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Author Topic:   ASH: A Secret History. By Mary Gentle
ohnhai
Member (Idle past 5161 days)
Posts: 649
From: Melbourne, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2004


Message 1 of 1 (174380)
01-06-2005 11:10 AM


In my mind Mary Gentle's 'ASH' deserves a place amongst the all time greats of our time.
It is quite a hard book to explain, and too much explanation will undermine the twists and turns of the plot. The easiest thing to explain is its size. Simply put it’s huge. Over 1100 pages and was published in one volume in the UK (was cut into 4 books for the US edition) But unlike many book that size it doesn’t drag and bog down in turgid details and tedium (can we say Stephen Donaldson! God what a bore) Nope, Ash clicks along at one hell of a pace and will drag you though it with alarming speed.
As Roz writes better than me I’ll leter her explain.
Ash kills her first man when she is eight, and at 20 is an experienced captain of mercenaries in the small wars of the late Middle Ages--but not quite the Middle Ages we know from history. The more scholar Piers Ratcliffe works on the evidence, the more knowledge and recorded history and the rules of evidence crumble under him--this world of Visigoths with ceramic robots and of the religion of the Green Christ is nothing he knows of. Ash hears voices, but not like those of Joan of Arc--voices that give her very specific advice about the winning of battles. Married against her will to a man who despises her, but whom she lusts after; finding that the Visigoth general is her twin; coping with the day-to-day problems of battle and siege and mayhem, Mary Gentle's Ash is a magnificent creation. This long, passionate novel, blending historical fantasy with thoughtful speculative fiction, is as smart about the minutiae of medieval war-making and manners as it is about the wilder reaches of contemporary cosmology
---review written by Roz Kaveney (published on ammazon.co.uk)
I can’t say much more as I don’t want to spoil it for any one but all I can say is read this book.
This message has been edited by ohnhai, 01-06-2005 11:19 AM

  
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