Book Review: Cursor’s Fury

Jim Butcher is better known to me as the writer of The Dresden Files, but his Codex Alera high fantasy series is also proceeding successfully.  This is a review of its third installment, following Furies of Calderon and Academ’s Fury (which I just discovered I never reviewed).

Cursor’s Fury by Jim Butcher (2007)

Overall		Story
Re-Readability		Characters

Story:  This is a return to Butcher’s fantasy world, populated by apparent descendents of Ancient Rome (a mystery still only brushed against), and where magic manifests as bound / familiar elemental spirits, or furies.  Furies can not only manifest themselves as elemental creatures. but also give to their controllers great power — strength for Earth, speed for Air, endurance for Metal, etc.  Everyone in the realm of Alera has access to fury-based power — everyone except Tavi, who has only his wits and reflexes to save him from various dangers, the prime protagonist of the series.  Ostensibly an orphan from the boondocks, Tavi has already come under the watchful eye of First Lord Gaius Sextus, ruler (and most powerful furycrafter) of the empire, and has gone from farmboy to student to, in this volume, one of the First Lord’s Cursors, or secret service agents. 

In that role, he ends up undercover in a newly-formed Legion — which finds itself, unexpectedly in the middle of both a civil war and an invasion.  Can Tavi balance soldierly loyalty with loyalty to the First Lord?  Can he rise to the occasion as battles thrust him to the forefront of dealing with the invasion?  Can he overcome yet again his lack of furycrafting?

Well, yeah, of course he can, it being that sort of fantasy novel — but not without a lot of hard work, heartache, and danger. 

But the book would only be half its 544 pages if that’s all there were to it.  Instead, Butcher, following the pattern of the second book, runs at least another half-dozen major characters through their own separate tales, dealing with politics, magic, old loyalties, and devil’s bargains made and broken.  Butcher manages to do this pretty successfully, even if some characters get a slightly short shrift.  And he does it all with wheels-within-wheels conspiracies, secrets both hidden and (to some) revealed, plots, counter-plots, soap opera, and plenty of unexpected twists and turns (some of which are payoffs from earlier volumes, others of which hold plenty of interest for future books).  The good guys win, mostly, but never easily, and always at a cost.

There’s probably three novels worth of material here, but Butcher does a good job of keeping it managed and coherent — and entertaining.

Characters:  As noted above, the book has several primary, and several more secondary, characters, most of whom we’ve met in earlier volumes, all of whom are involved in an elaborately woven series of plots and circumstances.  The characters tend to be well-written, if not terribly complex, falling into fairly standard fantasy/adventure roles.  The story holds some surprises, but not many of the characters do.  The impressiveness is that Butcher keeps all of the balls in the air, rather than that any of the balls themselves are works of art. 

That’s not to say the characters are badly written, by any means — they’re just not all that uniquely written.  The fun is in the plots that Butcher runs them through, and how they react to it.

Re-Readability:  Though I haven’t gone back to them yet, the series feels eminently re-readable.  Indeed, as more secrets are revealed, I’m sure that an eventual re-read will be even more interesting.

Overall:  Another solid, successful effort by Butcher. The next volume of the series — Captain’s Fury — is already out, and despite it only being in hardcover, I’m sorely tempted to pick it up.  Hard to ask much of an author than that.