
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Eternal's Chosen is the first book in a fantasy series called The Ravenslayer Chronicles. While I was quite taken by the opening chapter, with a warrior called Marcus returning full of guilt after his recent battles, I found my confusion increasing through the rest of the book. The place and time for various events seemed to bob about following this chapter.
The violence and sexual mores of this historical fictional, but very dark fantasy became a distraction from the development of the various characters. His torment is understandable but the evil characters from the Underworld, and its ‘Dark Lord,’ are so reminiscent of the orcs and elves found in Tolkein’s books it seemed too much of a coincidence. That and the explicit descriptions of rape and violence resulted in spoiling my ultimate enjoyment of the book.
Adding a fair amount of shocking sexual incidents did nothing for my interest. Maybe if I had been a ‘very mature’ teenage reader there might have enough titillation to make me want to carry on reading. But I could not say it had that effect upon this reader. The ‘Mordor effect’ of wars and jarring industrialisation has been well covered in the works of Tolkein and Mervyn Peake, so adding the graphic sexual violence in this book became an irrelevance for me. I just skimmed past those sections of the novel to look for other interesting characters like the tormented Marcus Blackthorne.
Ashton’s writing skill is exemplified well through his curious and thoughtful world building of the pagan communities. Within them there is a responsibility upon men to produce many heirs, and thus they are expected to take many wives. This leads to an unfortunate neglect of older women, but to an even more unfortunate choice of the very young females as potential ‘breeders’ and which, today, we would consider as an abuse of girls who are still children. Admittedly the author does introduce groups of women who wish to reject the system, thus providing conflict within their society.
Mature fans of dark fantasy might enjoy this book.
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