Orcs

Main Review:

[Content Warning: Rape and Sexual Assault is discussed below]

Last week I was reading a review by my friend Steph about The Girl Before. In it, she talks about how quickly she was able to deduce from the terrible writing of the female characters that pseudonym-using author J.P Delaney had to be a man. Having just finished the Orcs anthology by Stan Nicholls, I would have been willing to bet good money that the author was a man even if he’d been writing under a pen-name.

I always try to read as broadly as possible, it’s a fun adventure going and finding something new and giving it a go. Sometimes, I find a book that I start and, whilst nice enough, it doesn’t engage me. Like someone drinking a lukewarm cup of tea, I just battle through, finish it quickly and then put the literary equivalent of a kettle back on and start all over again. It’s a simple system, but it works. It’s often hard to say why I didn’t enjoy them, they just don’t quite click right for me in some way. Some books, however, elicit a more intense negative reaction, and in the case of Orcs, I can pin-point exactly the moment when I realised that I was going to loathe the book.

It was in the second chapter of the first book. Of the trilogy.

The series prides itself on being a fresh take on certain fantasy ideas and tropes. Optimistically, the blurb claims that the book will ‘change the way you feel about orcs forever’. But such a bold claim of artistic innovation doesn’t even go beyond the first chapter. As soon as we are introduced to the villain of the piece, Queen Jennesta, it becomes painfully apparent that the author’s capacity for innovation is terribly lacking. He might want to subvert some fantasy tropes, but when it comes to writing female characters, he’s happy to go all-in on the tired and sexist tropes of ages past. Queen Jennesta is the most generic evil power-crazed seductress that I have ever come across. The author introduces the audience to her by having her rape and murder a pleading prisoner on a sacrificial altar in a deep, dark dungeon in the royal palace.

“Gritty”, “Realistic” Fantasy is sadly no stranger to the depiction of sexual violence, with perhaps the worst offender being Game of Thrones with its frequent abuse and assault of its female characters. In Jennesta’s case, what is most abrasive about the scene is Nicholls’ seeming lack of awareness that what he is writing is a brutal act of sexual violence. The Queen is a half-human, half-nyadd [fish-woman] hybrid, alien enough to be unpleasant, but not so alien that she can’t be sexualised. Overt and overly indepth attention is paid to how she’s ‘beautiful’ in an exotic, forbidden sort of a way. In writing the victim, Nicholls can’t resist suggesting that the victim is in some deep subconscious way enjoying being sexually active with the woman. It’s so poorly written that it feels cheap and dirty, like a script for a bad porn movie. The whole scene left a deeply unpleasant taste in my mouth, one that stayed with me for the rest of the book. All the characters within the series are equally one-dimensional. No-one has any sort of growth as they progress through three whole stories. The mercenary company that makes up the main cast of the series can more easily be given labels than names – there’s the “Leader”, the “token female character”, the “big grumpy guy”, the “old guy” and the “one who’s not an orc and everyone keeps mentioning that he’s not an orc”. Real inventive stuff.

The entire thing just feels woefully lacking. As I mentioned above, the series is allegedly a re-imagining of the popular attitudes to orcs but it’s hardly trailblazing on that front either. Nicholls’ orcs are battle-hardened, grim natured and tusky. Quintessentially ‘rough and ready’. In the modern world of fantasy imaginings, with things like Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and Kingdoms of Amalur already offering new and fresh takes on famous tropes; the half-hearted attempts of Orcs to ‘do something different’ just lacks any sort of merit. Given they were written just at the start of the millennium – when a certain famous fantasy novel was getting a blockbuster movie adaptation from the New Zealand tourist board, the series just feels like a feeble attempt to capture a fantasy hungry audience. Its writing style comes across as someone who tried to imitate the high prose of Tolkien but without an appreciation of why The Lord of the Rings is written the way it is. Orcs feels at times like someone just put entire paragraphs through a thesaurus to find more complicated words to use. I started to wonder how any literary agent had considered it good enough to consider publishing, a question not helped by the fact that half the reviews on the back seem to be from places that the author has previously worked at. I’m lucky enough to have friends willing to tell me when I’ve been going on about something for a while, I’d like to have thought that someone might of mentioned to him at some point that his stories had some glaring issues.

If it had been handled properly, there are certain elements of the series that would have been really interesting. The core premise of the world seemed to me to be something different and engaging. The world of Maras-Dantia, it is told, used to be a land of the ‘elder races’ – elves, dwarves, orcs etc who lived in harmony with the land and whose spiritual connection with their homes gave them the ability to do magic. All this was threatened by the arrival of humans. First, they came in small numbers, seeking refuge from dangers at home. Since then, more and more have come from two sides of a major religious schism. The humans have been building, mining and excavating the land, which has destabilised the magic therein and thereby weakening the power of the elder races, allowing humans to take their land and continue the process of environmental degradation. Such activity has even caused a great movement of glacial ice in the north that threatens the whole land. For a shot at a narrative so deeply coded with ideas about ecology, race and colonialism I might have even be willing to not criticise the potential ramifications of making the indigenous populations be non-human.

But Nicholls is unable to keep even that tiny speck of possibly engaging social criticism going. In the final third of the final book, we learn the true history of the world. The world of Maras-Dantia, we learn, is actually entirely human, and all the other races have magically been teleported there over-time by cosmic sorcery. Not only but it also seems to heavily imply that that big wall of ice is actually the fault of the teleportation of these magical races to the world. So not only does the book completely invert its already defined dynamics of race-relations, it also manages to tear apart its own ecological criticism as well. The whole series ends with the orcs agreeing to go back to their Orc world (which none of them have ever been to) because it’s important for every race to be equal but separate. No one questions it, all the characters just support casual segregation in the same way one might support going to the pub for a nice afternoon pint. It’s worth noting as well that Jup, the dwarf of the company, doesn’t go with them because he’s a dwarf, and therefore has to go to the dwarf world. He’s spent the whole series wanting to not be thought of as a dwarf first and a person second and then Nicholls pulls the rug out from under that potential arc of character growth.

Orcs was a deeply frustrating read. It was unoriginal, uninspired and unconscious of its own narrative. The only contribution I could see it having to fantasy literature was acting as an example of what not to do if you want to tell a compelling story.

If you want to read the review of Steph’s that inspired my intro – you can find it here: https://beautifullybookishbysteph.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/review-of-j-p-delaneys-the-girl-before/

If you have any books you’d like me to read, tweet me @danieltriggeh and I’ll get them added to the list.