“Who Am I?”: Mark Chadbourn’s Lord of Silence

A few months ago, I was blown away by Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule trilogy, three books which practically redefined the Tolkienesque quest novel.  It was, therefore, with great anticipation that I began Lord of Silence, the first in a new series, which I was elated to find in a science-fiction bookstore while on vacation last month, particularly because I had been looking forward to reading his also-new The Swords of Albion series and hadn’t been aware of this one’s existence.  While discovering the book was a surprise, how absorbing, entertaining, and creative it is, certainly was not.  I had been well-prepared for that, thanks to my earlier Chadbourn reading experience.  It is a mark of the strength and versatility of his storytelling that Lord of Silence deals with some of the same themes as his earlier work and exhibits a similar complexity of character development and world-building, while feeling very different indeed.

Whereas Age of Misrule is clearly set in our modern day, Lord of Silence takes place in unfamiliar, more archaic terrain, in a world that exhibits an intriguing blend of influences from a wide range of Earth cultures.  One of the main religions–of which there are dozens–seems to be modeled on Christianity, but others have more polytheistic origins.  Meanwhile, character names derive from a number of varying ethnicities, including British, Celtic, Asian, Indian, Arabic, and others.  All of these numerous, clashing backgrounds coexist in the melting pot of a city, Idriss, which is surrounded on all sides by a treacherous, cursed, fairy-tale forest full of mythical terrors and paths that shift and change, spelling near-certain doom for anyone unwise enough to enter.  Most of the cramped people of Idriss live out their entire lives without ever leaving the stifling walls of the kingdom, in a fashion reminiscent of Mervyn Peake’s classic fantasy, Gormenghast. Much like in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, it is too dangerous for them to enter the woods.  Unlike in that misbegotten film, however, the supernatural threat in this forest is very real.  Incidentally, Lord of Silence shares other thematic elements with The Village but carries them off with far greater intelligence and finesse.

One may wonder how people arrived in Idriss in the first place, given the nature of the woods.  The answer to that question is, in fact, unknown by a great deal of the population.  While some people have wandered in from other places after luckily and inadvertently surviving the forest’s horrors, only to find themselves forever stuck for fear of not being so lucky again–particularly since no cartographer would be able to survive drawing up a map, and even if one could, no conventional map would be useful, because the forest is constantly changing–most of the others have been there for generations.  Furthermore, the people of Idriss have no knowledge about their ancestors’ history or their past.  They struggle through existences full of toil and hardship, living solely in the cultural vacuum of the now.  Everything else–the outside world, their own histories–are abstract concepts at best.

Seemingly the only person for whom the urge to discover the truth of the world and his place in it is a driving force is Vidar, a man who was rescued from the forest three years earlier–lost, confused, and stricken with amnesia.  Asgrim, a man who befriended him–also from elsewhere–dubbed him after one of his gods, also known as Ghost Warrior, Lord of Silence, Stealth, and Vengeance.  The name is fitting because of a large, mysterious orb embedded in Vidar’s chest, referred to as the Vampire Jewel.  It effectively turns Vidar himself into a twist on the vampire legend, as it forces him to drain other people’s life forces to survive.  Whenever he kills another human, it recharges the jewel, which provides him with health and strength, but as soon as the power depletes, the jewel begins to feed on his own energy and will continue to suck him dry until he kills again.  Although Vidar–who the king has made head of the Crimson Hunt, his military police force–only slays criminals, this need for blood separates him from the rest of society.  In the hands of a lesser author, a character who subsists on such darkness and who does not know his real identity, might alienate the reader, as he is indeed, very alien, with emotions that can be hard to relate to.  Additionally, he performs a number of actions that make him a morally grey hero at best, if not an antihero.  Chadbourn, however, always manages to hone in on Vidar’s humanity, making his situation understandable, if not fully approachable.  We would never feel comfortable embracing him, and nor should we, but he is someone we root for, even though he can be hard to like.

This is a trait that the majority of characters in Lord of Silence have in common.  Cheyne, for example, is a friend of Vidar’s who at times seems close to sociopathic in his lack of emotion, Kantian ethics, and casual ability to kill with no remorse.  Chadbourn still, however, finds ways to place this character, who might have otherwise seemed a monster, into situations which force us to see past his cruel exterior.  Meanwhile, Vidar’s love interest, Rhiannon, an Inquisitor (a more medieval version of the police detectives of our world), is also rather cold and distant, having been raised to be so by the harsh rulers of her order.  In short, all of this novel’s characters live in a reality so far removed from our own that none are as comprehensible to us as the modern day world and characters of Age of Misrule.  Still, Chadbourn imbues them with many of the same qualities as the heroes from the previous series, particularly Veitch, the ex-con.  They are all basically everyday people who must deal with, conquer, and at times even embrace aspects of their inner darkness in order to become heroes.  In Lord of Silence, Chadbourn proves as adept at making one care for characters with whom one might initially seem to have nothing in common as he did with those closer to our own world view and life experiences.

Lord of Silence hinges on twists and revelations that I would not want to spoil for anything in the world, so I hesitate to say much about its plot.  Suffice it to say that it revolves around the investigation of a serial killer who is ritualistically murdering Idriss citizens and seems to be inspired by Batman’s Joker, with preternaturally white skin, an eerily wide smile, wild, unnaturally colored hair, and mad eyes (when he is first spotted, his cloak is tellingly described as “billowing behind him like the wings of a giant bat”).  Not only do these murders, striking fear in the soul of Idriss’ citizens, threaten to unravel the delicate balance of its society but they propel Vidar on a quest of self-discovery that might end up revealing the truth not only behind his own shadowed past but that of this entire, very strange world.  Lord of Silence is a truly masterful blend of secondary-world fantasy, fairy tale, forensics procedural, religious mystery, horror, suspense, and more which, like each of the Age of Misrule volumes, ends on a note that provides satisfying closure for the immediate arc even as it has this reader–and many others, I’m sure–desperately clamoring for the next installment.

Related posts:

1. The Last Crusade: Mark Chadbourn’s The Devil in Green
2. “Swyfte, Will Swyfte”: Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull
3. The End?: Mark Chadbourn’s The Hounds of Avalon
4. “A Whole New World”: Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule
5. Dark Lady: Mark Chadbourn’s The Queen of Sinister

Tagged as: Books, Lord of Silence, Mark Chadbourn