The stars, they die. Darkness has fallen in paradise. But we’ll be strong and we will fight against the creatures of the night. Let’s rage against The Time of the Dark, by Barbara Hambly.
Synopsis:
On the wizard Ingold’s world, the monstrous Dark have been mere legends for thousands of years. But now, they have emerged to ravage the land.
Source: Goodreads
SPOILERS BELOW
I’ve reviewed a few books by Barbara Hambly before, from the good Dragonsbane to the not-so-good Star Wars: Planet of Twilight. Now, it’s time to take a look at another: The Time of the Dark. This one sees a woman named Gil dreaming of a fantasy world, then eventually being transported there along with a man named Rudy. However, it turns out to be a bad time to visit, because an ancient evil called the Dark has just reawakened and begun laying siege to humanity. The Dark was defeated once before, thousands of years ago – but unfortunately, no one remembers exactly how. Teaming up with a wizard named Ingold, they struggle to survive and find a way to save the world.
The Time of the Dark has got some good things going for it. Worldbuilding, for one: it paints a beautiful and fascinating picture of society under siege by Lovecrafitan monsters – a word I use not in the usual aesthetic sense of fishy-tentacle-squamous-and-rugose, but in reference to their nature as an unfathomably ancient race whose gigantic (one might even say Cyclopean) cities dwarf the works of man. A wonderful sense of deep time is conjured by the descriptions of architecture older than the surrounding geography, and the imagery of their inhuman cities that have never known light sparked my imagination in the same way as Lovecraft’s vision of alien Yuggoth.
I also have to praise the book for the depth it gives to some of its characters. When Chancellor Alwir, Bishop Govannin, and the wizard Bektis were first introduced, I worried that they’d be one-dimensional antagonists – the hidebound authority figures who refuse to believe Ingold’s warnings until it is too late, and who are more concerned with petty power struggles than the survival of the population. However, to my pleasant surprise, rather than going by the children’s cartoon logic of “evil is one big, happy family”, the story fleshed them out by having them clash with each other just as much as with the protagonists. Despite all being authority figures, they represent different types of authority (secular, religious, arcane) and therefore have different priorities. Their motives also served to drive home just how devastating the impeding attack by the Dark has the potential to be – not just in terms of lives lost, but in terms of the destruction of society. Alwir endangers lives with his resistance to evacuating the capital; but he does it because he fears that doing so will mean a permanent end to centralized government power and fracture the nation into tiny disconnected fiefs as local lords will retreat to isolated fortifiable positions and thereafter be forever separated when the Dark inevitably makes any journey longer than what can be walked in one day unsurvivable. And Govannin, she comes off as an obstructive ass when she demands a carriage be used to haul church documents rather than the sick and elderly, but she gives a powerful speech about the loss of their culture – hundreds of years of accumulated legal decisions, codifying civil and religious rights that people fought for and were sometimes martyred for, which all stands to be erased in an instant by the depredations of the Dark unless they do what is necessary to save it.
That said, the book had its flaws as well. For one thing, the pacing was a little bit wonky. At first, of our two Earth protagonists, Rudy felt extraneous – Gil was the one who connected to Darwath through her dreams and made contact with Ingold, while Rudy was just some random passerby who happened to get dragged along for the ride. However, as the book went on, it seemed like Rudy was getting all the plot involvement and character development – training in magic under Ingold, romancing the widowed Queen – while Gil was just kind of fading into the background. And most frustrating of all, at least to me, was a large chunk of the book focusing on the protagonists carrying around and protecting the infant Prince Tir. I do not find babies precious and adorable; I find them annoying and misery-inducing. I really don’t want to devote my time to reading about babies wailing incessantly and repeatedly dirtying their diapers when I could be reading about the war against the Dark instead. Prince Tir is a character I could have done without.
With a lot of very strong elements counterbalanced by some frustrating and annoying elements, I think that, on the whole, the balances out at around average. We’ll have to see where the sequels go from here.
Final Rating: 3/5
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