[Book Review] With His Father’s Sword (Empire of the Beast 1) — T. M. Carruthers
Revenge cuts both ways!
The debut novel of T M Carruthers is a dark fantasy tale of vengeance against human and mystical forces. It kicks off his trilogy, Empire of the Beast.
With His Father’s Sword sets the stage for a tale of Harald Fairhair’s vengeance after his family is slaughtered by a mysterious creature, the Draugr. His thirst for revenge sets him on a path of wanton violence, and political deceit, into the trenches of warfare, to the slave pits, in far-off lands in external conflict and internal conflict.
From the starting gun, Harald is pushed through the “conga line of torture” as he goes from set-piece to set-piece, inevitably escaping terrible circumstances of violence and ill omen by the skin of his teeth, racing him through the first third of the book. The pacing of the book is haphazard at best, racing through sections that need to breathe to develop heft, and slows down for mundane introspections that don't further the plot nor sufficiently increase the emotional connection Harald or flesh out his motivations beyond “this world is a dark place, and vengeance will bring righteousness”.
Carruthers cannot decide the magic/fantasy level in his story, between the nearly no-magic setting of grimdark, to the bombastic dark magicks of dark fantasy, his world languishes in the vague middle ground. The worldbuilding lacked any coherence or anchor, with Fantasy tropes being lobbed at us with names of places, people, mythos, etc. which were lackluster enough to gloss over with no reason to delve any deeper into. As an example, with a name like Harald and the opening location, I expected a Norse-themed premise to his character, yet the characters he encounters and locations he explores, the setting turned into more of an Anglo-Saxon/English-esque vibe, which was initially jarring but ultimately was set in the “meh” pile. His foray into the Golden City arc again conjured a Middle-Eastern desert aesthetic, but I was baited again, and the setting felt vaguely Greco-Roman, with a smattering of other dissonant elements that led to an aesthetic mess.
What grew from an initial annoyance to an irritation as the story plodded through, was Carruthers narrative choices. Told as a hodgepodge mix of a single-POV first-person style, Carruthers distracts the reader by adding snippets of a memoir-style remembrance, with “if only I knew…” foreshadowing which fell completely flat. The few cases where this memoir-style has word have been in the fantastic grim-noir trilogy Empire of the Wolf (Richard Swan) and the utterly immense grimdark space-fantasy sage Sun Eater (Christopher Ruocchio), both of which have narrator characters with oodles of charisma. This partial stream-of-consciousness style with the jagged pacing causes the narrative buildup to lose any weight or emotional investment from the reader. At no point, did I feel genuinely worried about the fate of any of the characters, least of all the frankly just plain annoying, Harald.
As with the worldbuilding and the narrative style, the character sketch of the protagonist, Harald Fairhair is a confusing mess. His continuous contradiction of action, intent, motivation, worth, and self-image is jarring at every juncture. Again, unsure of what kind of protagonist Carruthers wanted to create with Harald, he samples all the hot favorites, leaving us with an internally inconsistent, externally conflicting (not conflicted, which would be better) character. A genuine Gary Stu at most places, his own lionization could be another case of meta-commentary about the quintessential grimdark protagonist, but trips at every attempt to make this a solid claim. Dragged from one location to another, Harald lacks any agency which is an annoying counterpoint to his own claimed worth and effect on the world and people around him. If this was intentional satire, it was lost upon me at first read.
Along his journey of ill-advised revenge, Harald MehHair runs headlong into several side characters that range from moustache-twirling baddies to thinly veiled antagonists, to doe-eyed romantic inserts. Even the trilogy titular Beast is so laughably mundane and tropey that causing an immediate eye-roll by this grizzled veteran reader/reviewer. None of these characters or checkpoints service the plot except by being tentpoles which Harald drags himself through the story, accruing woes and reasons to inflict his own brand of violence, in the name of revenge, of course.
A of boyhood vengeance is not unknown in the dark fantasy and grimdark spaces, but With His Father’s Sword lacks the artistic deft to handle vengeance as a topic with any kind of experience hand. There is much to be said about how vengeance is a double-edged blade that hurts the wielder (usually) more than the world. While I do believe that Carruthers attempts to get this point across, Harald is a clumsy vehicle to deliver that message.
Overall, With His Father’s Sword is an uneven and chaotic, yet anemic and mundane debut, set in a world that lacks any breadth or much depth, characters without nuance or emotional heft for the reader, following a plot that has no direction other than mindlessly pushing forward, heralded by a protagonist that encompasses all the flaws mentioned, a pale imposter of other better dark fantasy and grimdark antiheroes.
