Throne of the Crescent Moon

I feel like every one of my book reviews these days is starting off with "For (X) book club…" I may be in too many book clubs. Is three an unusual number of book clubs to be in? Oh well.

Anyway. For the SF/F meetup book club, the book this month is Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I think might be part of a series but works perfectly well as a stand-alone novel. Going into this book, I pretty much knew that 1, it was a fantasy novel of some sort, 2, Saladin Ahmed is sometimes funny on Twitter, and 3, from the title and cover art I figured it the world would be sort of Middle-East-based more than Europe-based.

I was pretty dead-on regarding #3. The worldbuilding is pretty decent considering it's the first novel in a series and it clocks in at less than 300 pages; I think I'm a bit spoiled about worldbuilding these days… there's a part of me that wants to be like "Wah it's not as fleshed out as, for example, Tortall" but then I remember that there are seventeen Tortall books and it's not very fleshed out in just the first one either. The Crescent Moon kingdoms are essentially Ye Olde Medieval Arabia, which can be a nice change from the continual flow of Ye Olde Medieval Western Europe books in the genre, but I would also probably not be able to put up any kind of specific counterargument if you told me it took place in the same universe as Disney's Aladdin. (Maybe the lack of musical numbers.) It's a vivid and accessible kind of Ye Olde Medieval Arabia setting, full of the food porn we've all come to expect of the fantasy genre, brief mentions of other lands outside the Kingdom's borders, and intriguing tidbits about a fallen prior civilization with ill-understood magic. The fallen prior civilization is transparently a sinister take on Ancient Egypt, even up to the name, Kem (Kemet was the name for Egypt in Ancient Egyptian). I, for one, definitely want to hear more about Evil-Magic-Ancient-Egypt in the upcoming books.

The political situation in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms, and in particular its enormous capital city of Dhamasawaat, is tenuous. The current Khalif is cruel, greedy, and entirely self-absorbed, and the city is stressed to the breaking point under his callous mismanagement. (This mismanagement includes causing massive traffic jams that last half a day or more. THIS IS BAD FOR YOUR POLITICAL CAREER, just ask Chris Christie.) A flamboyant, Robin-Hood like figure calling himself the Falcon Prince has shown up to steal from the rich and give to the poor, give bombastic speeches, interrupt public executions, have fabulous moustachios, and that sort of thing. As one would expect, he is a very polarizing figure.

In the middle of this political unrest, a bunch of people are getting murdered in very nasty ways—hearts torn out, souls devoured, that sort of thing. The murders don't have anything to do with either of these political factions—they are the work of some monsters: mostly ghuls, but also a nasty shadow creature called a manjackal, who is surprisingly whiny and talks about himself in the third person. The main plot follows our band of heroes as they try to fight the ghuls and the manjackal, and to find and kill whatever sorcerer is raising these creatures before he can drown Dhamasawaat in rivers of blood and steal the Crescent Moon Throne from its two current contenders.

Our band of heroes consists of three to five people, depending on how you want to count—the book jacket only mentions three but I think it's pretty obviously five. Our protagonist is Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, who is not actually a doctor kind of doctor; members of his particular order of ghul hunters are called Doctors by tradition. (I'm not sure why. Possibly the author just likes the title "Doctor." If so, I cannot actually fault him for this.) Adoulla is getting too old to be a proper ghul hunter—he's about seventy—and he really just wants to retire with his books and drink cardamom tea and marry his ex-girlfriend Miri, a madam who doubles as a sort of extragovernmental spymaster around the city. Adoulla also enjoys trading insults with his friends, complaining about how old and fat he is, and making fun of his assistant, Rasheed. Rasheed bas Rasheed is a dervish of some extremely puritanical holy order or other, whose entire purpose in life is to be the perfect weapon of God. To this end, he helps Adoulla kill ghuls, but spends most of his time being scandalized over one thing or another and fretting about the inevitable conflict that crops up when his list of pious rules and proscriptions bumps up against how life actually happens.

While hunting ghuls, Adoulla and Rasheed meet Zamia, the last member of her particular band of the Badawi tribe, who were all slaughtered by the ghuls and manjackals and other horrors raised by the Mysterious Evil Sorcerer. Zamia can turn into a lioness. She and Rasheed almost immediately have awkward feelings about each other that neither of them wants to deal with, as they are both so impressed with how unbearably serious the other one is. (Adoulla, of course, endlessly makes fun of them for being soulmates in stick-up-their-butts-itude, otherwise they'd probably collapse into a black hole of humorlessness.) Zamia joins up with Adoulla and Rasheed so that she can get vengeance for her tribe. When the three of them are attacked in Adoulla's house (which is supposed to be impossible) by the manjackal and a couple of sand ghuls, Zamia is injured and the house burns down, so they team up with two of the Doctor's old friends and neighbors, a married couple consisting of a magus and an alkhemist. (…The vaguely Arabified spellings of words that are common in English language fantasy annoyed me a little at first, but eventually I got used to them. The same cannot be said of Microsoft Word, which keeps trying to correct the spellings to "ghouls" and "alchemist.") The rest of the plot is a pleasant mix of all the things that make fantasy-adventure fun—unravelling old curses on old scrolls, almost getting killed by thuggish guardsmen, more monsters, magical healing, treasonous plots, unlikely allies, some musings on class warfare and the duties of kings.

The one thing notably missing from the usual roster of Stuff What Goes In Fantasy Adventure Novels is "interesting pantheon of gods," in either its definitely-real-because-they-show-up-and-mess-with-people incarnation (see: Tortall) or the don't-show-up-therefore-people-squabble-over-them incarnation (see: Westeros). In the Crescent Moon kingdoms, everyone is monotheistic. Period. The culture is steeped in religion, with the common speech patterns heavily peppered by God references regardless of the level or type of personal devotion of the speaker. While the details of the religion are a bit vague, despite the extensive quotations from its holy texts, one thing is clear: it's the most monotheistic version of monotheism I've seen in a long time. (It isn't Islam; it's definitely a fictional religion. It seems to fit within the moral strictures typical of Abrahamic monotheistic religions—there's definitely a bit of a purity culture thing going on with some of the holy orders—but it doesn't draw on any specific rituals of any real-world religions that I'm aware of.) The deity-level characters are God, a Lucifer-like figure called the Traitorous Angel, and what sounds like an undifferentiated host of other Angels. There aren't even any particularly noteworthy Prophets named. Personally, this didn't really work for me because I think monotheism is absolutely boring as fuck. I can only even handle historical medieval-Europe-y stuff that's heavily steeped in Christianity because medieval Europe's version of Christianity—Catholicism—is practically half-pagan in its endless roster of named Angels and Saints, not to mention that its one God is three characters. (I grew up Catholic, and when I started questioning Catholicism, one of the reasons I could never seriously consider switching to a more liberal Protestant church is because Protestantism is so incredibly boring, just God and Jesus and Satan and nobody else.) So while the cast of monsters, evil sorcerers, shape-shifters, people with various magical powers, and other down-on-the-ground-level myths is fabulous, I couldn't help but feel that there was a bit too much theism for how mono it was.

Overall it was a fun, quick read; but… that didn't entirely work for me. I'll be very interested to see if the sequels end up providing more depth to the world and the characters, because, while I like a good escapist monster-hunting adventure now and again, for some reason I feel like this book should have been less fluffy than it was—I wanted more, although it's hard for me to put my finger on precisely what it is I wanted more of, whether it was worldbuilding or characterization or explorations of power systems, but I definitely wanted more depth of some sort.

Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/40655.html