No Man's Land by Richard K Morgan
I’ve been sporadically reading Richard K Morgan novels for the last quarter century, since he first flew above my rader with Altered Carbon in 2002, and its sequels, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies in the years that followed.
I read Black Man when it came out, and at some point, I also devoured Market Forces.
I loved all of them.
Morgan’s work has a few quirks - none bad by themselves - which are offset by the humanity of the humanly inhuman characters.
With very few exceptions, his characters are caricatures of the ultra-masculine ‘ideal’ - the superhero, endowed with extra manliness, who can cut through all opposition with the help of testosterone and ultra-violence.
In Black Man, this was quite literal thanks to our guy’s extra ‘Y’ chromosome. The violence is visceral and shocking in all of his works, but is, in most cases perpetrated by a human being (or something close to one), who is thoughtful, introspective, and despite the dis/advantages afforded by life as an alpha predator, is a fully rounded character.
There’s also usually a mystery, a quest for justice of some kind, and a satisfying (and extraordinarily violent) resolution. Oh, and graphic sex with beautiful women.
No Man’s Land is an alternate history fantasy novel set in the aftermath of a First World War that was brought to a close by the sudden appearance of fairies and forests all over Britain and continental Europe.
Cue child kidnappings, changelings, government plots, conspiracies, witches, secret magical government departments, and our standard Morgan super-angry, super-violent protagonist, Duncan Silver.
Silver survived the war (during which he did super violent things), and is very angry. He is even more angry about fairies kidnapping human children and taking them off into the woods. He’s also angry about his past.
He’s angry with with the government, his stepfather, and a bunch of other things too tiresome to list.
Armed with a trench knife, an iron-shooting trench gun, and his ancestral Sgian-dubh, Silver is now a woodsman, who is hired to retrieve lost children from the wicked fae - a task he accomplishes with an excess of violence, gratuitous swearing, and, of course, the odd bout of graphic sex with beautiful women.
Where this differs from Morgan’s previous novels is in the character’s lack of other characteristics. Sure, all of the other lead characters are rage-filled murder machines, but there’s very little about Silver that redeems him. The rage and violence is his entire personality. An effort has been made to flesh out the character, give him a backstory, and some motivations, but he’s not fully formed, and the effort to mould him into a believable, sympathetic character, is not convincing.
The plot is OK. The fight scenes are excellent and as graphic as I’d come to expect from Morgan, but honestly? I just wasn’t feeling it.
Don’t get me wrong, No Man’s Land is a good book, but it’s not as good as his previous efforts.