Black Trillium Review

[epistler]

Long, long ago in the days of myth and legend, I owned a bad book reviews blog which I wrote quite a few reviews on under the name of the Book Rat. Sadly that blog is long gone along with all its contents, and in fact I don’t even remember which books I reviewed on it by now, with two exceptions: the Axis series up until Crusader (I think) and, well, this one.

Black Trillium is pretty unusual in that it was actually co-written by three different authors: Andre Norton, Julian May and (ugh) Marion Zimmer Bradley. All of whom, the secondhand bookseller who sold it to me informed, were at their absolute worst.

The initial publication date is 1990 so it was presumably written during the late 80s. As there was of course no internet back then they would presumably have had to do this by what my generation calls “snail mail”. I’ve never cowritten a book and backed out on the one occasion when I was invited to, because for me writing is just inherently an individual, solitary thing beyond getting advice from beta readers. So as such I don’t really know that much about how it even works.

In this particular instance the writers (or whoever presented the idea to them) actually handled it pretty intelligently: there are three main protagonists who appear in alternating chapters, so each author was assigned to write one of them. And as their storylines are separate for most of the book that would have made it easier as they passed the manuscript back and fourth, round robin style. With that said they apparently all hated the experience, so while there are sequels they were written independently by just one author per book. In fact according to Wikipedia they each got to write one sequel with the exception of Julian May, who wrote two of them. Sequels which I will not be reading.

Late last year I happened upon a copy of Black Trillium (the original having long since been disposed of) and thought you know what – why not read this bastard again and see if it’s as bad as I remember, and then write a new review? So I did and so I am doing.

Not only is it really bad, but it’s also aged really poorly.

Plot

The plot is actually pretty damn simple. A good and virtuous King and Queen are delivered of a beautiful daughter. Except it’s three daughters so we can have three beautiful princesses. They’re triplets, albeit non identical. A wise old sorceress blesses them at birth and gives them a special amulet each (a preserved specimen of the titular black trillium apiece) and declares that they are Special and have a great destiny ahead of them eventually.

Fast forward to the three beautiful princesses as young adults. Their homeland is invaded by an Evil King and his Evil Sorcerer, along with the Evil King’s son who is reluctant because he is Good for whatever reason. The villains capture the capital city, violently murder Mummy and Daddy, and take over while the three beautiful princesses flee with the help of a personal servant apiece (more on this later). Each of them is then sent on a predestined quest to find a magical whoozit each. 

They survive various boring I mean exciting adventures along the way, get their magical whoozits, lead an army against the Evil King and save the day. Oh, and one of them falls in love with the Good Prince despite the fact that they don't even know each other. The eldest, meanwhile, has a fling with the Evil Sorcerer who is old enough to be her great-great-great-great-great grandfather and looks it and I am absolutely positive this was one of Bradley’s “contributions” because… well duh.

(If you’re lucky enough not to be in the know, please allow me to ruin that for you. Bradley was a lifelong incestuous paedophile married to an older incestuous paedophile who, like the Evil Sorcerer, had a long white beard. She was very fond of writing about characters clearly based on her daughter – one of his victims – getting involved with various extremely creepy sexual situations. I’m not going to go into any further detail on the subject because I don’t really know much about what she wrote other than Mists of Avalon and that was bad enough so I’m choosing to cherish my ignorance on the subject).

How the evil sorcerer is ultimately defeated is one of few highlights, not to mention awfully familiar: the three princesses use a magic deus ex machina to reveal to him what an awful guy he is who doesn’t know love so he goes into despair and leaps to his death. Who would have thought the “Empathy Spell” wasn’t even new?

Happy ending, eldest princess becomes the new “Archimage” and yes that’s actually the Good Sorceress’ title, the one in love with the Good Prince marries him and becomes the new Queen and they all live happily ever after or at least until whatever happens in the sequels happens.

It’s about as generic as it gets plotwise and nothing to write home about. It’s in the other details where it gets truly awful (and in some cases ridiculous, and in other cases extremely offensive).

Setting

This is one of those fantasy settings that really goes in hardcore with the “THIS IS A FANTASY WORLD” angle because you’ll barely recognise anything in it other than humans and mountains and boats and buildings. Just about everything else is some made-up fantasy thing. All the plants and animals are made-up plants and animals with made-up names. Everything else has made-up fantasy names as well. The authors don’t even use familiar measurements – instead everything is measured in “ells”. Last time I reviewed this book I found out that’s actually a real unit of measurement, but even so it’s very unlikely to be one the reader will recognise. As such, saying something is “fifty ells high” is going to be completely meaningless. Meanwhile the constant barrage of made-up words quickly gets exhausting because it’s damn near impossible to memorise them all, and there’s no distinction drawn between which ones we need to remember and which ones are just set decoration. From there the exhaustion ultimately gives way to irritation and the story (such as it is) becomes increasingly difficult to follow and visualise. It’s easy to see why this sort of style seems to have largely fallen out of fashion in more recent times, though equally easy to see why Paolini is obsessed with doing something similar because the sources he pulls from are equally outdated as this. Heck, there’s even a mountain named Brom for some damn reason.

The religion is also a confusing muddle – sometimes the princesses refer to “the lords of the air” but at other times it’s just “god”. They also occasionally use “by the Flower!” instead, while the baddies have a god called Zoto or something. It’s weird and unexplained.

Of course, relative nitpickery of this sort is ignoring the rather large elephant in the room, which is this.

It’s racist as fuck.

The ruling family and class are all (presumably white) humans, while the rest of the country is inhabited by various… I hate to say sub-species… groups of non-human goblinlike people. They have various different tribal groups (which means even more made-up names, naturally) and some are more “civilised” and work with their human overlords (usually as servants) while others are more “primitive” and only seem to know how to wage war and – sigh – cannibalise their victims afterwards. The latter of course must be brought to heel by one of the three beautiful (white) princesses and then pressed into service.

Oh, but it gets worse. A LOT worse. Not only are these people described as having claws, green skin, eyes that comically bug out, etc., not only are they “primitive”, living in swamps and only seeming to have stone age levels of technology, not only do they only exist in the story to be servile helpmeets to the three protagonists, not only does each of the protagonists have a personal goblin servant (referred to as “Oddlings”), not only have they clearly been colonised by the humans at some point but never raise any objections, and not only do they eagerly rush in to help put the princesses in power against the “bad” humans… no not only all of that, but guess what else.

Guess what they are repeatedly called, by both the text and the characters?

Aboriginals.

And sometimes aborigines.

Do they benefit in any way shape or form from helping their deposed overlords become their overlords again? Oh, hazard a guess. Is it ever acknowledged that this situation is incredibly oppressive and wrong and colonialist? Hazard another guess.

Who would have thought that three white authors could write something this horribly clueless? It’s a mystery all right, sigh. And now you know why I spent such a large chunk of the reading time cringing on every other page.

Characters

These are just plain bland, as other critics have noted. Each princess is differentiated by means of a couple of stock character traits – Anigel is shy and sweet (and don’t think I didn’t notice what you did there, whoever came up with that oh so subtle name), Kadiya is feisty and Haramis is supposed to be confident and learned but is in actuality a colossal dumbass.

They also all suffer from the usual Bad Fantasy Character issue of barely reacting to things that should warrant a very big reaction, most notably when their parents are inevitably killed by the invaders. Their royal father, being just as stupid as his daughters, has no idea how to fight but barges out there anyway, whereupon he is captured and gruesomely dismembered. Then the queen is killed as well, within earshot of the three princesses – who by the way escape because… they hid in the privy. Behind a curtain. And the villains, having taken all of ten seconds to get the queen to say where they are, don’t even bother to search the room afterwards. Good thing they’re just as stupid as everyone else or this would have been a very short book.

Anyway, so not only did our three protagonists essentially witness their loving mother’s murder but during the escape from the castle they also come across Daddy’s bloodsoaked remains.

And… they don’t react as if this is what they’ve just experienced. They don’t scream. They don’t throw up. They don’t cry. They just kind of… stand there while one of their Wise Native Servants makes a pretentious speech about the nature of evil. And after that it’s just forgotten entirely. Yes, they do periodically think things like “she still felt sorrow for the death of her father” but they don’t grieve. They don’t experience any shock, or trauma. It might as well never have happened. It’s just part of the reason why they don’t feel human and relatable.

The other reason why they don’t feel human is because of some of the very unnatural and forced stupid decisions they make, most notably when Haramis is supposed to return to the old Archimage once she’s got her magical doohickey… but instead accepts an invitation to the evil sorcerer’s lair just because he asked nicely, with the rationalisation that “well she hadn’t been asked to come back immediately”. Even though the Archimage (god that title is stupid) is literally on her deathbed at this point. Nope, instead she blithely goes off to have sex with the creepy older man who is the reason her parents are dead. Because, well, it wouldn’t be a Bradley novel if some creepy old man didn’t entice a stupid young girl into his bed via painfully obvious grooming tactics. It doesn’t even have any reason to be in the book in the first place; it has no impact on the plot or characters, and ultimately goes nowhere. The Archimage isn’t even pissed at her and just makes Haramis her successor anyway!

Everyone else here is just a bunch of stock characters – the kind-hearted prince who inexplicably loves Princess Anigel when they don’t even know each other, to the point of betraying his own father just to get with her, the comic relief Native Servants, the brutal general, the evil king who ends up going crazy, the loving parents who only exist to be murdered, the wise old sorceress mentor. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

Of course, no doubt people were fooled into thinking this crap is feminist because of the mere presence of female protagonists, sigh. Two of whom have plotlines revolving around some guy they just met.

Prose

The pacing here is pretty bad; most of the book is just the three protagonists endlessly travelling around having various misadventures before eventually getting their magical McGuffins free of charge. None of said McGuffins even do all that much in the scheme of things. In case you care, one is a magical crown, one is a “pointless sword” – a repeated description which I found just plain funny – and a literal magic wand. All three can be joined into a single superweapon which is like really dangerous and stuff and if they’re not Pure of Heart it could ruin everything (but of course they are, even though one of them abandoned an old woman on her deathbed to go have sex with the villain).

Since so much of the prose is spent on endless descriptions of various made-up fantasy stuff we don’t care about, and since the protagonists are boring and periodically irritating, it’s a tedious read to say the least and also quite overwritten in places. It’s as if all three authors just had to pound it into our heads that THIS IS EPIC FANTASY at every opportunity.

 

WTF-eries

And now for my favourite part – the really ridiculous shit in this book. So, we’ve had Paolini and his “Grey Folk” and "the Vanished". We’ve had Newcomb’s “The Ones Who Came Before”. We’ve had those fucking alien spaceships and tarred roads in Douglass’ crap. Well, here’s one of the granddaddies of them all because this book has “the Vanished Ones”. Guess what, the evil sorcerer isn’t actually using magic. He’s using alien technology.

I’m not kidding. He’s got a laser cutter surgical tool, fire and lightning generators, and an AI computer with tracking capabilities. Among other things. At one point someone even comes across an implied crashed alien spacecraft. He also has some “Golden Pastilles”, which had me guffawing because to me, that’s a sweet not a magical cure all medicine.

There’s doubtless more to note but this review is now five pages long so I should probably call it a night.

This book is awful. Luckily for you, I read it so you don’t have to.

[Epistler exits, pursued by a bear]