Overview
Title: Ill Met In The Arena
Author: Dave Duncan
Publisher: Tor
Length: 300 pages, trade paperback
Genre: Heroic Fantasy, with a splash of Romance
Review copy from: Purchased from Ellison Hawker, my local.

Ill Met In The Arena is an interesting, eloquent and somewhat unexpected fortieth novel by accomplished Fantasy author Dave Duncan. Departing in many ways from his holdfast of adventure fantasy, Ill Met In The Arena still gives the reader more of the same excellent quality that we’ve come to expect from this superlative writer.

Refreshingly presented as a stand-alone in a genre often hampered by painfully drawn-out storytelling, IMITA keeps the pace flowing with superhuman gladiatorial combat, labyrinthine relationships and incestuous politics that would give the French aristocracy a run for their money. Somehow, Duncan also manages to squeeze in two perfectly-executed love stories, wrapping everything up in a healthy 300 pages.

The World of Aureity
Duncan builds his worlds in style, and this one is no exception to his norm. Pelagic’s math and basics are laid out briefly at the start of the book, so we aren’t left guessing as to how the world itself works. With twin suns that follow each other across the sky with a 60 degree lag, the day is neatly divided into quarters. Calendars divisions are non-standard but explained succinctly and add verisimilitude. Great stock is placed on the highborn’s system of tracking nobility through multiple generations, so it’s good to come to grips with it before you settle too deeply into the story. Once you get going, Duncan rockets the story along at a pace that’s fast enough to let you keep your breath, but if you don’t have a fine eye for detail, you may get a little lagged out.

Superpowers and grooviness
The glorious worldbuilding continues with the emergence of supernatural powers attributed to those of royal caste. The men manifest psychic abilities physically, giving themselves the ability to teleport, move massive objects through force of will. Both of these skills are used to great effect through the story. The protagonist, Quirt of Mundil, traverses the continent the story takes place in in a series of ‘ports’.

Male royals can teleport to locations they have memorised previously, leading to a whole host of ingenious logistical problems.
This is one of the things that Duncan does best – creating a system that’s unique, and then deconstructing the challenges it poses to protagonists.

Combined with this teleportative ability is the capacity to psychically ‘heft’ objects. This can mean both themselves - giving them the capacity to fly in a limited fashion – and an ability to hurtle around solid objects with terrifying force. These two abilities are shown off in the gladiatorial contest that let the political shiftings of the story take place around them. Gladiators progress in a single-elimination tournament with increasingly challenging rounds.

The recurrent theme of porting is used throughout the story to great effect. The story skips locations rapidly and gives the narrator an excuse to cut to the action directly in each scene, which keeps things moving along freshly. Having every second or third paragraph interspersed with a heavily-typeset:
***PORT***
is a little off-putting at first, but you quickly adjust to the at-times-bewildering pace. I liked it, though. The excitement of instantaneous travel is worth having to drastically re-orient yourself as a reader much faster than normal.

Matrilineality and strong women
The women in the story are, if anything, more powerful and intriguing than the men. The ruling system is matrilineal, and with hegemonic rule. Women manifest their psychic strengths mentally, able to wield prodigious powers of illusion, perception and compulsion. Men compete for attentions of royal ladies, hoping to be assigned as a consort in order to raise both their standing in the world and provide a greater lineage for their offspring. With nobility followed four generations back, this adgerence to family lines and ties allowes for deep, complex political maneuverings to be palyed out, and played out well they are.

The women’s strengths in illusion create some interesting results. Most touched upon is a woman’s capacity to change her appearance. In the world of the nobility where women can look as tall, young and beautiful as they want, it is considered an honour and a sign of respect for illusions to shrink or fade and the real woman to be visible for an audience. They have truth-telling and memory-searching capabilities that are enhanced by proximity. Through this system crimes are meant to be controlled and prevented, for anyone with a guilty secret would give themselves away to any noble woman within close physical range.

The punitive measures the ruling women can deal out are mesmerising. The darkly hinted-at ‘improving’ robs a miscreant of some element of their personality. A skill used through physical contact, some hegemonics use it to trim elements of aggressiveness or other untoward behaviour from their spouses. More terrfying, though, is that ‘improvements’ can only take AWAY from a victim, so the process is more like a psychic lobotomy.

The plot thickens
Of course, no system is perfect. Quirt’s mother was brutally raped by the unknown Enemy on the eve of her betrothal, made helpless by a soporific drug. Quirt has spent his life searching for revenge, and it soon emerges that not only are some secrets being, impossibly, kept, but that Quirt’s quest may be in vain. His struggles against a web of power far outstripping his own means he needs to tread carefully through layers of secrets going back generations, where each truth he unearths earns him nothing but more enemies.

As mentioned above, the unique setting Duncan has created in Auriety, combined with the hegemonic powers the nobility of the story possess, make for some interesting problems.

In a world where people can teleport to locations they’ve been previously, how do you maintain security?
How do you escape an enemy?
How do you set up an ambush?
How do you imprison someone?

All these questions and more get addressed through the story itself, which has enough twists and turns to keep readers experienced with political drama guessing until the very end. Doomed to find a fearsome, yet seemingly invisible Enemy, we meet our hero who has just had a hint of the enemy he’s been tracking for a third of his life.

More setting
Names and places hew closely to Greek styles of naming, giving the entire story a distantly familiar feeling. The physical setting of the story is familiar enough that Duncan doesn’t waste much time on physical world-building. Once again, the familiar naming structures show us that Duncan’s capable of building a comfortable, relateable world, with enough twists and variations in it to keep us intrigued. He doesn’t have to resort to alien-sounding-and-inevitably-unpronouncable gibberish in order to impress us.

Also notably absent is the common Fantasist’s curse of over-capitalisation. Considering we deal with several politically powerful, and royal families, the wielding of titles and formal address is kept to a minimum, and the narrator’s conversational tone as he relates his story is friendly without being off-putting.

Early on Quirt meets up with Humate, a delightfully arrogant young hegemon. Mudar is able to overcome Hewat at the first gladiatorial game we experience, although, interestingly, this is more through trickery and cunning than any surplus of psychic strength. As the story progresses, the belligerent Humate proves himself to be superior to our hero, which makes his wavering allegiance all the more dangerous. The danger of potentially plotting against the family of someone who can snap your neck at any time, and teleport your corpse miles out to sea, gives the story a tingling sense of edge about it.

The gladiatorial combat itself is fantastic. Interestingly, there is only a miniscule amount of swordplay. Given Duncan’s proven facility in eloquently narrating the freneticism of combat in his other books, this is a bit of a surprise. Regardless, when action takes place – and there’s enough of it – it’s fast, brutal, and shockingly real in its abruptness. Duncan has eschewed the speech-laden monologuery that romantic and political novels tend to enjoin and has gone for cast, brutal combat that’s over quickly.

The harsh realities of the arena make for compelling reading. This is heightened by a stunning juxtaposition between the glorified, ritualised combat as we’re exposed to it, and the harsher realities that emerge outside the Arena.

What’s this? Real relationships?
The relationships in the story are another highlight. Deep, rich and complex, we get dumped into the machinations of royal families with an outsider’s experience, discovering how the world functions along with Mudar. Without any greater reference than the squabbling political families of Europe to go by, it’s a challenge at times to see all the connections being woven. As they’re touched on over time, though, we get to develop a feeling for the politics of the world.

Duncan is relentless in these developments; his characters are more familiar with the situation than we are and make logical leaps in instants that would take me five minutes and a diagram to wrap my head around. Luckily, Duncan weaves the exposition cleverly enough that you keep pace without feeling lectured to.

So….
This is a book that took some warming to. I’ll happily admit that the starred review from Romantic Times on the blurb had me thrown for a bit. With Duncan happily jumping about in his timelines, as characters reveal pieces of family history to each other in the form of flashbacks, the cohesion of the story lags a bit in places. Once we get a solid grip on the world, characters and setting about half-way through the book, though, Duncan’s in his element and nothing shakes him from producing a superb finale to the book.

Read this book if you: want to see how romance, gladiatorial combat and general swashbucklery can fit together.
If you don’t read this book, I’ll: be a little disappointed, but recommend you check out Duncan’s other books regardless.

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