Drum Warning (Drums of Chaos, No 1)

Rating:
Summary: Chapter 1 is superb!
Review: I bought this book because of scanning through chapter 1. This is my usual method for deciding if a particular book might likely be something I would enjoy. This time, however, my method failed me. Chapter 1 was superb. The subsequent chapters were just *okay.*

Chapter 1 introduces Cymel, an 8-year old who lives on a farm with her dad. Her experience of the sights, smells, & activities on that farm are so vivid that I felt like I was there. I immediately liked Cymel and her dad, & was eager to follow the fascinating plot threads that were introduced in her chapter.

Sadly, however, the chapter ended & the book started introducing new characters, new locales, & new plot lines, etc etc, in rapid fire fashion. I soon got rather confused. Worse yet, Cymel seemed to have been relegated to a minor role, & I neither liked nor disliked any of the several new characters sufficiently to get me past the sixth chapter.

Rating:
Summary: Too many wizards spoil the broth
Review: In "Drum Warning," Book One of "The Drums of Chaos," an apprentice wizard doesn't earn his diploma until he kills his teacher, tans the old mage's hide and fashions a drum out of it. One would expect this custom to lead to a dearth of wizards on the two magically merging planets of Glandair and Iomard, but just the opposite is true. There are wizards who walk between worlds, wizards who cast death spells, wizards who do nothing but scribe, and yet more wizards who exercise what fantasy readers might consider the whole magical repertoire. Adding to the confusion, "Drum Warning" is told from multiple points-of-view---not just wizards, but the occasional swamp witch and minor bureaucrat. I finally had to sort the characters out by function:

There are three bad wizards who are murdering all would-be students on their way to a school of magery (in which the teachers don't end up as drum-heads). There are two teen-agers, a boy and a girl, who refuse to admit to their magical potential until the bad wizards attempt to kidnap the girl, sink a couple of ships out from under the boy, then try to drop a mountain on him when he refuses to drown. There is a bandit-wizard, on the run from a troop of female warriors who want to geld him. He seduces an alcoholic wizard, who--

A plot does somehow stay afloat in this confusion of magic. One of the young mages is destined to become the Hero who saves the merging planets of Glandair and Iomard (I don't quite understand the astronomy here) from chaos. There had been a collision seven hundred years past, when everything went to chaos. Libraries burned. Empires crumbled. Network T.V. ratings declined.

Can a young Hero save Glandair and Iomard from another time of chaos and bad programming? We're not even positive who will assume the role of Hero, although my money is on the twice-drowned boy. Nevertheless lots of interesting stuff takes place in "Drum Warning" while we wait for the Hero to appear. Little Gods torment cats, sour milk, and trash vegetable gardens. Big Gods make an occasional appearance and precipitate weird happenings (rather in the style of British royalty). An emperor is seduced by the Dark Side. An army marches into the realm of the swamp witch. Ships sink. A wizard is turned into a drum.

All of this makes good reading for a rainy day, if you can keep track of who is telling the story.

Rating:
Summary: Too many wizards spoil the broth
Review: In "Drum Warning," Book One of "The Drums of Chaos," an apprentice wizard doesn't earn his diploma until he kills his teacher, tans the old mage's hide and fashions a drum out of it. One would expect this custom to lead to a dearth of wizards on the two magically merging planets of Glandair and Iomard, but just the opposite is true. There are wizards who walk between worlds, wizards who cast death spells, wizards who do nothing but scribe, and yet more wizards who exercise what fantasy readers might consider the whole magical repertoire. Adding to the confusion, "Drum Warning" is told from multiple points-of-view---not just wizards, but the occasional swamp witch and minor bureaucrat. I finally had to sort the characters out by function:

There are three bad wizards who are murdering all would-be students on their way to a school of magery (in which the teachers don't end up as drum-heads). There are two teen-agers, a boy and a girl, who refuse to admit to their magical potential until the bad wizards attempt to kidnap the girl, sink a couple of ships out from under the boy, then try to drop a mountain on him when he refuses to drown. There is a bandit-wizard, on the run from a troop of female warriors who want to geld him. He seduces an alcoholic wizard, who--

A plot does somehow stay afloat in this confusion of magic. One of the young mages is destined to become the Hero who saves the merging planets of Glandair and Iomard (I don't quite understand the astronomy here) from chaos. There had been a collision seven hundred years past, when everything went to chaos. Libraries burned. Empires crumbled. Network T.V. ratings declined.

Can a young Hero save Glandair and Iomard from another time of chaos and bad programming? We're not even positive who will assume the role of Hero, although my money is on the twice-drowned boy. Nevertheless lots of interesting stuff takes place in "Drum Warning" while we wait for the Hero to appear. Little Gods torment cats, sour milk, and trash vegetable gardens. Big Gods make an occasional appearance and precipitate weird happenings (rather in the style of British royalty). An emperor is seduced by the Dark Side. An army marches into the realm of the swamp witch. Ships sink. A wizard is turned into a drum.

All of this makes good reading for a rainy day, if you can keep track of who is telling the story.

Rating:
Summary: Not unreadable, but disappointing
Review: This confused, unwieldy fantasy novel is one of the last written by Ms. Clayton, and unfortunately is far from her best work. It's the story of two worlds drawing closer and closer together until the boundary between them dissipates and characters can talk, or even travel, between one and the next. This is an original conception. Drum Warning also uses ritual magic in fresh, well-described ways. However, it is a severely flawed novel. There are too many characters and too many ill-defined subplots -- and most of the characters are young adults, a common fantasy novel device that I'm thoroughly sick of. Also, Clayton does something annoying to me, which is to use Welsh language and poetic forms for some of the names and poetry of one of her worlds -- without basing the culture on medieval (or any other period) Welsh culture in any way, and in many cases with the names and words being meaningless. I would have preferred her to have invented her own culture and language rather than "borrowing" something from Earth. I also disliked the pointlessly cruel death of the young girl's pets, which is depressing without advancing the plot. This book isn't unreadable -- there's certainly worse fantasy out there -- but I don't really recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Not unreadable, but disappointing
Review: This confused, unwieldy fantasy novel is one of the last written by Ms. Clayton, and unfortunately is far from her best work. It's the story of two worlds drawing closer and closer together until the boundary between them dissipates and characters can talk, or even travel, between one and the next. This is an original conception. Drum Warning also uses ritual magic in fresh, well-described ways. However, it is a severely flawed novel. There are too many characters and too many ill-defined subplots -- and most of the characters are young adults, a common fantasy novel device that I'm thoroughly sick of. Also, Clayton does something annoying to me, which is to use Welsh language and poetic forms for some of the names and poetry of one of her worlds -- without basing the culture on medieval (or any other period) Welsh culture in any way, and in many cases with the names and words being meaningless. I would have preferred her to have invented her own culture and language rather than "borrowing" something from Earth. I also disliked the pointlessly cruel death of the young girl's pets, which is depressing without advancing the plot. This book isn't unreadable -- there's certainly worse fantasy out there -- but I don't really recommend it.