Subject: "Seeker's Mask", by P.C. Hodgell

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 1994 07:40:18 GMT

"Seeker's Mask" is the too-long-awaited third book in P.C. Hodgell's
'Jame' series.  The first book, the out-of-print "Godstalk" is one of the
all-time most enjoyable fantasy novels, and our introduction to the world
of Rathillien, to the Kencyrath, and to Jame.

The Kencyrath are a union of three species -- two of them nearly human --
bound by the Three-Faced God to fight Perimal Darkling, a force (sentient?)
of Chaos which threatens to destroy the universes.  After binding them,
the God left them to their battle.  After thirty millenia of losing
battles and retreats from one universe to the next, the Highlord of the
Kencyrath turned his coat, betraying most of his people to Perimal
Darkling in exchange for immortality of sorts.  The survivors retreated to
Rathillien, the next 'threshold' world on the Chain of Creation.

Jame is an enigma.  She first appears fleeing out of the Haunted Lands --
the abandoned territory closest to Perimal's border -- but part of her
memory is gone.  She is Shanir -- one of those Kencyrath who are
particularly (and unwelcomely) close to their God.  Such closeness manifests
itself in dangerous powers, in physical differences, and in rotten Karma.
(The Kencyrath don't 'worship' their God, or even like it.  They just obey
because they weren't given a choice.)  "Godstalk" is the story of Jame's
year in the city of Tai-Tastigon, wherein she apprentices in the Thieves
Guild, begins to learn some of the secrets of Rathillien, and gets a lot
of people killed before she flees the city.  It's the best of Hodgell's
books -- well balanced between humor and drama, with engaging characters,
a very strange city, and a complex mystery in the background.

The sequel to "Godstalk" is "Dark of the Moon", a much...well...darker book.
It alternates between Jame's story, as she travels towards the Kencyr homeland
and that of Torisend, her twin brother.  Sort-of twin:  Somehow he's a decade
older than she is.  He came out of the Haunted Lands years earlier and managed
to persuade the feuding Highborn families to accept him as the heir to their
vanished Highlord.  (That he survived his ascension by more than a few months
came as an unpleasant surprise to most of those Highborn.)  We learn more
about the Kencyrath in this book -- not least that the rigid honor by which
they define themselves has for many become a facade.  And, through Jame's
travels we begin to learn that Rathillien itself is a more complex world
than it seemed -- one which is fighting Perimal Darkling -- and perhaps
the Kencyrath -- in its own way.  "Dark of the Moon" ends with Jame rejoining
Torisend.  The reunion is not a comfortable one (he hates and fears her
Shanir heritage, not least because he is repressing knowledge of his own)
and ends with his sending her off to become a proper Highborn lady.

Okay, you didn't really need to know all this, because "Seeker's Mask" is
only out in a limited-edition printing, so it's safe to assume that anyone
who gets it has read the first two volumes.  That seems to be what Hodgell
thought, too, because "Seeker's Mask" makes little allowance for new readers.
It's too bad:  "Seeker's Mask" starts poorly and then gets better and better,
but it could do with ten pages of introduction and about a hundred pages less
text.  (Or a hundred pages more.  More on this later.)

(There are also three short stories:  "Bones" is an odd episode in Tai-
Tastigon.  "Stranger Blood" takes place about a decade later than the
first three books.  And "Child of Darkness" takes place on Earth, and ties
into the rest of the series...oddly.)

"Seeker's Mask" begins at Torisend's keep of Gothregor, where he has sent
Jame into a far worse situation than he intended.  She has been taken in
hand by the women there, who mean to train her to obedience, whatever it
takes.  By the time Jame departs Gothregor, she has invisible assassins
and enraged pursuers on her trail, and a wound on her cheek that could
trigger a civil war if it is seen.  She keeps it hidden behind a mask.

The bare plot of "Seeker's Mask" consists largely of an at least temporary
tidying of loose ends left over from "Dark of the Moon".  One by one, as
she travels, Jame pulls in artifacts and characters she left scattered
around Rathillien.  (In some cases 'scattered' was more comfortable.  For
instance, last time she saw Bane, he was merely a demon.)  In the process
Jame moves towards an identity she can live with, within the Kencyrath.

In "Dark of the Moon" we began to see the rot within the Kencyrath.  Since
the betrayal two millenia earlier, Kencyr honor has become a rigid facade
behind which the power-mad can play with human lives, as long as they
stick to the tattered letter of their code, and repressive Custom has
taken on the status of law.  We see more of this corruption in "Seeker's
Mask", but we also see that the Kencyr still have considerable if hidden
strengths.  Much the same is true of Rathillien, as a whole.  Its very
reality is being eaten away by Perimal Darkling, but it also has tremendous
native reserves of power which are being marshalled in its defense.  There
is a satisfying symmetry to "Seeker's Mask", a progressive unveiling of
Jame, of the Kencyrath, and of Rathillien. 

The book also has Hodgell's accustomed combination of action and slapstick.
The humor is largely situational:  The drama is real enough, and the stakes
are high enough, that one can almost fail to realize what an ensemble
Hodgell has put together with a straight face:  Jame is fleeing invisible
assassins, vengeful monsters, and some gods (?) that keep trying to swallow
her (but will behave if spoken to sharply), while lugging around a large
tapestry, a knife that will rot anything, a blind cat, soldiers who think
she's insane, and a semi-sane, semi-feral, semi-trustworthy follower.  This
while trying to make her way through a reality storm that may have been
triggered by a keepful of scholars who got too bored.

"Seeker's Mask" ends with an equilibrium of sorts.  The loose ends from
previous books have been rescued or retrieved, and the most dangerous of
them have temporarily neutralized each other.  The native powers have
revealed themselves as possible allies.  Jame herself is placed in a
position of greater strength, and possibly greater safety.  She is also in
a position of immediate risk, and Hodgell *could* pick the story up where
she leaves this one -- but it would work very well if instead she picked
up ten years later, with the situation implied by "Stranger Blood".

I enjoyed the book.  It started poorly, I thought:  The situation in which
we first find Jame is by turns unconvincing, Byzantine, and over-complex.
After she leaves Gothregor, though (which is to say after the first hundred
pages or so), trouble is encountered in smaller doses, and Jame is in
better command of what she encounters, a combination which makes for more 
enjoyable reading.  By the book's half-way mark, I was turning pages with
great satisfaction (and noting in distress that I had less than two hundred
and fifty pages left to go).

The book has its flaws.  The first I've already noted:  It requires a
great deal of background knowledge.  Some of that knowledge is simply
assumed, some of it is force-fed in places, rendering parts of the book
too dense.  A related problem is that the doesn't have a major focus,
unlike "Dark of the Moon", for instance, which revolves around an enormous
battle.  "Seeker's Mask" is important within the context of the larger
series, serving to tidy up the first part of that series and bring it to a
closure, but it doesn't have a strong 'identity', of its own.   A third
failing is its lack of well-developed characters.  Hodgell simply doesn't
pay much attention to the feelings, thoughts, or motivations of the
secondary characters.  That puts too much weight on Jame's character,
which Hodgell isn't particularly interested in developing in this book.

As you've probably gathered, I'm looking at "Seeker's Mask" from two
perspectives.  As a middle-of-series book for readers who are already
immersed in this story, it is more than satisfactory.  (I'll be rereading
the book soon after I finish writing this.)  It could use some tightening,
some editing, (just a bit of proofreading), but it gives its readers what
they've been missing for too long.  But if a publisher picks this book up
and prints it without reprinting "God Stalk", a casual reader is going to
have a hard time picking it up, figuring out what's going on, and enjoying
it.  It could be repaired:  A good introduction would help.  So would a
shortening of the book, in some ways:  Some scenes are extraneous, some
details don't need to be explained.  And the book could use a stronger
unity:  Everything that happens is subtly connected, but too often it
feels as though Jame is wandering from one coincidental encounter to another.
The climactic encounter with the gods seems like just another episode.

"Seeker's Mask" is *not* coming to a bookstore near you. :-(  It currently
exists as a limited (pronounced 'pricey') edition.  Word from the publisher
is that if Hodgell can't sell the book to another publisher, he'll put out
a general hardcover edition.  (This would be *bad* news, in the sense that
we'd be less likely to ever see book four.)  The best outcome would be for
"God Stalk" and "Dark of the Moon" to be rereleased, and for a more tightly
edited version of "Seeker's Mask" to then appear, but we're unlikely to
know for a long time.  In summary, then, I'm thrilled that this book has
finally appeared, and even at limited-edition prices I thought I got my
money's worth -- but I hope for some rewriting before it sees a more
general distribution.

%A  Hodgell, Patricia C.
%T  Seeker's Mask
%D  1994
%I  Hypatia Press, 360 W. First, Eugene OR 97401  (503-485-0947)
%O  $60 US ppd, 500-issue leather-bound signed limited edition
%G  ISBN 0-940841-32-0
%P  474 pp

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope