4 crampons out of 5

“The Mongoliad” totally surprised me.  Yes, I bought it just because of Stephenson, but there are a ton of authors attached to this thing, and I understood that they would all have a hand in the overall story development, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  It’s also a historical piece, which I don’t normally dig, and Stephenson’s last historical forays – the whole Baroque cycle – are immensely accomplished pieces of work that, all the same, I still haven’t finished completely and took me forever to get in to.  So as this was a collaborative effort, subtract Stephenson’s concepts and writing style from getting full force presentation, and maybe… well.  Who knows.

Uh, me.  Now I know.  Whatever the exact process was for streamlining this beginning of the story, it results in a surprisingly awesomely thrilling action spectacle, with the added bonus of being “educational” thanks to the effort put into its research.

Guide Cnan joins up with a group of Christian Knights that go under the banner of “The Shield Bretheren” on their mission to kill the current Mongolian ruler of the lands, Ogedei Khan.  Quest stories, by their nature, have a baseline of thrill, and The Mongoliad keeps this going by making movement a necessity, as the road between here and the Khan is a lengthy one.  To expand the world, we get a different perspective of the khan thanks to chapters featuring Gansukh, a messenger sent to the Khagan’s palace from the Khan’s brother, and the Shield Bretheren’s frontline distraction, a splinter group of knights who go to fight in a contest of warriors for the Khan’s entertainment.

The book loses momentum in its last quarter due to some narration switching, suddenly jumping to new character’s points of views when we’ve been used to hearing the story told from one or two perspectives, and as this is a volume 1, all the build-up of the various storylines end up being for nought, not even culminating in a book 1 conclusion so much as giving us a general “To Be Continued…”

But despite these flaws, I was impressed by how individualized each of these characters became (perhaps owing to the Mongoliad project’s development of farming characters and story elements out to individuals for development) and how intense the story was, either from the action side of things with the knights, or the more political aspects with Gansukh.  Also, since the principle motivator here was to write more realistic battle scenes (according to Stephenson), there’s a layer of gritty reality riddled throughout the story that rips it free of most of the padding side-stories that clog up your normal fiction tale.

“The Mongoliad” should appeal to the fantasy crowd, capable of dipping into the historical buff genre.  That being said, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with both genres, and I flew through this book like so much textual candy.