Book #86

Possession
by Chris Humphreys

I read this one for my librarian friend; normally I would have passed on this, because it's the third book in a trilogy and I haven't read the first two. But I wanted to help her out with her stack of books to be reviewed, and I liked the guy's name (heh), so I picked it up; my friend pointed out that one of the measures of a good book is whether or not you can pick it up without having read the entire series, and understand and enjoy it. Made sense to me, so I went for it.

So according to that standard, this was not a terribly good book. It did not stand alone; too many references were made to the earlier two books. The biggest problem in coming into the series at this point was that the villain's villainy has already been well-established, and so is mostly assumed. There were also apparently a plot twist or two and a serious betrayal of the main character by the villain, and so much of the dramatic tension stems from that; since I didn't read that part, the struggle between the hero and the villain seemed a little bland.

The basic idea of the book is strong: it focuses on a pair of modern teenagers, cousins, who have the ability to use Nordic runes to perform a sort of astral projection -- though again, much of the explanation of the mechanics of this came in earlier books and was only glossed over here; I'm still not sure whether the spirit form in these books, referred to as the Fetch, is material or not -- and can turn themselves into animals, or travel back into the past along their family tree, or even possess another person, which is the major plot device in this book, as evidenced clearly by the title. The best parts of the narrative are the flashbacks to other times; the author has a nice grasp of history, particularly the more mundane, human aspects of it, and has chosen his moments well. The witch in their ancestral tree, for instance, is a woman in the 1600's, who we encounter at the tail end of the siege of York by the Puritans, following the English civil war when Parliament overthrew the king -- the onset of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, if my own shaky grasp of history has the right grip. It's an interesting glimpse, made more interesting by the fact that this woman's husband is one of the besieging Puritans, who accuses and convicts her of witchcraft after the city falls. Another flashback is to a Viking invader who fights on the side of the Saxons, whom he just fought with his fellow dragonship raiders, against the Normans during the Battle of Hastings. The explication of the runes, too, including the ways they shift meaning depending on the combinations of different runes, was also quite interesting. Unfortunately, without the buildup of the first two books, the climax in this one was simply -- anticlimactic.

In the end, I would recommend the book as the third in a series, but not by itself.