“Swyfte, Will Swyfte”: Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull

Faeries.  British Folklore.  Alternate Elizabethan History.  Magic.  Spies.  Political Intrigue.  Christopher Marlowe.  If these fantastic components weren’t enough to get me excited about reading The Silver Skull, the first novel in the new Swords of Albion trilogy, the fact that Mark Chadbourn is the author sealed the deal.  If not, I might have actually been a bit more tentative to pick up the volume, as only last year, I was bitterly disappointed by Elizabeth Bear’s The Promethean Age series, which utilized all of the above listed elements (albeit in a very different manner) but whose author squandered their potential by also making the books unnecessarily pretentious, impenetrable, and actively contemptuous of the reader without an advanced degree in History and Mythology.

With Chadbourn, however, I had no doubt from the start that the material would be in excellent hands.  An expert on British mythology and folklore, he is a master not only at crafting brilliant fantasy novels with complex characters and nail-biting suspense but ones which demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge without condescension or awkward exposition. Chadbourn is the rare sort of author who can layer a novel with history and mythology, teaching the reader a great deal along the way, without seeming as if he is delivering a lecture or lesson.  The information flows with the natural rhythms of dialogue.  His stories are rich from a plotting, characterization, mythological, and even philosophical standpoint, but he also never forgets that a good story’s first priority must be to entertain and then to enlighten. He weaves historical events into his tale, providing secret, magical explanations that are clever and make perfect sense in the context of the universe he has constructed. He also has a skillful manner of introducing a large number of characters–both historical and fictional–in a short amount of time, but presenting each one so vividly that they are instantly memorable and distinguishable from one another, something which is particularly appreciated in a novel filled with so many spies.

Will Swyfte, the protagonist of The Silver Skull, is a particularly memorable hero, who–much like Vidar, the protagonist of Lord of Silence, the last Chadbourn novel I read–must at times perform actions so dark and morally objectionable he can veer into the realm of “antihero.”  Known as England’s greatest spy, the dashing, roguish, swashbuckling Swyfte is redolent of James Bond, with John Dee providing him with the types of explosives and weapons hidden in otherwise innocuous items that Q might have, were he around in the 1600s.  One of the most fascinating aspects of the character is that Swyfte’s boss, the historical Walsingham, has turned him into a household name.  The book features a running gag in which people ask Will how he can be such a great spy since everybody knows who he is; the answer is that his superstar, ladies’ man persona is but a facade, obscuring the dark secrets he knows and the unspeakable things he has had to do in the name of protecting his country.  His celebrity status (one gets the sense that comic books would have been written about him, had they existed back then) is a decoy to fool the populace into thinking that England is safe and protected.

Swyfte is such a fantastic creation, however, because he encompasses both of these personas.  On the surface, he is a jovial, adventurous hero who can get out of any scrape and defeat the bad guy, no matter how badly the odds are stacked against him.  Particularly in some of the scenarios that pit him against ancient, riddle-fueled security systems, he is James Bond and Indiana Jones rolled into one.  Deeper down, however, he is a man who has spent the majority of his adult life in a great deal of psychic pain, due to the loss of his love, Jenny, years before, and due to his knowledge of the Enemy.

The Enemy are the Fair Folk; the Unseelie Court; the Faeries, who, for reasons we come to learn over the course of the book, demand retribution from England.  These are naturally not the good fairies of children’s stories.  These are terrifying, merciless, thoroughly alien creatures who cannot be understood on any human level; who can whisper a secret into a man’s ear and drive him mad; who can tear people’s minds to shreds with tortures unimaginable; and they will not rest until they have reclaimed the lands of Britain for their own.  Their current plan involves using a magical device known as the Silver Skull as a weapon of mass destruction to slaughter thousands of people, and they have influenced and manipulated the rulers of other countries, such as Philip of Spain, to help them in their quest.  And Will Swyfte is, of course, England’s greatest chance for survival.  It is one of the novel’s major strengths that it can be so thrillingly adventuresome and yet also capture a foreboding, creeping sense of imminent darkness from start to finish.  There are consequences to being a leader or a hero in The Silver Skull, and one of them might be in sacrificing one’s humanity–becoming almost indistinguishable from the Enemy.  The character of Launceston, who has been irreparably, dangerously warped by his years as a spy, is a prime example of this.

Another is at the center of a jaw-dropping revelation in the final pages of the novel that feels as shocking as it does inevitable, tying together all of the novel’s thematic threads in a grim bow and launching the story to an even more startling and fascinating plane, which should be explored in more depth in the next two volumes of the trilogy, the first of which is due to be released later this year. As with all of Chadbourn’s books that I have read to date, this volume ends on a note of resolution, so the reader doesn’t feel as if he has spent days with a group of characters only to be left hanging at the end of a cliff.  The Silver Skull is a full and satisfying reading experience that leaves one satiated while extremely eager to discover what’s in store for Will Swyfte and England in the rest of the Swords of Albion series.

Speaking of which, I have also come to learn that Will Swyfte was first introduced in Chadbourn’s earlier Kingdom of the Serpent trilogy, which is itself a sequel to his Age of Misrule trilogy.  Since there are many overlapping themes between the works (not the least of which being the modern world being attacked by a far more powerful, ancient force who possessed the land long before humans came on the scene) and now an overlapping character, and there are also thematic overlaps between both of these series and Lord of Silence, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of Chadbourn’s novels eventually assembled into one grander, meta arc.  It will take at least a few years to know for sure.  The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent trilogies aren’t yet available in America, Lord of Silence is currently on indefinite hold, and it will take almost two years more to reach the end of Swords of Albion, but in the meantime, this tantalizing concept is something to ponder while waiting for the next Chadbourn.

Previous Mark Chadbourn Reviews

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The Silver Skull

Related posts:

1. “Who Am I?”: Mark Chadbourn’s Lord of Silence
2. The End?: Mark Chadbourn’s The Hounds of Avalon
3. The Last Crusade: Mark Chadbourn’s The Devil in Green
4. “A Whole New World”: Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule
5. Dark Lady: Mark Chadbourn’s The Queen of Sinister

Tagged as: Books, Mark Chadbourn, Swords of Albion, The Silver Skull