On The Nightstand – The Thousand Names – 4/14/2018

This one was unplanned.  I’d just finished my second April release – “The Night Dahlia” by R.S. Belcher – and I was honestly without direction on to what I was going to read next.  It’s not that I didn’t have plenty of choices – the Library’s full of them – I just didn’t have anything that was on its knees – begging to be read.  When I wind up in that situation, I sometimes just allow myself to be guided by chance.  I’ll sit in my chair in the Library:

and let my eyes wander – scan the room and see what I fasten on first.

That’s exactly what I did this week and I wound up landing on “The Thousand Names” by Django Wexler.  I’d bought this one at Barnes & Noble in 2013 when it first came out but had never gotten ’round to it.  Thankfully, my random selection turned out to be a pretty good one.

Once I jumped in, I found that I really didn’t want to put it down.  There were so many things Wexler did well in this story that I found myself regretting the need to leave for work every morning – I just wanted to read through to the end.  Here’s just a few of the things that made it fun.

First, he keeps it simple.  He obviously wrote this as the first volume in an extended narrative but he didn’t feel the need to hit me with too much up front.  In the same way that Weber started small in his Honor Harrington epic with “On Basilisk Station”, we start out in a small, insignificant corner of his world with characters who are, at the time, small insignificant people.  He gives you a simple yet compelling baseline story that allows you to get to know his protagonists when they’re still nobodies who, at the time, are playing small ball.  Marcus and Winter become that much more worthy to the reader because you get to see them at that point in time when they’re on a very slow boat to nowhere.  Their growth over the course of the story is more believable and compelling due to how they’re introduced and the minor ugliness they have to overcome during the first few chapters of the book.

Second, I actually love the fact that magic plays no part in the narrative until the final 100 pages or so.  The entire first book is devoted to a very conventional military campaign – something that really appealed to me.  While you’re introduced to Colonel Janus relatively early in the book and while there are hints that he’s arrived to assume command of the Colonials for reasons far more complex than putting down a local rebellion, almost the entire book focuses on just that – his work to rebuild the Colonials and the military campaign he conducts to destroy the rebel coalition.  It’s actually a very well written fictional military history.  Wexler gets this part right and serves up descriptions of a series of battles that are both exciting and feel factual.  While Janus is obviously a skilled tactician, he’s conventional and there’s nothing in his battles that ever strike me as silly or out of bounds.

In fact, it’s pretty obvious that he’s modeled Janus on Napoleon as a tactician and a battlefield commander.  He makes reference to this in the introduction and he calls out David G. Chandler’s “The Campaigns Of Napoleon” as one of his sources of inspiration:

This is THE definitive history of Napoleon and his military campaigns.  At almost 1,200 pages in hardcover, reading it is no small task but for anyone interested in the time and the man, I would strongly recommend it.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I learned by reading this book.

As you read through this first volume of the series, you see Napoleon in Janus – his emphasis on mobility, effective use of cavalry as screening elements, willingness to split his command and fight multiple, concurrent engagements, the decisive nature of artillery and a willingness to put smaller units at risk in order to isolate and defeat larger elements of an enemy army.  Combine this with pretty accurate descriptions of the hardware used by armies during the Napoleonic age as well as the way he makes you feel the random and terrifying nature of the battlefield experience and you have a great fictional military history.  If you like this stuff, you’ll love the novel just for the way he marches you through the campaign to defeat the rebels – the Redeemers – and place his King’s allied Prince back on the local throne.

Finally, once he does introduce the element of magic – as well as the larger political context  at home that explains Janus’ presence in this far corner of the world – he does it skillfully and in a pretty compelling way.  There’s only a taste of this in the last 100 pages of the book but the way Wexler brings it in – serving up just enough to make you want to learn more – he’s opened a huge door for his readers to walk through.  By the time you get to the final pages of the book, Janus has convinced Marcus and Winter – who have grown into pretty formidable characters over the course of pretty grueling military campaign – to ally themselves with him in the larger project he’s pursuing on behalf of King and Country.

It’s all very skillfully done and it makes for a great read.  Short to long – there’s a lot to like about this book and I enjoyed it enough so that I’ve already ordered Book Two – “The Shadow Throne” – which should be arriving next week.

I was actually amazed that this series, since I picked up the first volume in 2013, has grown to 5 main novels, one short story prequel and one novella.  Titles are listed below in reading order:

The Penitant Damned – prequel short story

The Thousand Names – Main Novel #1

The Shadow Throne – Main Novel #2

The Shadow Of Elysium – Supplemental Novella

The Price Of Valor – Main Novel #3

The Guns Of Empire – Main Novel #4

The Infernal Battalion – Main Novel #5

If “The Shadow Throne” is as good as “The Thousand Names”, I’ll be buying and reading all of these.