David and Leigh Eddings, The Treasured One (Warner Books, 2004)
The Treasured One is book 2 of the Eddings' latest tetralogy The Dreamers.
Briefly, Mother Sea and Father Earth are the great creative forces of the planet. One continent, the Land of Dhrall, is ruled by eight gods, four Elder and four Younger. The two groups follow a cycle of activity and rest. In the present cycle, Zelana rules the West, Dahlaine the North, Veltan the South and Aracia the East. The Wasteland in the central part of the continent is the domain of That-Called-the-Vlagh, an evil being who has created insect-reptile-human hybrids and wants to conquer the whole Land of Dhrall, and then the rest of the world. Each of the gods has been entrusted with a child, a Dreamer, who is not quite what he or she seems. To thwart That-Called-the-Vlagh, the four gods have called in people from the other continents to defeat the hordes sent against them. There will be four great battles, one for each cardinal Domain. The Elder Gods set the scene and told of the assault on the West. The Treasured One brings the conflict into the South.
The Treasured One reminds me of nothing so much as a Celtic knot. The story keeps twisting back on itself. The same point is arrived at from several directions. The shifts in viewpoint (from first person to third person to author omniscient and back again) are dizzying. As with a Celtic knot, anyone who tries to follow one strand is likely to get very lost. With a Celtic knot, the result is beauty. In The Treasured One the beauty, while there, is less evident. I enjoyed the story, yet I found myself getting impatient with it by times.
The Treasured One picks up the story a short time after The Elder Gods ends, although also skims the millennia in its meanderings. Veltan's domain is at risk, and he and his siblings have to organize its defense.
Do you have to have read The Elder Gods first to grasp The Treasured One? It wouldn't hurt, but isn't essential. I would have been better off had I reread The Elder Gods first, but there is so much retelling of the story (Celtic knot time here) that even though I found that I had forgotten many of the details of the previous story, I managed to keep up.
Reading The Elder Gods first will, if nothing else, give you a few preconceived notions to be shot down later. Not all of those who appeared to be the main characters in the saga appear more than fleetingly in The Treasured One, and someone who is only introduced in the second volume turns out to be the most powerful player in the story so far.
The dichotomy between deities (good) and organized religion (bad) is fascinating. Veltan is better than Aracia (at least in his own mind) because his people look on him as a friend, while hers worship her. As for the Church of Amar, we are told that although it was first based on the innocuous teachings of a fairly benign prophet, it has now taken corruption and greed to new depths.
I also wonder why there is such a major difference in technology between the continents. The people in the Land of Dhrall are still in the Stone Age, while a short distance away (at least, the journey only takes a few days) technology is much more advanced. Is it supposed to be a fable of the Old and New Worlds on our planet? It doesn't quite seem to be. Perhaps the mystery will be explained in a coming volume.
One of the key problems in the situation needs more exploration, too. The gods can't kill anything, anything at all. This severely limits their actions, and means they need armies of mercenaries to defeat the Vlagh. I hope that the next books will go deeper into the implications of this.
Celtic knots are beautiful. However, one can have too much of a good thing. I wonder whether the Eddings could have dropped a few retwists from the knot, made this tetralogy into a duology (two Domains per volume instead of a book per Domain) and had an even better result.
I am still looking forward to Volume III, though.
David and Leigh Eddings don't have an e-mail address or an official Web site, but there are plenty of sites devoted to them. A few good starting places are here, here, and, especially for information about their earlier works, here.
