Fighting bugs and the plot

Battling giant man-eating bugs ought to make a ripping premise for a fantasy novel. Fending off razor-sharp maws or bracing against the sliminess and sheer bulk of their 6-foot carapaces could keep any would-be epic hero busy for a few hundred pages.

What a pity Steph Swainston’s debut novel doesn’t quite live up to the thrill and crisp writing of its opening chapters, when the reader is plunged into a richly imagined, if creepy, world where there’s never an exterminator around when you need one. But the story unravels for want of simple common sense.

Soaring above it all is Jant Comet, an antihero with a drug addiction and an overactive libido who proves a reliable and affable narrator. The offspring of an interspecies rape, he’s the only winged human in the fictional Fourlands who is lithe enough to fly. Plus he’s a polyglot. Both are handy gifts if you’re the emperor’s messenger.

Jant’s lofty vantage lets him keep an eye on every skirmish on or off the battlefield and among the emperor’s inner circle of 50 immortals, each of whom has been chosen for mastery of a particular skill. There’s a sailor, an archer, a healer, engineers and others, each tapped as the very best, at least until someone better comes along and they’re booted back to mortality.

Jant fears for his job of imperial letter carrier, translator and schmoozer. But the guy can fly 200 miles a day in a world where rapid transit is a team of horses. He keeps track of all the courtiers, his wife and mistress and sundry mortal combatants while manipulating all of them in their own language. The emperor should be bestowing perpetual Employee of the Century plaques instead of making him grovel.

Ah, but the hero has a weakness. He’s a junkie, which is the court’s worst-kept secret. A narcotic called “cat” jolts Jant into an alternate reality that he’s dubbed the Shift. There a dead king also wages war on the insects with startling results for the Fourlands. If only Jant could get someone to believe his habit transports him anyplace besides catatonia.

This setup ought to hook genre fans willing to give elves and wizards a rest but without sacrificing all that nifty swordplay and medieval-style pageantry. Yes, this is a pre-gunpowder society and Swainston’s at her best offering a bird’s-eye view of hand-to-mandible combat against mindless swarms. A fantasy novel, however, relies on world building; either the reader is fully transported and cares about its salvation or there’s no reason to continue. Not everything about the Fourlands’ customs, beliefs or technology is fully explained or needs to be, but the author’s civilization is often more impenetrable than the gray walls her insects build from saliva and rubble.

Two thousand years of combat should’ve yielded a few more innovations than barbed arrows. If mind-altering drugs are no problem, how about a decent pesticide? And isn’t it odd that the wise eternal emperor hasn’t found an entomologist to join his bug-killing coterie? It’s left to Jant to discover the insects’ attack patterns, communication, mating habits, even origins. How annoyingly convenient.

At one point, Jant muses that the emperor fears becoming obsolete if the bugs are ever fully vanquished. It’s a sufficiently subversive idea that could’ve built steadily into a dramatic final showdown, but Swainston drops it in favor of plot detours through various lovers’ quarrels and political infighting that merely burn pages until the climactic battle.

Swainston already has published a sequel in her native Australia, so it’s a likely bet that this inventive world is explored further and some of its logistical holes are plugged. A trilogy is planned. And Jant is worth following if only for the skillfully drawn nuances of his character. But the strength of the story must ultimately rest on more than his graceful wings.

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Anne Boles Levy is a reviewer whose work has appeared in The Times and who also writes a children’s blog at www.bookbuds.net.