"The Magician's Apprentice", Trudi Canavan

"The empire had been at peace for a thousand years". If there's one line than can reliably cause me to throw a fantasy or sci-fi book across the room with a scream, that's it.

Trudi Canavan is the exact opposite of that kind of lazy writer. (And no, that doesn't mean the even more dumb "The war had gone on for a thousand years"). Other writers have perhaps captured a fantasy society at a point in time that's more engrossing or vivid than Trudi Canavan's Kyralia, but I've never got such a strong feeling of a society that is living and changing, that is the result of the things that happened decades ago, which are the results of the things that happened decades before that, in a way that is coherent and believable but not pat and predictable, nor copy-and-pasted from some handy chunk of real history.

The Black Magician Trilogy hooked me slowly, as the pace and the stakes ratcheted up from the rich but slightly sedate opening to the sprint finish of The High Lord, which justified every chapter of its lengthy buildup.

In The Magician's Apprentice, Ms Canavan takes on the prequel problem. I've said my piece on prequels before — the constraint of an already-known future presents the author with the dilemma of treading a plot already sketched out for the readers, or else descending into something inconsequential enough to have not left its mark in the already-published later stories.

The Magician's Apprentice very nearly threads the needle — it takes advantage of one mystery left unexplained in The High Lord, it explores a society whose character had been forgotten by the time of Rothen and Sonea, though its effects were well remembered. Best of all, it extends the history further, giving the backstory of The Black Magician a backstory of its own just as rich and plausible. However, it still suffers somewhat from the reader knowing some of the things that have to happen before the end, and that detracts from its impact. I think it's fair to say that nothing really shocking happens in the whole book, the way The High Lord or Last of the Wilds are able to confound the reader's understanding of events and characters.

I've read some criticisms of the book along those lines, that it's a bit dull. It's a mistake to read it without having read The High Lord — the context of the later events do lend significance to episodes in this book that would otherwise be uninteresting. The alternative criticism is that the heroine of this book is too similar to that of the trilogy. That's hardly rare - I could name a dozen successful writers who have written volume after volume with the same character appearing under a different name in each new book.

Despite the lack of twists, the story keeps on pulling. I bought the book about midday on Saturday, and finished it on my way to work on Monday morning. Trudi Canavan isn't a deep or challenging writer; she writes entertaining stories about characters that you like enough to care about, and still want to know more about after you've finished. A bit of mystery, a bit of excitement, a bit of romance (yes, that will be off-putting to some younger male readers), layered with the virtuosity of an original fantasy setting without hard edges in time, without the absurdities of economics or politics — "how does that army eat?" "Why is that group in power when that other group could have easily take over?" — that mar lesser writers' creations.

The next book — a first sequel to The Black Magician — is in hardback only until April, but I will certainly grab it then.