Review: The Curse of Chalion

Initially the Curse of Chalion moved pretty slowly. Several chapters into the book nothing much “action-wise” has still to really occur. In addition the main character of Cazaril started unlike most fantasy protagonists I had read. He was very reserved, almost the opposite of your usual hero due to being quite a broken man physically, mentally and spiritually. But it was the introduction to this very different but believable character that initially “hooked” me on the book and got me reading. As he recovers he eventually comes out his shell and if anything might be called “too perfect” of a character. I heard one reviewer call him the male version of a “Mary Sue”. I don’t know if I would go to that degree, but while the character seemed to be sometimes unbelievably “good” he was also very well written and engaging.

Besides the character of Cazaril, the interesting fantasy idea of “death magic” that is introduced in the first chapter also hooked me. Basically a person can perform an illegal ritual that if it works will call up a demon that will magically murder your target victim, but this demon will also ALWAYS kill the person who performs or even orders the ritual. This intial idea of course comes back in a BIG way part way into the book. It is the build-up to this death-magic event (which does not go as planned), and some of the fall out from it where the book first really picked up and became engaging to me and difficult to put down.

After this big event which I am not completely revealing here even in this spoiler-laden section of the review as it is so key, we learn more about the gods and magic of the world. You discover that the family line that rules Chailion is under a curse. As the head of Chalion, the Roya Orico is the most affected, but all the line including Cazaril’s charge Iselle is “infected”. Primarily through the interesting character of Umegat, Cazaril learns a lot more about the gods, their need to enter the world through simple animals or through a human who has given himself to the gods of his own free will.

While I really liked the well thought out idea behind the pantheon of gods and most of the supernatural aspects of this novel, the whole idea of the curse seemed pretty lame. The curse being held off somewhat by Orico’s menagerie of sacred animals and his downfall when that menagerie is taken away a little later in a dramatic page-turner section also seemed pretty hoaky to me. Near the end we learn a little more how the curse came to be, but mostly it seemed what it was, a much needed plot device.

Eventually our hero is off to get the prince of the neighboring country of Ibra to marry our heroine in hopes that by marying out of the ruling line of Chalion, Iselle can escape both the curse and the political danger she has found herself in. The whole middle section, from shortly after the dramatic scene involving death magic in the courts of Cardegos, until Cazaril’s ambasadorial quest to the neighboring country had a number of flaws I thought. It was still largely well written, but I had issues not only with the curse, but with our hero who seems to be merely reacting to one thing after another, the sudden lack of a real villian, and any real jeopordy. At this point even the “crime” of death magic suddenly becomes not so bad and the religious big wigs are more than willing to look the other way. The largest villian from earlier in the story has been largely illiminated, the other who you thought was behind the first turns out (at least here) to be just another victim of the curse who is easily circumnavigated.

The book really grabbed me again once Cazaril leaves Cardegos to take Iselle’s proposal to Bergon, the heir of Ibra. There was a lot of action in this climatic section too of course. I pretty much had difficulty putting the book down from here on out.

Here’s one great quote from this section:

Bergon shook his head. “Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I’d always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.”

“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice — if not whether, then how, they may endure.”

As the book draws to a close our wishy-washy villain suddenly becomes very villainous again. Cazaril our “old” hero has grown in reverse and seems young again having defeated his own inner demons, seen somewhat into the realm of the gods (which was a very well written bit of prose), and now “leaks poetry”. Iselle gets her man, Cazaril gets his girl, and we have a thoroughly enjoyable (if somewhat campy) happy ending.