Wars used to be about two armies squaring off against each other, but those days are gone. In the heart of the Kingdom, Kings come and go and partisan fighting, for the crown, is rife. Discontent amongst the Slyt population has broken out into outright rebellion, so the Kingdom sends its young conscripts to quell the outbreak. What they find is a country, hot and inhospitable and an enemy unwilling to engage in traditional battles. What looks like an easy victory soon drags on year after year with no clear resolution, all the time stripping the humanity out of the Kingdom's soldiers...

Of Bone and Thunder (2015. 527 pages) is a new fantasy novel from Chris Evans, author and military historian, who previously had success with his Iron Elves Trilogy.

In this new novel Evans has, very much, taken his inspiration from the Vietnam War with many of the events in the book being a mirror image of the events of that war. The book is split into three sections; the first introduces us to the infantry. In this case they are a troop of long bow and crossbow soldiers, but it’s not that big a stretch to transpose many elements from the real world into the fantasy one. So, bows stand in for rifles, the dragons fill the position of aerial transport and attack planes and, of course the illusive Slyts take the place of the Vietcong.

Evans has used a lot of cultural imagery from both film and history to depict his soldier. They arrive in the jungle in their shiny tidy uniforms and helm, horribly unsuitable for the jungle fighting. We see how the men try to adapt to their new reality, placing dirt and leaves around them to afford better camouflage, much to the chagrin of Weel, their commanding officer, whose idiocy is more likely to get his men killed.

The story is told mainly from three interlocking perspectives. Carny is a reluctant soldier who gets through the war numbed against the horror by taking drugs. Jawn is a young man versed in the use of Thaumatics, who willingly comes to the war seeking a heroic life; however his chance encounter with Rickets diverts him from his chosen path into a much more dangerous one. Lastly we have Vorly, the pragmatic leader of a flight of rags. Rags are the dragons, however Evans has created a biology for them which makes flying them a dangerous proposition. Fly them too hard, or have their hides pierced, and the rags explode.

One of the things I have noticed about a lot of fantasy books is their desire to be long enough to wedge a door open and this book is no exception. However, whereas a lot of books are filled with unneeded bloat to extend their length, this is not the case with Of Bone and Thunder. Evans captures the disillusionment and horror of war well and the decision to split the story into three military actions means that you never feel that content has been included for contents sake.

Events in the book deliberately follow events in the Vietnam War, so we hear news of a new king assassinated in his carriage, town criers are imbedded with the troops to report the war and I’m pretty sure that the battles are based on actual events. This does mean that occasionally you pop out of the fantasy element of the book when you recognise its real world equivalent, but for the most part the world building and characters are enough to keep you in the moment.

Evans has created a remarkably engrossing story, with characters that you get to know and really care when they are killed. The depiction of war is realistically brutal with the troops trying to fight an enemy they neither know nor understand. I don’t know if this will be part of a series, but on the strength of this novel I would happily pick up another.

9

Charles Packer