Rating: WORTHY!
Dark Triumph is the second in the "His Fair Assassin" series (I reviewed the first, Grave Mercy here) and it takes off right where the first in this series ends, but it does so from the perspective of another of the assassin nuns: Sybella. In volume one, Sybella was one of the colleagues of Ismae, the main character and narrator of that volume. Sybella appeared very briefly, but on several occasions, yet she was never really graced with an introduction. Now she has her own story, and it ain't a happy one! She's resident in the castle of Count D'Albret, and living in fear of discovery. She has only one ally, Julian, and he's hardly her friend - not unless he can get something out of her in return for his "friendship". Indeed, Sybella's intimate history is rather florid, it would seem, and Julian has played an intimate part in it, although LaFevers appears too terrified of scandal to delve into it in any form other than hints and allusions.
In this novel, Sybella is pretty much under house arrest in D'Albret's purloined palace, and is watched closely. She is nominally the Count's daughter, but believes herself, like Ismae, to be actually a daughter of Mortain, the god of death. In passing, it's interesting to note that Mortain is actually the name of a city in Normandy, situated very close to the border with the region of Brittany.
Why Mortain chooses to rape women and have daughters who become assassins is left unexplained, but if there is one consistency in the history of humankind's invention of gods it is that these gods are useless, and require human intervention on a routine basis to help them out. They're also well-known for raping women, including the current popular god, Yahweh, the god of the world's three foremost monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. According to the Christians, that god raped Miriam to produce a son for slaughter. But Mortain seems to be particularly incompetent in that all he can do is mark people for death! He cannot kill them himself, but requires one of his female slaves to, er, undertake this? How ridiculous is that? What a pathetic and ineffectual god he is!
This novel starts out as though it were a fan fiction based on Graceling, the accomplished assassin traversing the castle steps. I had two immediate problems with it. The first is that this is another first person PoV tale. I have issues with that kind of story to begin with, but take a moment to think about it in this context: the narrator is a secret assassin, yet she's writing a true story about what she does, including names, places and dates?! Not a wise choice for a writer to make! OTOH, we do get (finally) a confirmation of someone's age in this novel: it's the Duchess (although she's crowned queen before we learn this) and she's thirteen. Some reviewers had assumed she was twelve from a sentence in the previous volume, but the sentence was so ambiguously worded that it was impossible to honestly assert with complete conviction any age IMO. This was another of Lafevers's writing failures.
The second problem I have with this is the blatant genderism - strike that, not genderism, as much as pure hatred of men! This new narrator says (on line six of chapter one!) in the context of learning how to kill "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a man's body...". For a moment (or a long moment as LaFevers would have it!), let us re-write the line: "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a woman's body...". Indeed, let us re-write the entire novel but reverse the gender roles. Would you be outraged at it then? I would. So why no outrage when that same line and that same tone in that same novel is written about men? We already learned from volume one in this series that women can be just as evil as men, so why this sustained campaign against men? It's a bit creepy to say the least.
Yes, back then (the first chapter is dated 1489AD) men typically did hold the reins/reigns (and unfortunately still do at a disproportionate percentage), but evil is not solely the preserve of men, and even where the evil is perpetrated by a man, there is often a woman who supports him, yet nowhere in either volume of this series so far, do we see any amelioration of this vendetta which is specifically and consistently directed towards men. As another reviewer pointed out, these femme vraiment fatale (or ninja nuns!) attack men, but they also work for a male god! Not very much in the way of logic there.
I was amused when, at one point, Sybella remarks upon Ismae's sharp wit, but I just got through reading that first volume and I recall none of that! Perhaps she's talking about the three years when they were in training, not a whit of which was shared with us in that first volume. That particular history is something which, done right, would have been really worth the telling, but it was not to be. More like 4F, in fact.
And now a word about the incessant use of 'demoiselle'! It's rife in these two novels! It's fine as far as it goes, but it really stands out because of its extreme frequency, rather like 'mayhap' and one or two other words did in volume one. If you go to dictionary.com and use the French - English translator there, the definition of this word is: unmarried lady; young lady; damsel; rammer, object or tool that rams! Hmm! The funny thing is if you split it into "de moi selle", it means "to me saddle". Hmm squared! Obviously this is just another thing to be cautious about when you're writing a novel!
So Sybella really, and I mean really, wants to murder this Count, but it seems she is to be robbed of the pleasure. Her instructions from the Abbey are instead, to free The Beast - the prisoner who was taken at the end of the last novel. This she does and this leads to arguably the best piece of action/adventure writing from LaFevers's keyboard in two novels. Of course, the massive telegraphing of the oncoming affair between Sybella and the Beast undermines the purity of the adventure with its ham-fistedness. This volume is definitely a league or two ahead of Grave Mercy. At least that's how it seemed at the half-way point! Unfortunately, then we have to deal with Ismae and Duval. Again. It's a pity that their divinity, Mortain, didn't have the god-like power to tell all these hapless Bretons that they were going to lose, that Anne would be forced to marry the French king, and that she would herself die before the age of forty (assuming that LaFevers follows the actual history of the region at all). Given how thoroughly reliably gods have proven themselves to be utterly unreliable throughout history, I don't find it the least bit surprising that they were invented by frightened, ignorant, and delusional humans!
Despite what I've said about LaFevers's writing in terms of how it reads, in terms of how she puts the words on paper, I have to say I have found no glaring errors until I reached p204 where she writes: "Provided the attack come from within." which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It should probably read "Provided the attack does not come from within." Another mistake I think she made has nothing to do with writing but with story-telling. Maybe that sounds like a tautology, but what I mean by "story-telling" is how she puts together her tale, her world, her mythology, and in this instance particularly: mythology. I guess others might call that world-building, if we take world-building to be understood in its very broadest sense. LaFevers claims in her novel that gods are real and powerful and worthy of veneration - just like the religiously inclined do in real life, in fact! But the problem LaFevers has is the same one the religious have in real life: their gods lack credibility and are actually completely powerless!
Everything the Bretons do is aimed at staying free of the French, and maintaining their independence and their old gods, so why are they worshiping these gods in secret? Why are they forced to venerate them as saints instead of as gods? Who, exactly, is it who is repressing these old gods in LaFevers's Brittany? She never explains this, but if the gods are real and powerful and Brittany so weak, then why are the gods not helping?! And on another note, how is it that some people see this as a feminist novel when the Duchess is so weak that she must marry a man to save her and her province? This isn’t a feminist novel at all, it’s quite the opposite, because not only does the Duchess need a man, so too do the assassins featured in each volume.
LaFevers uses the term "High-traffic areas" which is such an anachronism that it really jumped out and reminded me, yet again, that I was reading fiction that has high traffic in the area commonly known as 'poorly written'. LaFevers also seems to suffer from chronopsia. This is a word I've coined to described those people who are unable to gage the passage of time accurately. Here's why I think this is the case with LaFevers: Sybella goes to visit The Beast when he's recovering from injuries in a local convent. When she leaves his bedside, it’s "not quite morning". She returns to the palace and sleeps "a short while" and then has to go to a council meeting. When she leaves the council meeting very shortly afterwards and goes outside, she's in the "cool night air"! Where the hell did the entire day go? It’s not morning, it’s night because she sees downtown that the bars are open and people are reveling. She slaughters two of these revelers, who happen to be D'Albret's infiltrators and who are reveling all over a poor innocent woman. But suddenly it’s almost daybreak again! My, how the gods make the sands of time run at their bidding!
Despite all this, I do still prefer this novel to its predecessor, but LaFevers seems determined not to make it easy to like it. She has this hardened assassin (Sybella) agonizing over what people will think of her now they know she is D'Albret's daughter even though she really isn’t his daughter because she's Mortain's daughter. Are you still following this? It's seriously and amateurishly confused. She frets and worries most of all over what The Beast will think of her, and I found this to be at first annoying, followed by irritating, and finally truly nauseating. It is so out of character for Sybella. But at least she gets the goods on what Mortain really wants: she learns from Ismae that the marque does not command them to kill someone. It’s merely an indication that the person bearing it is going to die soon.
But enough of this rambling banter! In conclusion, and this might surprise you, I am in fact going to rate this as worthy if only because it was significantly better than LaFevers's previous sortie into this series. There were still many problems with it, however, which is why I have really no interest in pursuing this series any further. I committed only to the first two and that was plenty! They were worth reading but not addictively so. Hopefully, should you choose to read it, you will be able to offer it a warmer reception that was I!
