The Gilded Chain

I just read 'The Gilded Chain' by Dave Duncan, mostly aloud to my favorite audience (small but very rewarding.) I had a good time reading it and found the character politics interesting and amused myself mapping the characters and events to Henry VIII. While certainly not an exact mapping, there's enough there to make me wonder if the author intended it, or at least did use Henry as inspiration.

The tests of prowess and endurance drew a pretty good balance between being satisfying for me and not too tedious for my audience. If there's too little I'm left wondering "where's the swashing?" and if there's too much I get a "can we skip this?" from the gallery.

The narrative bounced back and forth a bit from history to the current time in the story line. The style didn't always pan out -- maybe it was my reading, but the transitions weren't always clear, so I usually added a remark about fading into the past or present. It worked OK, but I'm not sure the story was better for it.

It's a story with magic in it and I'm always curious about how authors make magic work. The idea of mixing the four Classical elements with four, er, other ideas (Love, Luck, Death, Time) is interesting. Magic works by mixing the 8 'elements' in different proportions. If you're going for that sort of thing, it would be nice to have more sense why or how things work the way they do. Love and Death oppose each other across the resulting 'octagram'¹. The opposition of the two seems to be a source of power in one enchantment, others seem to simply use lots of sources. Granted, it's not a story about magic itself, or a magician, but if you break it down into interesting components with relationships to each other it's a little let-down not to explore them a bit in the story. As it is, it's a distraction: interesting, but not important. The important parts of how magic works in the story don't seem to relate to the 'structure' of the magic at all. Maybe there's another story where it all relates.

¹Me, I was amused by the 'sex and death' motif, as popular in the 16th century as it is now. Anyone for a little Shakespearean double-entendre?