Triumff by Dan Abnett
I have a brief confession to make. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve made it here before. Still, here we go again – genre makes me flinch. There, I said it. I don’t know why it exactly has that effect on me. It’s not like it even happens all the time, with every single genre story. I’m not one of those people who wouldn’t entertain the thought of a sword or a dragons unless they came bundled up with some HBO nudity or Chris Pine doing his best Guardians of the Galaxy impression.
Sometimes, the allergy can come through the style of the prose. If you can feel someone following a painting by numbers approach to building a bigger story, then I normally recoil from it. If a first book features people saying things like ‘a war is coming’ or ‘something is coming’, I have roughly the same reaction. Other times, however, genre can feel like an incredibly comfy and welcoming chair. If the planets are in alignment, if I’m in the right frame of mind, and if the story doesn’t feel in any way like a photocopy of something grander and older and perhaps a little dustier, then I’m in.
Gareth L Powell’s Ack-Ack Macaque won me over quickly and kept me thoroughly entertained for the entire trilogy. Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series is something I keep meaning to get back onto after the opening four books really captured my attention with a great mix of bleak, brutal crime and old fashioned magic. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series might be one of the greatest fantasy series written in my opinion, and one I’m aiming to read again one day. And I’m still working my way through the sprawling, imaginative history of Frank Herbert’s original Dune books, whilst Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice is still waiting on the shelf.
Recently, after enjoying a number of his ongoing stories written for 2000 A.D. (namely Brink, Lawless and The Out), I decided it was time to read one of Dan Abnett’s novels. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d enjoy the Warhammer novels, since I don’t really know much about that world, so I went with his swashbuckling fantasy Triumff. I’m so glad I decided to give it a go. This book is a rollicking read from start to finish.
The story is set in 2010, only this is a 2010 where the Elizabethan era of England has never exactly ended. Instead, this is a Britain which has been allied to the forces of magic for centuries. So, people are still wearing ruffs and carrying swords, only now the police can bring bodies back from the dead for questioning, the cities are powered by magical forces and absolutely no one is driving a car or carrying a smartphone.
Our hero, Rupert Triumff, is a man with many a secret and many a vice. He’s living the high life. Fighting duels with a hangover. Dodging people trying to get him to finalise his reports on discovering the strange, distant land of Australia. He is also about to be dragged into a plot to assassinate Elizabeth XXX by forces far outside of his (or most people’s) understanding.
The action and twists keep you turning the pages. The characters around Triumff are often as engaging as he is, many of them getting to enjoy a shift or two in the limelight themselves, and there’s a fantastic sense of humour running through the novel. It’s not very often in a steampunk tinted, theatrically staged, espionage novel that sometime will find time to keep a Dirty Harry parody running.
At times, with its seemingly wide cast net of threads spread far across the world of Triumff, there is an almost Terry Pratchett like touch to the Triumff. Which, for me, was undoubtedly one of the reasons I found this book so hard to put down. You see, a while ago I was looking for more writers who worked with in the flavour of Pratchett and Douglas Adams. That was I tried Early Riser by Jasper Fforde.
Fforde is undoubtedly one of the more popular comic fantasy writers around. He’s written numerous stories with his character Thursday Next and her world. He’s building another set of stories set in his colour based dystopia which started in Shades of Grey and I, well, I could not get into Early Riser at all.
There was no doubting his ability to build a world. I just didn’t really buy the humour or most of the action. It didn’t help that, when I started reading Shades of Grey last year, it all felt very similar to Early Riser. A young man from the big city, trying to fit into a tight but surreal social architecture, who ends up going to the countryside and the smaller towns only to get into trouble and find out the truth behind the world he’s living in.
Abnett’s Triumff, however, won me over fast. The world building is just as strong, but it’s the plot, the sudden action, and the offhand humour contained within the story that kept my attention hooked. It all just felt so much more thought out, but never overworked. That helped it to come across as much more grounded, if that’s the right word for a story where someone thinks they killed a demon with an apple on a string and there is all manner of trouble when it comes to the truth about the ‘savage land’ of Australia.
I guess it helps that this isn’t a book that feels like it needs to brag in order to make sure you’ve noticed how clever it is. It didn’t come across as smug to me. It felt far more natural. It felt like someone who wanted to have fun, and I also absolutely loved how Abnett had found a way to interweave his narrative device right into the heart of the story. It’s such a simple idea, but it keeps the story’s feet firmly on the ground and allows for a couple of last minute revelations that leave you wanting to know what’s going to happen next.
To say that I normally pull back when I can feel someone building towards a series of stories, my reaction here was exactly the opposite. After finishing Triumff, I went looking to see if he’d written any more stories featuring Sir Rupert and his friends. Sadly, I couldn’t see anything obvious waiting for me on the bookshelves yet, so I’ll just have to cross my fingers and hope the magically propelled reign of Elizabeth XXX has a few more tricks waiting up its sleeves.