The Eyes Of A King by Catherine Banner
Sep. 7th, 2008 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
These are the last words I will write. "Tell me everything from the beginning," you said. "Explain to me why you did it." I have. There is nothing left to tell you any more.
Leo North has spent five years remembering. He has recalled the tediousness of attending military school and the oppresiveness of living with his pious, fearful grandmother and his younger brother. He has relived the moment when everything changed.
Five years ago, Leo found a blank book in the snow and was amazed when words started to appear on the pages. Passages wove together his family's past, the history of his country, Malonia - and that of a parallel world called England, where Ryan, the heir to the Malonian throne, had been exiled following the assassination of his parents.
At the same time, Leo's narrow path took some unexpected tragic turns and the mysterious book, initially an escape, became inextricably linked to him and his world. Leo has spent five years retracing his steps and filling in the blanks of the journey he made. This is Leo's story. This is the book.
The promotion for this book makes much of Catherine Banner's age - she was 14 when she started writing this trilogy and will be starting university this autumn - thereby drawing a parallel with other teenage writers, such as Christopher Paolini and Helen Oyeyemi. Completing a manuscript (let alone working on a trilogy) when you're still a teenager is a hell of an achievement and I commend Banner for it. However, regardless of an author's age, a novel has to stand or fail on its own merits and for me, THE EYES OF A KING fails.
The story is split into two strands. The main strand follows Leo North, a 14 year old boy with magical powers that his grandmother is keen he keep hidden from other people. He attends a military academy in Malonia that he hates and lives with his grandmother and younger brother, Stirling, in a tennament block in Kalitzstad, the capital city. The second strand follows a man called Arthur Field, who begins working as a butler for a military collector called Raymond somewhere in England. It is this strand that is recounted through the book that Leo finds one day in the snow and as the strand continues, you discover that Arthur is really a magician exiled from Maloria, who becomes guardian to the exiled Prince Ryan. Banner uses this second strand to dump the background information to the novel - the overthrow of the king by Lucien and the sorceress Talitha, and what happens to Prince Ryan and Arthur's niece, Anna.
Unfortunately very little of interest actually happens in Leo's strand of the story. Essentially limited to recounting snow in the summer (and Banner repeated descriptions of snow or the weather as being "cold" get very boring, very quickly), the spread of a mysterious illness called "silent fever" and Leo's relationship with the teenage Maria and her son, Anselm, who come to live in his block, the lack of action makes for dull reading. The problem is enhanced by the fact that both Stirling (who serves as the emotional core of the strand) and Leo are poorly characterised. With Leo, Banner has tried too hard to create a flawed hero. Here is a character who bickers with his overly protective and religious grandmother, but who appears to care for and is protective of his younger brother. The next minute though, he thinks only of himself and makes little effort to help his brother when he really needs it, preferring to instead wallow in self-pity. Stirling by contrast is some kind of saintly ingenue. Aged 8, he's supposedly unable to read and yet is able to read out loud pages from a newspaper. His main purpose is to demonstrate his religious devotiation and desire to be a priest but the problem with his piety is that it makes it difficult to empathise with him, which is necessary given that the main part of the plot turns on what happens to him. More moving is the depiction of the grandmother's slow mental decline towards the end of the book, but her stilted characterisation in the early parts (by turns shouting, nagging and berating) again make it difficult to fully empathise.
The Arthur segment to the story is purely info-dumping to get the backstory in and despite the publisher trying to liven it up by putting it in different fonts, it's also tedious reading. This is mainly because the characters are never allowed to breathe on the page. Indeed Prince Ryan doesn't appear until half-way through and when he does, there's little about him that seems interesting. Ditto for Anna. They're both there to keep the 'destiny' element to the story alive, which robs the novel of tension and drama. Banner makes the situation worse by having Leo's strand repeat information that's already been recounted in Arthur's strand (and vice versa), the repetition again serving to slow down the pace. Banner's inexperience also shows through her having Leo and Stirling engage in several "as you know" conversations to get across information about how Maloria works as a society, it's clunky and reinforces the artificial nature of the world she's created.
Banner incorporates mature themes in her book - including religion, destiny and war. However, she deals with the themes in a simplistic, somewhat naive way, particularly with religion. It's only Leo who seeks to challenge the notion of God as it's taught to them, but even he comes around to believing when the chips are down. There are hints of better things to come from the author - notably in a scene where Leo threatens a soldier with a gun, which is tense and believable - but these are few and far between. As it stands, I'm not interested enough to continue reading this trilogy.
The Verdict:
There are hints in the text of better things to come from Catherine Banner, but on the strength of this novel, I don't think she's really there yet. The Eyes of a King is dull reading where very little happens and it's difficult to see how this will improve over the remaining books in this trilogy.
Leo North has spent five years remembering. He has recalled the tediousness of attending military school and the oppresiveness of living with his pious, fearful grandmother and his younger brother. He has relived the moment when everything changed.
Five years ago, Leo found a blank book in the snow and was amazed when words started to appear on the pages. Passages wove together his family's past, the history of his country, Malonia - and that of a parallel world called England, where Ryan, the heir to the Malonian throne, had been exiled following the assassination of his parents.
At the same time, Leo's narrow path took some unexpected tragic turns and the mysterious book, initially an escape, became inextricably linked to him and his world. Leo has spent five years retracing his steps and filling in the blanks of the journey he made. This is Leo's story. This is the book.
The promotion for this book makes much of Catherine Banner's age - she was 14 when she started writing this trilogy and will be starting university this autumn - thereby drawing a parallel with other teenage writers, such as Christopher Paolini and Helen Oyeyemi. Completing a manuscript (let alone working on a trilogy) when you're still a teenager is a hell of an achievement and I commend Banner for it. However, regardless of an author's age, a novel has to stand or fail on its own merits and for me, THE EYES OF A KING fails.
The story is split into two strands. The main strand follows Leo North, a 14 year old boy with magical powers that his grandmother is keen he keep hidden from other people. He attends a military academy in Malonia that he hates and lives with his grandmother and younger brother, Stirling, in a tennament block in Kalitzstad, the capital city. The second strand follows a man called Arthur Field, who begins working as a butler for a military collector called Raymond somewhere in England. It is this strand that is recounted through the book that Leo finds one day in the snow and as the strand continues, you discover that Arthur is really a magician exiled from Maloria, who becomes guardian to the exiled Prince Ryan. Banner uses this second strand to dump the background information to the novel - the overthrow of the king by Lucien and the sorceress Talitha, and what happens to Prince Ryan and Arthur's niece, Anna.
Unfortunately very little of interest actually happens in Leo's strand of the story. Essentially limited to recounting snow in the summer (and Banner repeated descriptions of snow or the weather as being "cold" get very boring, very quickly), the spread of a mysterious illness called "silent fever" and Leo's relationship with the teenage Maria and her son, Anselm, who come to live in his block, the lack of action makes for dull reading. The problem is enhanced by the fact that both Stirling (who serves as the emotional core of the strand) and Leo are poorly characterised. With Leo, Banner has tried too hard to create a flawed hero. Here is a character who bickers with his overly protective and religious grandmother, but who appears to care for and is protective of his younger brother. The next minute though, he thinks only of himself and makes little effort to help his brother when he really needs it, preferring to instead wallow in self-pity. Stirling by contrast is some kind of saintly ingenue. Aged 8, he's supposedly unable to read and yet is able to read out loud pages from a newspaper. His main purpose is to demonstrate his religious devotiation and desire to be a priest but the problem with his piety is that it makes it difficult to empathise with him, which is necessary given that the main part of the plot turns on what happens to him. More moving is the depiction of the grandmother's slow mental decline towards the end of the book, but her stilted characterisation in the early parts (by turns shouting, nagging and berating) again make it difficult to fully empathise.
The Arthur segment to the story is purely info-dumping to get the backstory in and despite the publisher trying to liven it up by putting it in different fonts, it's also tedious reading. This is mainly because the characters are never allowed to breathe on the page. Indeed Prince Ryan doesn't appear until half-way through and when he does, there's little about him that seems interesting. Ditto for Anna. They're both there to keep the 'destiny' element to the story alive, which robs the novel of tension and drama. Banner makes the situation worse by having Leo's strand repeat information that's already been recounted in Arthur's strand (and vice versa), the repetition again serving to slow down the pace. Banner's inexperience also shows through her having Leo and Stirling engage in several "as you know" conversations to get across information about how Maloria works as a society, it's clunky and reinforces the artificial nature of the world she's created.
Banner incorporates mature themes in her book - including religion, destiny and war. However, she deals with the themes in a simplistic, somewhat naive way, particularly with religion. It's only Leo who seeks to challenge the notion of God as it's taught to them, but even he comes around to believing when the chips are down. There are hints of better things to come from the author - notably in a scene where Leo threatens a soldier with a gun, which is tense and believable - but these are few and far between. As it stands, I'm not interested enough to continue reading this trilogy.
The Verdict:
There are hints in the text of better things to come from Catherine Banner, but on the strength of this novel, I don't think she's really there yet. The Eyes of a King is dull reading where very little happens and it's difficult to see how this will improve over the remaining books in this trilogy.
