Book Review – Blood Ties

Author: Pamela Freeman
Publisher: Orbit
Publishing Date: June 2008
Binding: Paperback
Cover Artist: Darian Causby

Blood Ties is written by the Australian author Pamela Freeman who previously has written fantasy aimed at children and young adult readers. Blood Ties is her first foray into the territory of adult fantasy and it is the first book in The Castings Trilogy. The second book, Deep Water, is already published and the third, Full Circle, is scheduled to come out at the end of this year.

A thousand years ago, the Eleven Domains were invaded and the original inhabitants forced on the road as Travellers, belonging nowhere, welcomed by no one.

Now the Domains are governed with an iron fist by Warlords, but there are wilder elements to the landscape that cannot be controlled, that may prove their undoing. Some are spirits of place, of water and air and fire and earth. Some are greater than these – and some are human.

Blood Ties focuses on the stories of three people, all Travellers. The enchanter Saker, a man so consumed with the anger of a thousand-year-old injustice that he will stop at nothing to see the descendants of the invaders driven out and the land returned to his people. Ash, young man who is apprenticed to a safeguarder and forced to kill for an employer he cannot escape. He comes from a family of travelling performers but his inaptitude when it comes to music has forced him to leave the road and seek employment in the city. Through coincidence he discover that he possesses a disconcerting and rather frightening talent, something that might be the very reason why his father has refused to teach him the oldest songs of his people, the only records that recount their version of what happened in the past. Bramble is a young village woman with a remarkable affinity for animals. She’s a proud and rebellious spirit who refuses to bow her head and accept the tyranny of the brutal warlords. When she runs afoul of one of the local warlord’s men, she is forced to flee for her life. She finds shelter with a horse-trainer of Traveller heritage. Here she learns his craft and she makes a name for herself participating in the hugely popular horse-races. Her talent with horses attracts the attention of an ambitious warlord and when Bramble refuses to cede to his demands, she is once again forced to flee. Seeking the Well of Secrets, a healer and oracle, Bramble’s path crosses that of Ash, who is looking for answers of his own. Meanwhile, Saker, driven by his quest for vengeance, has begun to raise the dead, something that interferes with Ash’s quest.

As their three stories unfold, along with those whose lives they touch, it becomes clear that they are bound together in ways not even a stonecaster could foresee – bound by their past, their future, and their blood.

Blood Ties deals with some very heavy themes – genocide, oppression, disenfranchisement and deep-seated collective trauma. It is significant that all of the main characters belong to the people that have been disposed. Although the original crime is centuries old, they are still victims of this disenfranchisement. The Travellers have become permanent outcasts in their own countries, constantly encountering prejudice and contempt, vulnerable to all kinds of abuse. Each and every one of them carries the trauma of genocide and dispossession, a hurt that is passed on through their songs from generation to generation, and reinforced by every slight and injustice that they continually experience.

This idea of a deep trauma, embedded in the collective memory of a people is also made manifest in the world of the Eleven Domains. During the original invasion something happened that made the ghosts of the dead linger. Each time a person dies; their ghost rises three days later and must be helped to leave the world of the living so that their soul can be reborn. But not everyone is able to let go of their past life, of their anger and hurt. Saker exploits this in his search for vengeance and it seems that the unquiet dead may hold the key to what really happened a thousand years ago.

Blood Ties is very well written – apart from a few stylistic choices that I don’t agree with- and the novel’s basic premise is also very intriguing. However, despite its obvious qualities Freeman’s novel failed to move me, and this was a quite frustrating experience because I really wanted to like it. The story is quite exciting and suspenseful, after a rather slow start, the characters are generally quite sympathetic – yet I couldn’t bring myself to care about neither them nor the story. The world-building is one the generic side and is somewhat lacking in terms of texture and historical depth. The prose is good with the occasional glimpse of brilliance but the symbolism is rather heavy-handed. Apart from the curious and frustrating lack of appeal, my only serious problem with the novel pertains to the structure of the narrative.

For reasons unknown to me, Freeman has included a large number of tangential stories that only touch upon the central narrative in the slightest degree. Thus scattered throughout the story are a number of chapters that have almost no connection to the primary narrative but instead tell the back-stories of several very minor characters. These vignettes add a certain depth and realism to the world but they don’t fit well within the overall structure of the narrative. They are exclusively written in a first-person narrative, which contrasts jarringly with the third-person narration of the main story-arc. Furthermore, these side-stories aren’t really integrated into the primary narrative on a deeper conceptual level and therefore the final result makes for a fragmented narrative and an uneven reading experience. It is extremely difficult to successfully integrate this kind of tangential story-telling into a larger narrative and Freeman falls woefully short. In fact, the only successful example that comes to mind is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Last Light of the Sun – and Kay is one of the giants within the genre of fantasy fiction.

In sum, I found Pamela Freeman’s Blood Ties to be a largely competent piece of fantasy fiction and a pleasant but rather bland reading experience. The novel has some good qualities but it simply failed to enchant me and I doubt that I can bring myself to care enough about the story to read the rest of the trilogy.

Trine D. Paulsen

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