David Gemmell sprang to almost immediate attention with the publication of his first novel, Legend, in 1984. In the years after that he wrote twelve more novels about the Drenai, the people who were defending their land from the incursions of Ulric, the Nadir Warlord. These sequels and prequels cross centuries of time and space (several don’t even take place in Drenai) but it’s possible to put together a chronology and history of that land through some diligent reading and note-taking as you go along. But to put it into some kind of context…
Legend was Gemmell’s first novel. However, according to the way the series is structured, it’s the ninth book in the Drenai series. Quest For Lost Heroes (1990), the novel we’re looking at here, was Gemmell’s ninth published book but it is also the eleventh book in the series. The first book in the series was Knights Of Dark Renown – published in 1989 – and which takes place quite a distance from Drenai but in the same world. It’s all a bit confusing which is why I always recommend people read the books of any series in publication order because you’re coming to the stories in the same order as the writer did.
Anyway, this story is sandwiched between The King Beyond The Gate (1985, tenth novel) and Winter Warriors (1997, twelfth novel). In that latter book, reference is made to a “War Of The Twins”, a bitter war of succession that ravaged the continent that these stories take place on. Mr Gemmell never wrote about this war – although he spoiled the outcome of it in The Swords Of Night And Day (2004, thirteenth novel) – but the results of it were all over the novels that he wrote and that took place after Quest. Here we see its genesis.
And it’s a bloody shambles.
To explain, I need to make an aside here…
If you’ve read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion you might have felt the same sense of shock as I did that the epic story of Frodo, the ring and the return of the king was summarised in just a few paragraphs that gave the barest details of that mighty quest but placed it firmly in its place as an important but minor episode in the history of Middle Earth.
I got a lot of the same feeling here when I reread Quest For Lost Heroes after Winter Warriors was published.
Quest starts with a raid by Nadir tribesmen on a village where they steal away women for the slave markets. Kiall, a young man believing himself to be in love with one of the girls, embarks on a quest to win her back. He enlists the aid of Chareos, Beltzer, Finn and Maggrig, four veterans of the last war with the Nadir (against Tenaka Khan, one of the heroes of The King Beyond The Gate) well as other allies, and then the story takes a rather grim turn…
I’m going to say that I didn’t enjoy this book the first time I read it. It was well written and moved fast, but it felt dark and nihilistic and joyless. It still does, but I can see a greater sense of purpose to it now. What makes it clearer is the sense you get of the larger history surrounding this novel, of where it fits into the author’s schematic of what he wanted to achieve with this series as well as this novel’s own themes. But it’s dark in many places: when Kiall returns to his village, he doesn’t count on the families of the kidnapped girls being indifferent or hostile at the idea of their return, at having extra mouths to feed after the village was pillaged, or the idea these women may be of no “use” to their families because they’ve been abducted and are possibly bearing another man’s child. It’s a harsh outlook to take but it feels realistic and grim in a way that other authors have tried to achieve and never really managed.
It doesn’t seem fair that a novel has to be read in the context of eight or nine other books in order for it to be accessible, but really, you don’t need to know any of the history to get a kick out of this book, although it doesn’t hurt because those other books just throw into sharp relief the message we get here.
However, here we have a defining event of the history of the Drenai people being caused by a boy who wouldn’t give up searching for a girl he knew he didn’t love and who didn’t love him. He didn’t give up because people had started dying and to do so would render their sacrifices meaningless.
This is what turned me off this book in the first place: that insistence that Kiall, our young hero, places on putting meaning on the events that happen in his life… until I realised that so many things in my own life that were important to me only happened because I was in a certain place at a particular time – a jump to the left or a step to the right would have made these events not happen at all, or happen in a slightly different manner, and my life would be very different indeed. I can name at least an dozen events where I made an obvious choice that had major repercussions on the rest of my life afterwards, and I’m sure you can as well.
Because one of the themes of Gemmell’s work – all of his work, really – is that we are fools for trying to see a purpose to our lives and what happens to us. There are moments across many of his novels where characters try to work out some kind of point to the tragic comedy that their lives have become and generally they can’t work out what it might be and rely on the Source – the all-pervasive religion of Gemmell’s novels – and just get on with living their lives as best they can for as long as they can.
And this novel is a collection of circumstances all happening in a particular way in order for a particular history to happen.
I also think that it might be the novel in which Gemmell realised that he shouldn’t keep writing potboilers and started going for something a bit greater, because there’s a shift in his writing taking place here: his characters are becoming a little deeper and his plots have a little more meat on them and his stories carry a little more weight from the world in which they were being written rather than the one in which they were happening. Even the elements familiar from his other books – an underworld, rites of passage, confronting (literal) demons, admitting that you do actually care about something bigger than yourself and making sacrifices to prove it – shine a little brighter here, possibly because they are the only lights we see.
And he begins to change a lot of the themes that he’d used in previous books to reflect the world more realistically. As an example, since Legend, a major focus in the novels was the bonds that are formed by people who serve in a cause that brings them close to death. We see it in the earlier books: in Legend, Gilad is a farmer who has come to the fortress of Dros Delnoch because it beats the hollow existence he has as a farmer. But by the end of the book, he has realised that he has learned a lot about how he relates to other people around him. Gemmell portrayed these bonds between warriors favourably in many of his early books, but here we have Beltzer who is considered a failure among the people he has come back home to. He found that wonderful camaraderie in battle but can’t get it anywhere else in his life. He becomes a drunk and a brawler… and a burden to his few friends because he can’t readjust to civilian life. He’s the sort of character that Gemmell may have met in the streets of West London as a boy in the 1950s; a veteran who couldn’t deal with the return to civilian life after years of combat and has become an aimless drifter. In 1990, as well, we didn’t know much about toxic masculinity, but I can read Gemmell’s novels now and recognise characters who are only successful because other people have suffered for it.
But there are other characters who are just as interesting in a positive way: Chareos, the traditional hero in this novel, hides a family secret that would make him a target in the wider world he lives in; Finn and Maggrig are two hunters who have taken up a quiet life in the wilderness before being drawn back into battle. They were also two of the first gay main characters that I ever read about in a fantasy novel. Gemmell dealt with progressive themes and ideas in his books sensibly, as a fact of the universe he wrote in. His books are violent and awful things happen to many of his characters, but he doesn’t flaunt the grimness or harm his characters gratuitously: they take risks and suffer for them, or are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there are joys to be had, and the quiet, obvious love between Finn and Maggrig is one of them.
Quest For Lost Heroes is not a fun book, but it’s brilliant and dark and complicated. It’s not a “must-read” Gemmell novel, but it is a “should-read”.
You can find out more about David Gemmell at: https://www.orbitbooks.net/author-spotlight-david-gemmell-2/
