The Isle Of Battle (The Swan's War Book 2) by Sean Russell
01/12/2002 . Source: Lucy A.E. Ward 

Pub: Orbit/Time Warner. 464 page hardback. Price: £12.99(UK). ISBN: 1-84149-086-5.

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Worse still, ancient sorcerers have returned to battle over deeds long-forgotten by mortals, acts that have receded into fragments of history and myth. Who can or will stand against them? Can a terrifying, bloody war be stopped?

Alaan has retreated into the Stillwater - a swamp hidden and offset from the normal world, filled with ghosts and other unnatural dangers. Elise has emerged from the River Wynnd with changed mannerisms and memories.

The Royal Courts are trapped in a Machiavellian web of intrigue in which betrayal and assistance may come from any quarter, yet always at a price. Hafydd's/Eremon's path is set on vengeance - to find Alaan and Elise and destroy them completely for their attempts to thwart his plans for domination of the One Kingdom.

Russell again displays a classic style, evoking a closed atmosphere that occasionally reminded me of Shakespeare's 'King Lear' and Maeterlinck's 'The Sightless Ones' (aka 'The Blind'). Seemingly striving towards a similar weight of symbolism and inner revelation, this book does not deliver the well-rounded style of these perhaps unfairly compared masterpieces.

It is a bridge novel, circular and hardly self-contained, so you will be disappointed if you're expecting a satisfactory beginning, middle and end.

When Dease Renné comments, 'I think it has too many twists to flow so straight... I'm anxious to see how it all comes out' (p386-387), I can't help but sympathise. More than fifty named characters make an appearance and it is confusing - on average, that's a new character roughly every nine pages if you haven't read the first book.

Not only that but you have to juggle similar personal names such as Baore and Beldor, Llyr and Llyn, Fynnol, Cyndyll and Pwyll, plus family names like Renné and A'denné, etc. They obviously aren't identical but as more and more characters were thrown at me and the chapters chopped between the groups, it became so muddled that I wasn't sure which family anyone belonged to or whether it mattered as they all behaved very similarly anyway.

If that wasn't confusing enough, several characters have interchangeable names. Beld is Beldor, Alaan is Sainth, Hafydd is Eremon, Elise is called Sianon by some...

My previously expressed wish for Elise Wills to become a stronger character was fulfilled in this book but I felt cheated by the method used to achieve it. In fact, Elise shows no personal development at all, excluding an almost laughable hymen moment - totally unnecessary.

I had the impression from the first book that 'The Swan's War' series was to be a trilogy but at this pace it will surely run longer. On the sleeve, the publisher declares that the 'series is destined to become a classic' and the contents of this book make me think that it was written with exactly that intention in mind.

Don't get me wrong, it is well composed, but is that alone enough? There are moments of poetry but for the majority the writing seems practical rather than passionate.

More than anything, this book convinced me that the back story is fascinating compared with 'present day' events. Every time new facts were revealed about the past, it made me wonder why I wasn't directly reading about that epic era.

This is doubly frustrating as it gave me the impression that this story still might develop into something incredible and should have developed into something more substantial here.

As a stand-alone novel, this book would be deeply flawed. As a bridge, it leaves me with genuine doubts about the future of the series.

Lucy A.E. Ward