stage play.

The Hero and the Heretic While our point of view does float a little, the mainobject of our story is Asodo Hatch; an ostensibly powerful man. Hatch is apurple-skinned Frangoni warrior. He trained in the Comat College and, in thetradition of his people, took a break to go and fight in the actual, brutaldesert dust and bloodstained spear warfare of Parengarenga. Unlike mostof the Cadets of the Combat College, he is in middle years, with actualmilitary experience. He is a tall, handsome, muscular man with an impressivetopknot. A leader in his community, he is a direct servant of the SilverEmperor and is in contention for the instructorship of the Combat College; arare and singular role that gives one permanent access to the College as itsde-facto ambassador to Dara Ken Halvar. His main challenger? The brilliant andruthless Embrell Islander, Lupus Lon Oliver. Only one can succeed!

But Asado Hatch is not fighting to succeed, he isfighting to survive. His father recently committed suicide, causing massiveshame to the family, his brother has disavowed the family, his sister is inmassive debt, sufficient to get her enslaved, and is involved with a crazycult, his wife has terminal cancer which is killing her slowly - the onlytreatment is expensive and illegal opium - everything is mortgaged to the hiltand his family position, for which, as a Frangoni, he is solely responsible, isa crazy house of cards which could come down at any moment.

To anyone looking at him from the outside, Hatch is theprotagonist of a great political and military saga, and that is often howpeople treat him; as the protagonist, the man who has a plan, who is going tomake things happen.

Asodo Hatch is not an anti-hero but a null-hero. To mostof the people in the story he seems like a 'main character', a driver of eventsand embodier of the historic moment - and in this book he is in fact the maincharacter, but within his own mind he feels utterly helpless, drivenrelentlessly by tangled webs of outside forces, all of which mutually conflictwith each other and none of which he has any time to adapt to, having toimprovise relentlessly in the moment, moment-by-moment. Even until the finalpages of the book his actual core beliefs and core ideology, remains negotiableto circumstance.

The interrelationship of debt, wealth, economics,politics and a simultaneous synthesis of deeply human emotion reminds me a lotof Sylvia Townsend Warners multi-generational convent story 'The Corner thatHeld Them'. Its relatively rare that a writer can deal simultaneously inpersonal psychology, family dynamics, debt, money, low and high level politicsand often sincere and conflicting religious and ethical impulses at the sametime.

Like ‘Wolf & Worm’, this is another protagonistcaught between cultures - a man who, in a sense, believes in nothing, or comesto almost believe in nothing, like I imagine Cook to be; he knows too much ofthe flaws and failures and invisible compromises of too many different culturesand too many different ways of life to be a thoughtless intuitive believer inany of them. But a believer is what he must become, or pretend to be, for onlyabsolute belief will save him.

The Tragedy of the Triumph While Alfric Danbrog fails in the material and powersense, becoming neither King, nor Senior Banker, he does manage to keep hissoul and restore and renew his sense of self.

Asodo Hatch wins in the end. He beats Lupus Lon Oliver,gets his wife healed of her cancer, protects his Daughter, (and his lover),regains a relationship with his brother, betrays his ancestral god, and any ofthe good aspects of the Nexus culture, sells his honour, massacres those whotrusted him and becomes the keystone of a successful revolutionary theocraticrevolution, for a misogynist faith twenty thousand years old, originallyrevealed only though his criticism of it. A faith he does not believe in butfor which he commits terrible crimes, because he believes it is the only way.

By the end of the story, he has lost his soul. He is theapparent Master of the hour but feels utterly hollow. He will spread thetyrannical religion of Nu-Chala-Nuth across the whole of Parengarengaand beyond and use its tyrannical autocratic power to begin the rebuilding of atechnological society which can repair the Combat College, which will thenspread life-altering Post-Future technology and medicine to the whole of OloMalan.

It will all be to the good, in the end, hopefully, aftermaybe a couple of hundred years. Hopefully.

"'I have unleashed a religion militant. I haveset loose the Nu-Chala-Nuth. My people have consecrated themselves by bloodingtheir swords in the service of faith. I am acclaimed as a Saint already.'

Unconsciously, Hatch let declamatory passion seep intohis voice as he delivered himself of this speech. He spoke as if he addressedan audience of seventy thousand. Rhetoric was ever a Frangoni vice, and Hatchwas true to the ways of his people: there was nothing he liked better than tounleash a speech.

'So,' said Shona softly. 'It can trick, cheat andkill. Oh, and make speeches! Great speeches, Hatch are you proud of yourspeech, are you proud of... aagh! Whats the use? You've decided, haven't you?

'I did what I had to,' said hatch defensively.

Yet he was uncomfortably conscious of his guiltburden. He had brought the Free Corps to destruction, yet many of those people... well ... Hatch has trained with them, had known them as companions andcolleagues ... and ... he had feared for the future, hence the arranged murder.But was it not perhaps better to risk the future than to do something which was... was what? Unpardonable?

Suddenly, very sharply, hatch remembered Lupus LonOliver. Lupus had said that a man who kills himself hands to his son a sharpsword.

'I will not do it,' muttered Hatch.

But...

'I have heard that the Nu-Chala-nuth is no Way forwomen,' said Shone suddenly.

'It is true,' admitted Hatch.

'Then what future for women?' said Shona.

Hatch was about to say that the women must suffer whatthey must. Then caught himself. because - of course! - Shona herself was awoman.

This came as something of a revelation to Hatch. ForAsodo hatch had never thought of the burly Shona as a woman, just as he hadnever thought of her as being one of the Pang, or one of the Yara,the Unreal -though she was all of those. he had always thought of Shona as being, well,Shona. His ally. His friend.

'The men must have something,' said Hatchlamely."

…

If ‘Zaan, OloMalan’ is about the end of an Age of Darkness, then it is a deeply realist, andquite tragic, look at what it takes to actually create states and empires,impose peace, unify peoples and in short, to restore civilisation. For itcannot be done by civilised means.

The New Nexus Naughtiness 'Worshippers & Way' plays a game of long, slowreveals, reveals of both what is going on right now, and the motivations of thepeople involved. One of the deepest of these is the slow drip-feeding of evermore information about the Nexus.

Hatch himself, raised in the frozen culture of the Nexusand educated in its history, strongly suspects it no longer exists; likelycollapsed and fallen into chaos long ago, unable to sustain its owndichotomies. The Narrator itself refers to the Nexus as something like anEmpire of High Riding Energy Lords.

For the power of the Nexus comes from its near-magicaltechnology, and the power of its technology comes from its ability tomanipulate probability, (like the Wizards of Argan do today), and how does thistechnology work? It is born from the mazadath; semi-magical hyper-chiplike chunks of gemlike matter that lie at the heart of every significant pieceof Nexus tech.

And whence the mazadath? Why the Nexus trades forthem, with a curious race of hyper-dimensional aliens called ‘The ShiningOnes’.

In fact the Nexus cannot even manufacture its owntechnological base and does not fundamentally understand how it works.

And whence the Shining Ones? Well.. Guest Gulkan,warlord of Tameran, finds that out in a conversation with God in the next book.The last book!

But before that, one more quote...

The Justice and the Justification Maybe the editors were complaining, or Cook was finallygetting letters about this stuff, or perhaps, writing in a bubble as he did,his mind simply began to turn thusly, for here begins the moral argument, andjustification for his work, here at the end of ‘Worshippers & Way’ not froman epistolaric in-world figure, but from the disembodied Narrator.

“It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moraluniverse, Asodo Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the Lady IroMurasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not agaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candyflossed to life bythe Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of errorand retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies.It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of themoralists.

But if some mission be demanded, if it be said thatthe mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why, then,let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity oflife. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of thishistory be a message in itself. And if something more still be demanded – amoral, perforce! – why then, let the moral be that life is a dice game playedin the shadows with a dog and a ghost.

Consider by the light of that moral the life of AsodoHatch. In the time of his testing, Asodo Hatch used means which he did notrightly know were at his disposal to achieve ends which were not strictly ofhis own choosing. He was swimming, yes, and swimming of his own free will, andin the direction of his choosing – but he was swimming in a river that was inflood, a boiling river of filthy brown water ever churning towards the hot pitof its final embroilment.

And we too in our time may be plunged into such aflood; and therefore should no be too quick to judge, or to say that Hatchshould have drunk the river dry, or should have grown wings and flown, orshould have conceded himself to the flood by evolving himself into a fish.

Let us then grant him the charity of our mercy.

And if it be objected that Hatch, whether swimming ordrowning, had no right to live when so many were dead – why then, know that ittakes only a moment’s courage to die, whereas it takes a lifetimes’ courage tolive. And Asodo Hatch had the greatest of difficulty in finding that lifetimescourage, for the undeniable truth is that his father had handed him both asharpened sword and the incentive to use it.”

.......

PART FOUR – Witchlord & WeaponmasterWe are finally here, the sad too-early end for the doomedglorious megaproject of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness. An age which nowmay never end.

What on earth were you thinking Hugh Cook? TWENTY booksin the FIRST series? And THREE series? You were not thinking at all, at least,not of things like sale and audience appeal, and this is why we love you. It isalso why you need a kicking.

Still, this is our end and we shall accept it. I will doa grand summation but for now I will try to keep things focused on Guest Gulkanand on the story of this book alone. But before even that get a load of this;

“Shabble drifted through the air towards theWitchlord. The fist-sized bubble pressed itself against the Witchlord's cheek,rolled up the Witchlords face, bumped over the ridges of the Witchlordsslanting forehead, shone a tightly focused beam of light into the mysterious recesses of the Witchlords bat-wingears, then rolled down his back, ducked between his legs, and slid upwardsthrough the air till they were (so to speak) face to face once more.

'Welcome to my island,' said Shabble.”

....

He (they)’ s Back Baby! More Shabble incoming!

More Wizards, One Warrior And we are back. Back for a synthesis andexpression of nearly every theme and method in the series so far. Like thefirst book, Witch & Weapon focuses on the epic journeys of some Wizards,mainly Stelt-Pitilikin, the levitating tutor of our hero, and Guest Gulkan, sonof the Witchlord and (eventually), heir to the empire. The violent scholars andsomewhat scholarly violators are our main characters and we see the worldthrough their eyes, and through the interaction between them;

“'I'll take no talk of sense from a schoolteacher,which is all you are,' said Guest. 'I'm an emperors on and heir to an empiremyself. I'm oath-bound to rescue Jocasta, and so I will'.

'You are not oath-bound at all,' said Senk. 'You arenot oath-bound because Jocasta lied to you. The thing cannot make you a wizard.it can only control you, possess you, seize you, subject you. Use you as atool, a thing.'

'But it bound itself to me in honour.' Said Guest.

'It has no honour!' Said Senk. 'Honour is - how can Iput this? You're mortal, you die, you seek significance in the face ofmortality, you seek a meaning. The oath-culture is quest for precisely that:significance in the face of mortality. The honour of a mans death is themeaning of that death. Jocasta shares no such fear of death, hence needs thesupport of no such culture, hence cannot be trusted to hold to an oath. Do youunderstand?

'You are a schoolmaster,' said Guest 'hence have anethnological temperament. But a thing - you're like Sken-Pitilkin. What's itall about, that's what you want to say. Then you riddle out a meaning, then yousay because it’s got a meaning it’s got no meaning. First you shape the thingin words, then you say the thing's only words so it’s nothing. But things arethings despite any number of words, and a thing is good in itself. My horse, mywoman, my honour, my sword. My honour -'

'Your honour is not a thing,' said Senk, with crushingforce. 'You confuse categories. You confuse your horse with your honour whenyour horse is a flesh and blood animal with mass, weight and an appetite forhay, whereas your honour is a cultural construct, which is something quitedifferent.'

'Yes, well,' said Guest, not appreciating that he hadjust been crushed under one of the heavier hammers in the intellectual toolbox,'you're talking categories, but it’s just like breaking up a bit of bread, youget big bits and small bits but it’s all bread when you're finished with it.’”

…

The Boy, and Beyond In 'Words & War', 'Walrus & War-Wolf'and 'Wicked & Witless' we saw the growth of a teenage boy, throughadventure and travail, to the state of manhood and (some), depth, (apart fromSean Sarazin, who remained a tool).

So does 'Witch & Weapon' give us Guest Gulkan as theprecocious murdering horny 14 year old son of an Emperor, and take us throughhis many, many failings, his dooms and dramas, loves and losses, till,seemingly slowly, (for the story covers perhaps a good 20 years), he emerges asa relatively sensible, (for a murdering Yarglat Barbarian), man.

We stay with Guest for much longer than we saw ToguraPoulaan, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Sean Sarazin and because of this his storyis deeper and lonelier. His life-arc takes us more into that of the middle-agedheroes of later books like Justina Thrug and Asado Hatch, with the sorrow thatGuest Gulkan never really has a stable home, being driven, largely by his ownimpetuous energy, on a series of crazed adventures, through his teens and 20'sand into his 30's, where he seems he would really prefer that things would calmdown, but they don't.

The Father and the Failure Themes of fatherhood and especially relationships betweenflawed fathers and odd sons have been present in much of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’.

Togura was overshadowed and ignored. Drake was orphaned, hisguardian, driven mad by Drake and by Syphilis, consistently tries to annihilatehim. His second father-figure, John Arabin, is a conniving, deadly but somewhathonourable and rarely sadistic pirate king from whom Drake learns a lot. Poor,awful Sean Sarazin is raised by the Randian and manipulative Lord Regan, withdisastrous results, and one of his few happy periods, and times in which he isnot an utter dick, is hanging out with his biological father in his forestguerilla revolutionary corps. Alfric Dambrog was Wormlord' is estranged butreconciles Asodo Hatch was tortured bythe suicide of his own father in the arena before the start of the book.

So this is 'Father and Son', Episode Six. A story of twomen tortured by ambition and empathy. The Witchlord, Onash Gulkan, a man whomurdered most of his own family to become Emperor, (normative for the culture,as the Wizards would say), has three Sons, and finds himself somewhatdistressed by the gradually-curdling certainty that his sons will not only endup murdering each other, but will kill him too, and that it will be Guest thatdoes this, for, though an utter tool at the age of 14, he is the bravest, thestrongest, the most cunning and has the strongest will-to-power. A man born offamily, slayer of the same family, wrestles with his genuine love for his sonsand his own Doom, and his own refusal to die, for old though he is, he is stillKingly, and has a Kings will.

Our story really starts with the simultaneous awarenessby Guest and his Father, that Guest will kill his Onash, and follows themwrestling with and against that fate over a consequential reach of history.

From Guests perspective, this is a classic tale, even aGreek drama, of a boy destined to fight and kill his father, escaping that fate,losing everything, actually getting to spend time with his dad and growingcloser, until fate catches up in the end.

Taking us back to 'Wizards and Warriors', and one of thegrand over-themes of the Cook-Books, this is also a story of..

THE GOGMAGOGIC GIGANTISM! Not since 'Walrus & War-Wolf' have we had a hero whotravels so madly and so wildly, by foot, by horse, by ship and now by magicalgate and Wizardly flying machine! His stage is the whole of the world! (Atleast the bits we’ve already seen, and a few more as well).

I'm not sure this makes the story better! At least 'as astory'. The back of the book informs us; "Although it forms part of avast fantasy epic, this volume is a complete and spectacular tale in its ownright." And this has never been less true! The book 'as-a-book' ispretty good, but if you haven't read the others then will seem sketchy taleindeed. The core to the story, if there is one, is stretched like mozzarellaover such a crazy compilation of nations, kingdoms, Banks, oceans, wars,betrayals, imprisonments, mutilations, trans-dimensional gates and a four yearlong marriage, that it would be hard to make out.

If you have read the other books, (and it’s hardto imagine someone reading this one without the others), then 'Witch andWeapon' is a grand condensation, very like the crazy 'War-Wolf & Walrus' inits physical range of adventure and in how it acts as twine that ties togetherhugely disparate events and people and makes clear firstly; yes this is all ONESTORY and everything interacts, and secondly; "Yes I HUGH COOK didindeed plan all this from the very beginning! Remember this bit from that bookand that bit from this book? Well here we are! It all comes together now!!SEE?"

If we are to be anal about it, he planned for twentybooks in the first series alone, so not everything comes together, thestory still has a wonderous superfluity of loose ends everywhere, but a LOTdoes. I found myself, in the middle of the story, skipping back five or sixbooks, to read the same scene as I was reading in 'Witch & Weapon', seenfrom the other point of view. It’s pretty impressive. It may be a uniqueachievement.

The (mild) Metatextual Madness! The Cook-Books have always elements of meta-textualitythreaded through them. Right from the beginning there are things like'translators notes' in which the floating third-person narrator elbows theirway in to comment on a translation or the meaning of a world.

This tendency reached its crazed apogee in 'Wazir &Witch'. Things cool off a bit for 'Wish & Wonders', which still maintainsitself to be an in-world text, but less assaulted by either madness oracademics, (but I think the original 'text' of Wazir & Witch shows up inWish & Wonder as part of the plot??? Cook god damn you.

‘Werewolf & Worm’ and 'Worshippers & Way' recedesomewhat to the usual Cook-Style of floating close third person with occasionalinterjections. But here at the end we get a return to the Epistolary conceitwith the gradual awareness that the book itself is being written by one of thecharacters in it; the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin, a Wizard who, the book assures us,never really did anything wrong and always had everyone’s best interests atheart, and only occasionally tried to run away to save his own skin. Thenarrator, narrating the conversations of Sten-Pitilkin, is wise enough to notethat the adult Guest Gulkan remembers elements of his own youth quitedifferently to what he, and we, saw through the pages of the text at the time.The narrator does not seem aware that we also saw the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin do anumber of very questionable things, (at the time), and adopt some attitudesthat the narrator might not agree with, which he later seems to’ just kindaforget’.

The Necrotic Nexus Guest meets God in this one. Or at least, anextra-dimensional being with simultaneous access to all points in local spaceand time and a perhaps infinite level of knowledge to bestow. It might be ademiurge, or an angel, or a Metatron or something. It calls itself ‘The Lobos’.

"'I was upset,' said the Lobos, now sounding sadrather than angry, 'because the thing which you have about your neck is a thingstolen from one of the Zelamith. Know you the Zelamith?"

'were a race of whispering dragons which lived in theplaces which do not exist, the places which lie between cosmos and cosmos. Foreach of the Zelamith there was a mazadath. And a mazadth, dear child of man, amazadath is a soul. It is like a harp: as the harp is nothing on its own, yetcomes to life when in concord with the harpist, so the mazadath is nothing onits own, yet comes to life when in a synergetic relationship with one of theZelamith. The Zenalith were slaughtered by the Shining Ones, the Vangelis, whobutchered them, then sold their souls to humankind for trifles.'"

…

Well well fucking well. It seems the entireinterdimensional culture of the Nexus was built on the corpses of murderedaliens, and perhaps they never even knew.

The Agony and the Amelioration Let’s count again. One - Morgan Hearst and his growth-arcfrom a Wizard-Hating Rovac warrior to maybe something else. Two - AlfricDanbrog, a man separated from his northern quest-saga knightly culture, and hisparents, and drawn into the more Cosmopolitan evils of the Bank, finding somekind of equanimity towards the end. Three - Asodo Hatch, Frangoni Warrior,Patriarch and slave to the Silver Emperor, but also Star Trooper of the CombatCollege, a man torn always between competing cultural drives.

So this is Cultural Alienation, Episode Four. GuestGulkan has the heart, and balls, and stomach, and mighty EARS of a true YarglatBarbarian, but he was raised as much by the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin as he was byanyone, who also has a claim to 'Fatherhood' on the boy, and Guestswide-ranging experiences across the world, his many encounters with thesuper-and extra-natural, his many languages, including the ever-despisedirregular verbs, gradually displace him from being a 'pure' Yarglat intosomething Other. This might be the Other of Kingship, but even so it is alonely place to be. Unlike the Wizards, he is not part of a semi-immortalconfraternity. He can never really go home and just be Yarglatagain.

Was Cook a culturally displaced person. Based purely onWikipedia, it’s hard to tell. Growing first in England, then living on a tinytropical island for what feels like some very consequential years of his youth,then to New Zeland where he was in the army, but as a medic, essentially the'Wizard' to the 'Warriors'; one of them, a healer amongst killers. Then awriter, a father, a teacher in Japan, a Cancer Patient. If the Age of Darkness is a Guide, Cook wasnever at home at home.

Still, it is partly through this alienation-from-selfthat actual growth is allowed to take place. Olo Malan is in trouble! TheSwarms have taken Argan! Nothing works! An ordinary Yarglat Barbarian is notgoing to cut it! Neither is an ordinary Pirate, Yudonic Knight, Wormlord,Frangoin Warrior or Banker. The world needs new souls and the only way to makea new soul from the ones you’ve got is to start cutting.

…

"So remember, when you find yourself in thepresence of a happily loquacious old soldier, that he is but a victim ofselective amnesia - a fact which may be amply proved by asking him to narratefor you the manner of the death of those of his friends who took the longest todie."

.....

PART FIVE – The Cease and the Substance

“One of the terrors of human existence is that, as weget older, the world loses its solidity and stability which it possessed duringchildhood, then the existing order seemed absolute. Indeed, to a wizard, theworld seems at times a sheer phantasmagoria, in which empires shift, deform,and melt like fog in the sun, and in which the very gods themselves change thefaces which they show to humanity as they endure their evolution”. –(likely) Sten-Pitilkin

…

You can kind of lose your shit when you remember thatoutright child abusers with less talent wrote less books and had more successthan Hugh Cook, who died of cancer in 2008.

Let’s try not to. Instead, like a Wizard rather than aWarrior, let us consider;

Hugh Cook consistently and brilliantly wrote books thatpeople didn’t want in a register and form that they were probably never goingto understand. He wrote in a bubble as perfect, playful, brilliant andindifferent as Shabble. His bubbleation is part of what made him interesting. Hewas probably never going to be a big commercial success.

He also couldn’t write believers, curiously. While henever treats religion with contempt, and is usually sympathetic to thespiritual yearnings which support it, I don’t think he ever wrote a religionfrom the inside so to speak. All faiths were one to Cook, or simplydifferent species of animal.

What then, did he do?

The first is perhaps not the most important, but is thesimplest to explain; he created a ten-volume fantasy epic in which all of thecharacters and events interweave in one simultaneous and concurrent story,so that you can turn back to a book written four years previously andread conversations and interactions that cross years in real time. No-onehas done this before or since. It is an achievement unique in fiction.(Disprove me in the comments if you can).

He wrote stories of deep political, social and psychological realism in the most fantasticand unreal setting. He wrote men, (and some women), of often bad, always flawed,character, but took us through their dark lives without surrendering to eithercynicism or sentimentality. His empathy for humanity never wavered, nor did hiseye glisten with bubbling tears, he showed us only what-was, but with a clearsympathy that told us we should value even that, and value it more because thatis what is really there, not what we dream or imagine is there.

He showed us the structures, empires, faiths, horrors,trauma, failures and sacrifices that might be involved if you had to actually,really, save a world.

Perhaps most importantly, while refusing to lie to usabout anything that mattered, he lied beautifully about everything else, whichmust surely be the gold standard for a writer.

He had a lot of dream sequences. Like a lot a lot. Idon’t know if there is any volume without one and many have several. I’m notcomplaining. Many are the best parts of the books they are in and I took a wordfrom one for the title of this essay; ‘Zaan, said the sun’. Still, there are alot of visionary dream sequences. (And a fair amount of sun-worship.)

He wrote a lot of horny teenage boys. It felt like awhole load. Really maybe a ridiculous amount. There was a lot of horny in thesebooks. He also had a pretty regular, almost ongoing, dialogue between theSoldier and the Scholar, always wearing different faces and leading differentlives, but in some ways the same conversation and the same argument, over thenature and truth of violence and its place in our world.

He created a world! Olo Malan of the Tulip Continuum!Land of the multicoloured stars. Home to bloodstone Injiltaprajura, Dara KenHalvar, the city of the Sun. He made all of Argan, of Parengarengea andYestron, Tameran and the Ravilish Lands!

He unfortunately wrote Sean Sarazin, aka WATASHI! Howeverhe also wrote Yen Olass, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Shabble, which goes someway to putting him in the black. He also put maybe way too many ideas,characters, plotlines and crosshatching literary techniques into ‘Witch &Wazir’, but I tell you what that book is a vibe and, as Steln-Pilitkinwould say;

“The parchment holds the ink, and holds it for alltime. So if the date be lost in the first reading, then it will be found in thesecond.

A second reading!

Is the historian truly counselling a second reading ofhis works?

Yes he is! And shamelessly!

Let it be clearly stated that a second reading is notjust to be recommended but is, rather, close to being compulsory. For this is aTrue History, one which faithfully stives to render the tangled complexities oflife itself. To unknot the tangles of this interweaving in a single readingwill not be easy. After all, the events confused their very victims, so howshould they be clearcut plain to the onlooker?

Read then this history a second time!

…..

He (presumably), organised his notes wonderfully, though,it seems even the ever-perspicuous Cook may indeed have lost track of some ofthe plot thread of some of the more intensely complicated tangles;

“… if you think it a long story, and a weary one, andone quite unnecessary for the performance of this history, why, then blame notthe poor historian. Blame rather a nitpicking tradition of jealous andintellectually impoverished scholarship which lacks the ability to appreciatethe grander of a full-scale historical tapestry, and therefore devotes itselfto picking loose any undefended thread at the corner of such a tapestry.'

Having thus defended this particular thread, let usreturn to the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin.” - likely Hjosta Sten-Pitilkin

The Needful KnowledgeLong ago I made you a promise which I have not forgotten.The secret of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan!’ The final and ultimate piece of wisdom thatHugh Cook would want you to take away from this epic saga! Know then, this;

“... know then the wound! First, one must look, foronly by looking can one know. One must seek for the damage, remembering alwaysthat piercing weapons – one thinks in particular of a quarrel shot from acrossbow – will damage with both instrike and outstrike.

Having found hole or holes, raggages or cleavages,tears and rips, gouges and gaps, one must path the same. And immediately! Haveyou no bandage? Then your hand must serve! But unless one be naked, the onesurely has bandages, for the cloth off ones back will serve when all elsefails. The cleaner the cloth, the better, though the cleanest of cloth is nouse to a washerwoman who has died of bloodloss while the ardent hygienist hasbeen searching for sterility.

Say it of certainty: in the face of bleeding, therescuer must match the urgency of the pumping heart. The wound must be patched,and immediately.

So when you are at war, and your bloodbrother has hisswordhand hacked away by a battleaxe, then do not hesitate. First kill theaxe-wielder. Then wipe the filth of battle from the palm of your hand, andclamp that living flesh of yours to the pumping agony of your bosom friend. Itcan be done in moment, if you have the courage to save as well to kill.

Press your hand to the hot wet pumpage of blood. Presshard, and crush the bloodflow down to nothing. Then keep your hand in placeuntil some hard-panting hero of your acquaintance can spare a few moments fromhis saga-work to assist with a bandage. Then you had best seek the help of ahealer, though the perversity of the world is such that you may find everyavailable pox doctor to have been slaughtered in the first heat of battle.

If such be the case, then your friends handless armshould for the moment be placed in a sling, so that the well-bandaged wound iskept elevated, for the heart finds it harder to pump blood to elevations. And –mind! – do not allow the wound to be dipped in liquid ordure, or steeped inboiling lead, or packed with red mud, or plunged into the sexual aperture of amenstruating cow. ……

…… And if you believe yourself likewise doomed to goto war, then know this of a certainty: if your study in its folly concernsitself with the mere use of weapons then you too are doomed to stand some dayin helpless guilt, watching as the object of your pity dies. So let this textthen carry an explicit message, a message apt for our age of ceaseless warfare:those who would study the use of weapons should study likewise the cure of thatuse.”