Gravedigger, by Michael-Israel Jarvis

Gravedigger is an action/adventure fantasy – and before you switch off be assured that there are no elves, dwarves, dragons or dungeons; the setting is fairly original, and more attention has been paid to the characters and the story than to the fantasy elements, which in themselves all weave together nicely to create an interesting and supportive backdrop to the whole thing. The world in which the story is set is fairly easy to get into – the town at the beginning of the book is just a town, the people are just people, and the nasty oppressive government is just a group of nasty, oppressive government mages.       

As can be gleaned from the title of the book, the story is about a gravedigger. Perin Foundling, a young apprentice gravedigger who lives and works in the local graveyard, who gets caught up in events that will affect the entire future of the land of Valo and which lead him to Nagyevo, the bustling capital city. There he knuckles under the thumb of the Tacnimag (the government mages), signing on with a squad of militia, whilst he looks for some way to free an imprisoned friend of his, held by the Tacnimag. Naturally this promises violence.

          Good points about the book: the pace of the story is rather good. It starts off with just Perin and his mentor, an elderly gravedigger, as they eke out a living by burying deceased townsfolk. The old gravedigger’s philosophical approach to his work makes him one of the best characters, instantly believable, and that he passes his views on to his apprentice is one of the main driving forces behind the book. After a brief interlude the story picks up again as Perin travels to Nagyevo with his new friend Kesairl, who immediately gets captured by the Tacnimag on trumped-up charges, thus leaving the young gravedigger lost and adrift. While this section is slow, it’s not long before Perin signs up with the Borderers, a group of misfit ‘volunteer’ soldiers with whom interesting social dynamics and camaraderie develop as they investigate the mysterious appearance of ferocious beast-men called Drizen (okay, these guys are effectively Jarvis’ answer to Orcs, the archetypal bloodthirsty ‘evil soldier’, but they are scary at least). From the start of the Borderers’ section to the final chapter, the story is brilliant – it flows so nicely that it is damned difficult to put the book down, and at some points even impossible to do so.

          The characters are generally quite good, at least the ones who matter are quite good – but alas this leads onto one of the weakest parts of the book, the introduction of ‘a team’ in the joint character of the Borderers. There are around six of them, and they all have distinct characters, but alas their joint introduction in chapter 14 is handled a little clumsily, too much information being introduced at once. We just end up with a mushy splodge of characters. This is a typical Alistair MacLean mistake, and no matter how much character development or how many fancy nicknames are placed on them, the messiness of their introduction (and to a casual reader, the similarities of some of their names) just made me give up trying to care about them. When this happens with Alistair MacLean, it is best to just wait for some of the characters to be killed off, to save us the effort. Eventually one or two of the borderers struggle to put their heads above the pile of the others, but even so they still look to me like the same nondescript person, because it was impossible to disentangle each separate character during their joint introduction. This is not to say that every character is bad; on the contrary the non-Borderers are very good, such as the loud-mouth bar-dwelling lad Arranyo, and Neva, the irritating kid who dogs Perin’s every step within the city – they’re both introduced in much more memorable circumstances, and their characters are consistently built up, enabling the reader to easily appreciate them for what they are worth.

          While the story is told in a good and original way, I can’t help but feel that underneath it all is a story often told in the Fantasy genre – a young hero has to confront a terrible and evil enemy in order to save the world. A group of people/ a fellowship, come together to help him. There is a confrontation between Good and Evil of truly Epic proportions. This is a minor quibble, as few stories are completely original, and Gravedigger succeeds in telling the tale - which is what actually matters. There are few works of Fantasy that stick out in my mind for being good, and this I can admit is one of them.

          
         The last point I shall make before wrapping up, the approach to the violence in the book.

There is a lot of it.

A name like ‘Gravedigger’ doesn’t exactly conjure up cheerful images, but the gritty, graphic portrayal of the fights against the Drizen is definitely worth mentioning – but it is the psychological reactions of the characters that I want to point out. The effect that the conflict has immediately afterwards gives this story an edge that I have rarely seen - it is important to note that very few of the characters are hardened killers, the Borderers all being completely new to the job, and even my inability to tell the lesser characters apart did not stop the scene after the first Drizen encounter from being one of the most stirring and memorable in the book.

           
         So there you have my verdict: Gravedigger is a good book. I have a few other criticisms (the overly young-adult oriented subject matter, the lack of any female characters whatsoever, the clear division of ‘Good’ vs. ‘Evil’, the occasional overuse of the word ‘grin’) but I shan’t go into detail here because that would just be picking at threads. It is a cracking read, and is by all means worth a look – if so, you’ll never view a spade in the same light again. I have now been used as a publicity engine, so get yourself a copy on Kindle or something, as Michael-Israel Jarvis might be famous one day.