Morningstar

The story

The story is told by Owen Odell, bard and magicker, looking back in old age on the man he once travelled with. That man was Jarek Mace: outlaw, thief and archer, charming when it paid and indifferent to almost everyone. Owen admits from the start that a storyteller's job is not simply to tell the truth, and the rest of the novel puts that admission to work. By his own account he was the more naive of the pair, and he serves as the story's conscience.

The Highlands are being overrun. Angostin armies are pushing north over the borders, burning as they go, and behind them a necromancer has raised the Vampyre Kings, dead for ages. The Highland people are desperate for a hero. Mace wants money and a whole skin, and has no intention of being anyone's saviour.

What follows is an accident of politics. Mace harasses the Angostins for his own purposes, the Highlanders benefit, and word spreads that he is the Morningstar, a hero from legend returned in the country's hour of need. Owen, who knows the real man, watches the story run ahead of the facts, and then starts to help it along. His songs and his magicker's tricks do as much for the legend as anything Mace does with a bow. As the war with the invaders and the undead grows, the question that interests him is whether the song can change the man it is about.

Gemmell keeps the frame in view. We are hearing an old man's account, given to a younger listener who wants the truth about a legend, and the book stays alert to what that listener is and is not being told.

Reading notes

Morningstar is Gemmell's Robin Hood novel, with a shadow of Arthur behind it, and it is one of the few he wrote in the first person. The choice pays off. Owen's voice is witty and self-aware, and the distance between what he saw and what he later sang is the real subject. The book asks whether legends are true accounts of heroism or useful lies, and whether telling one can alter the person at its centre.

It is shorter and lighter than most of his fantasy, with more humour, though the war against the undead brings the expected violence. The main criticism concerns the last stretch, where the plot leans on a device that some readers find too convenient. Others think the ending, which comes full circle, is the best part of the book.

Like Knights of Dark Renown, it was published as a standalone, and the Gemmell Awards chronology places both in the Drenai world's distant past. One of the Awards' three prizes carries its name. It needs no knowledge of any other Gemmell book, though readers who like their heroes clean may find Mace hard company for the first half.