The Queen Of Kings

I had a review of Alex Barclay’s YA novel CURSE OF KINGS (HarperCollins Children’s Books) published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weekends ago. It ran a lot like this:

“Envar was a land of twelve territories and its northeasterly was Decresian.”
  Alex Barclay’s career as an author of adult crime thrillers began with Darkhouse (2005), a novel set partly in Ireland and partly in New York. In recent years she has set her novels, which feature the FBI agent Ren Bryce, entirely in Colorado; but from the very first line of her latest offering, the young adult title Curse of Kings, we find ourselves even further from home, albeit in a place and time very far removed from the mean streets of the mystery novel.
  That’s not to say Curse of Kings wants for mystery, as the main storyline centres on young Oland Born’s quest to discover his true identity. We first meet Oland working as a servant for the vicious usurper Villius Ren, a sadist who murdered his friend and the former king, Micah, some 14 years before the story proper begins. In a pacy opening, Barclay establishes Oland’s plight as he is physically and verbally abused by Villius Ren and his cabal of dark knights, in the process dropping significant hints that Oland was not born into such a lowly status. Soon Oland finds himself in mortal danger, and he flees the kingdom of Decresian in search of the truth about his destiny. On his travels he meets Delphi, an unusual young woman who is herself in search of answers about who she is; together they find the wherewithal to face down the cruelties of Villius Ren and overcome the many trials they are forced to endure.
  There well may be a PhD out there for some enterprising student interested in discovering why so many Irish crime writers have published young adult fiction: Alex Barclay follows in the footsteps of John Connolly, Cora Harrison, Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee in writing for a younger audience. Perhaps the appeal lies in leaving aside for a while the crime genre’s demands for gritty realism. Here we find ourselves in the quasi-Mediaeval world of Envar, a misty, mythical place of castles and black princes, swords and shields, noble blood-lines and uncompromised morality. The back-page blurb references Tolkien but the book reads much more like an adventure-fuelled variation on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, or the minor stories of the Arthurian legends.
  That said, the novel has very contemporary resonances. Oland Born is essentially a bullied child who refuses to accept his fate, and Barclay eschews the easy option of allowing him access to magic, spells or fantastical devices that might ease his passage to freedom. Instead Oland and Delphi are forced to rely on their wit, courage and determination to succeed, which renders them all the more vulnerable and accessible to the reader, and enhances our engagement with their struggle.
  Or struggles, rather. Events unfold at a very rapid pace, and the story is jammed to the margins with incident, reversals of fortune, surprise reveals and confrontations. Indeed, there are times when the adult reader might be a little overwhelmed by the relentless buffeting Oland and Delphi experience, although the target audience of younger readers will very probably remained gripped throughout.
  The first of a planned trilogy, Curse of Kings is a handsome achievement, not least in terms of its creation of a new world that comes fully terra-formed with a unique history, religion, geography and civilisation. There is darkness here, and monsters both animal and human, but Barclay never loses sight of the fact that our folktales and fairytales were constructed to facilitate our instinctive desire to believe that no matter how bleak our lives appear to be, a better world is ours for the taking. – Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

The Bryce Is Right

I’ve no idea what the hold-up was, but Alex Barclay’s eagerly awaited fourth novel, TIME OF DEATH, finally arrives this month, with FBI agent Ren Bryce suffering the consequences of an ostensibly successful undercover operation that left one or two loose ends without a frilly bow. To wit:

FBI agent Ren Bryce’s hunt for some of the country’s most dangerous killers is about to turn into a nightmare. There is unfinished business between Ren and those she is pursuing, and soon she is forced to confront both personal and professional traumas. Then someone close to Ren is murdered and secrets from her past look set to be revealed, throwing her into a world of fear, paranoia and danger. Dark forces are at work and someone is determined to destroy Ren’s life. But time is running out and Ren must catch a killer before he catches her …

  TIME OF DEATH hits a shelf near you on July 22nd.
  Meanwhile, I’ve been mulling over for quite some time now (the entire three minutes since the idea occurred to me, to be precise) about how masculine are the current crop of Irish female crime writers. Not the writers themselves, of course - a more radiantly fragrant bunch of roses you’d be hard pressed to find the length and breadth of Christendom. As authors, though, they do tend to have a masculine edge. Alex Barclay’s hard-nosed Ren Bryce could by no stretch of the imagination be described as girly; Arlene Hunt not only writes of a partnership that is half male, but she did away entirely with the female half for her current offering, BLOOD MONEY; Tana French’s latest novel, FAITHFUL PLACE, features an entirely convincing male detective as its protagonist, as did IN THE WOODS; Cora Harrison’s series protagonist Mara is a judge in mediaeval times, an era not renowned for its enlightened attitude towards gender equality; Ava McCarthy’s female lead goes by the name Harry; and to say that Ingrid Black’s protagonists have balls would be anatomically incorrect, but metaphorically on the nail.
  Is it the case - Niamh O’Connor’s female detective being a hard-pressed domestic goddess at home, for example, but a ballsy woman at work - that the ladies are reflecting the fact that, in Ireland today, women have to work twice as hard as men in order to get paid half as much? Or are they simply having fun with gender politics? Or is it that, being the backward soul that I am, any woman not sporting kitten heels and a cleavage in which you could park a moped is immediately classed as unfeminine?
  The comment box is open for business, people …