So a trilogy is a series of three books, right? What’s a word for a series of twelve?

One of my daughters is currently completely obsessed with the Lemony Snicket books. She’s read 11 of the 12 (so far) in the Series of Unfortunate Events. You may be thinking that she only has the 12th episode to read, but you’d be wrong. No, the one she hasn’t read is #5. She has, in fact, read them in a completely random order. And if she finishes one and doesn’t have a new one to read, she just re-reads one. What’s a word for a thirteen-ogy? The 13th is due out in October, I think.

My other daughter is similarly obsessed with the Daisy Meadows Rainbow Magic Fairy books. Now, this series is a real racket. The books are all slim (Horrid Henry thickness) and have more or less identical plots, and there are fucking forty of them. I’m pretty much convinced that there is no such entity as “Daisy Meadows”, and she is in fact just a computer programme run at the publishing house. I hate these books with a passion, but my 5-year-old loves them. Well, I suppose it’s not really very much different than me buying the Beano and Wizzer and Chips and Cor! every week. Or Macworld, MacUser, and MacFormat every month when I was older.

So I understand how from the outside something can seem strange, obsessive, and a little bit silly. That Lord of the Rings film sequence, I thought, revealed the utter tripe lying at the heart of that book, which I have read many, many times. Being immersed in the book: great. Watching it on film? Embarrassing.

Katharine Kerr’s sequence of novels set in the fantasy milieu of Deverry and the Westlands started 12 novels and 20 years ago. She’s been ill lately, so fans have been starved of new material for some time (imagine if she’d died before finishing it, and you’ve been following the sequence for 20 years!). The Gold Falcon was – or so I thought – going to be the last, but it seems that she had too much material, so there appear to be two more in the offing.

In a way, that’s shame, because a trilogy of quadrologies has a certain neatness to it. Still, I’m happy to keep reading them if she’s happy to keep knocking them out.

So what do you get? At around 400-pages per book, 12 books, you’ve got a fantasy saga on a truly epic scale. Makes some other fantasy sagas look like small potatoes. The deep premise is that people die and are reincarnated, and that their fate/character flaws etc. continue to affect their lives even in future incarnations. So the series covers (so far) 500 years of history, and multiple generations of reincarnated characters. Preposterous! I know! But you can’t help being sucked in by it all.

The whole thing started when a young man had an inappropriate relationship with his sister. He fucked up her life, his life, and the life of the guy she was supposed to marry. It’s all a horrible tangled mess, and one of the triangle makes a rash vow not to rest until he’s put things right. Well, it takes him 500 years, doesn’t it? This character, Prince Galrion, becomes a powerful sage/magician (dweomermaster) called Nevyn, who keeps meeting up with his betrothed and her brother (and others) in all their incarnations, until he finally gets it – in EastEnders style – sorted out.

Kerr tells this story over the first 8 volumes or so, but it’s not a straight chronology, oh no. Instead, she darts back and forth in time, showing (again and again) how the past affects the present, and how people struggle to get out from under or accept their destiny/fate (or wyrd).

All the fantasy elements are here. Swords, sorcery, men and women, elves, hybrids, shape-changers, even dragons (in the later books, she builds up to it). It’s all very silly, but it’s great fun. You become immersed in the story, the language – people talk in a sing-song style, truly, saying somewhat instead of something and it gladdens my heart instead of I’m happy (well, it all helps the word count, no doubt).

If you loathe and despise the fantasy genre (as I loathe and despise those Fairy books), you’ll hate this. But if you’ve ever entertained the notion… For example, if you’ve enjoyed Lord of the Rings but wouldn’t know what else to pick up – well you just might find a life-long friend in Katharine Kerr. You can be sure that by the time you’ve reached the last in the series (if there ever is a last), you can – like my oldest – go back and re-read from the beginning.

Kerr’s a good writer, I think, and so much better than the likes of David Eddings that she’s in a different league. There’s quite a lot of scholarship under the surface – Celtic mythology, for example – and she always stays true to the rules of her fantasy world. She keeps all the balls of the plot in the air, and she makes it all seem deceptively easy. There are some great characters, and it can become unputdownable. Big problem I had with The Gold Falcon, there are no chapters: so you just keep reading on and on, with no natural break. I was up till gone one in the morning as I was finishing it up.

Highly recommended, if you like that kind of thing, but you’ll want to start at the beginning. One thing to watch out for are alternative titles! Don’t buy some from the USA and others from the UK, for example, or you might end up with the same one twice. The good news for those starting fresh is that the early episodes are available from Amazon Marketplace resellers for as little as one new pence!

Correct order:

Daggerspell
Darkspell
Dawnspell
Dragonspell

A Time of Exile
A Time of Omens
A Time of War
A Time of Justice

The Red Wyvern
The Black Raven
The Fire Dragon
The Gold Falcon

Forthcoming:
The Spirit Stone
The Shadow Isle

If you visit Amazon UK, you will see listed a book in the series called The Black Stone. This book does not, and will not, ever exist. Kerr states on her web site that her publishers issued the title on a list of forthcoming publications (when she was ill, I think), and for some reason Amazon seem unable to take it down. The next book will be The Spirit Stone, with at least one more to come.

If you want an introduction to Kerr as a writer, she has written three science fiction novels, Polar City Blues, Freezeframes, and Snare. I love Snare, which kind of straddles Sf and Fantasy. It’s one of those fantasy-like novels which turns out to be concerned with old/forgotten technology. It’s a good read, and a good place to start with Kerr’s writing. Again, available quite cheaply from Amazon Marketplace.

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