Oh-ho, this is how you know I am starting to procrastinate this weekend! I’m going for two reviews in two days!
When I first picked up this book, it had been eight years since I had read the previous four. I was no longer in high school but rather ready to start my Master’s degree. And to be honest, over the nine-year break, I had nearly forgotten the series. If I hadn’t noticed The Stone Key on the shelves after bumming around in a book store in Melbourne for a bit, I may have never picked it up again. But at the time, as far I was aware, this was meant to be the final book in the series—so I excitedly grabbed it off the shelf and dug into it that night.
As I have mentioned repeatedly, The Obernewtyn Chronicles is a series that greatly expanded over the course of its publication. During this time, it also transformed from a series of tighter, slimmer, novels—in the case of the original—to some absolute chonkers. This brings us to The Stone Key; a book so large that while Penguin in Australia kept it as one volume, the American publisher Random House split it into two, with the start of the novel spun off as Wavesong. The split is entirely justified; The Stone Key is bloody ginormous. You could kill a man with it. Easy. In addition, there’s nothing like the slow pace of The Keeping Place here; both content and pace have become almost overwhelming. Reading The Stone Key is not a sprint, it’s an endurance run.
Despite this, I worked out about half way through my first read that this book was not going to be the resolution after all. While The Stone Key is absolutely jam packed full of plot, most of it is not directly relevant to Elspeth’s main quest. What we are given instead though is still highly enjoyable, but very very overwhelming by the time we stagger to the end.
The rebellion against the Council has been a long running thread in the series, reaching back as far as The Farseekers. In The Keeping Place, the rebels managed to score some strong victories against the Council and as a result, they now control a good deal of the Land. But while the east coast rebels are getting ready to hold elections and attempt a democratic transfer of power, the west coast is still struggling. It’s not just the remnants of the Council that are giving them trouble; the warrior fraction of the Herders known as the Hedra and the slave trader Salamander have developed a tight relationship in opposition to the rebels too. Regular Herders are formidable enough, but these new warrior priests are exceptionally fanatical and cult-like. So how or why did they end up on the same side as Salamander?
The Misfits are suffering too. While some of the rebels have been—and remain—very good friends with Obernewtyn, a small number of rebels betrayed them during their fight against the Council, leading to a number of young Misfits being killed. As the Guildmistress of the Farseekers, Elspeth is obliged to seek justice on their behalf. However, when traveling back south to Saithwood to deal with the traitor, Elspeth finds herself swept away into the heart of the Herder stronghold.
I love the fact that the rebellion did not have a clean resolution, and that Elspeth and her allies have to deal with a very messy aftermath. This hit me as very true to life. However, the way that Elspeth then gets caught up in the fight against the Hedra is less realistic and is instead peppered with a lot of very convenient coincidences. But I feel I need to sometimes remind myself that we are working in a world where future telling is a genuine skill, and even if one person does not have much power, a number of people (or even beasts) working in concert can lead to some powerful measures being taken to ensure a certain path is followed. Someone wanted Elspeth on Herder Isle. And that is why it seemed contrived.
So who’s steering Elspeth? On one hand, we have the Agyllians, who have proven to be very interested in Elspeth’s destiny. But on the other hand, we have a certain malevolent little shit who has been haunting Elspeth on the dream trails. Despite their little shit status, they shouldn’t be underestimated; they’re more than powerful enough to influence major events. In The Stone Key, this same little shit really decides to ramp up their game and starts to torment Elspeth in real life as well. And the lengths they go to are INSANE. I stated in my review of Ashling that this particular individual lives rent free in Elspeth’s head—I do wonder now whether or not the opposite is true as well. And the reason. they can do what they can to her because they abuse the powers of other Talents for their own gain.
Its not just future telling Talents that this little night-haunt is using and abusing either; it turns out that while the Beforetimers ensured their own destruction with the Great White, nukes were not the only thing they developed that could cause a world-ending cataclysm. They also had bioweapons. And guess who worked out where they are stored? All the planning fighting and politicking in the Land across the last four books will have been for nothing if this little shit manages to get of one of these ‘plague seeds’ successfully released.
However, on a more happy note concerning the Beforetimers, we get to spend a lot more time with the Teknoguilders again! It’s not just the city under Tor that they are interested in now, but with a whole new, super advanced complex that seems to be run by an AI. And the clever little Teknoguilders have gotten it to wake up! I delight, time and time again, when the Teknoguilders start probing the limits of computers. One of them has even decided bugger the Turing Test, she’s just going to accept that all computers are capable of ‘being’:
[…] Dell has taken the opposite point of view. She believes that a computermachine is simply a different kind of being. It was this approach that enabled her to do what I could not, for all my rational theories. Indeed, it was her struggle to communicate with the computermachine as one life form to another that led to the discovery that it could both speak and listen.
Look, if you had an interest in computers and your connection was not that of a programmer or a developer, but someone who could psychically connect with them, would you conclude any differently?
Its not just the Teknoguilders though who have interesting interactions with Beforetime technology; we also have Elspeth discovering a bathroom, which made me giggle:
It looked like a privy, but it was so smooth and clean and sweet smelling that I sat down uneasily. When I got to my feet, a great jet of water burst out and cleaned the bowl. The noise it made was so loud and unexpected that I staggered backwards out of the cubical, tripped over and sat down hard.
Just like in The Keeping Place, our exploration of Beforetime ruins is paired with Elspeth’s true dreams of Cassy and Reichler Clinic. It’s now more and more clear that both she an Hannah are Beforetime Misfits, and that they knew enough about Elspeth’s future to start leading her as well.
Him, maybe I needed a third hand above?
Although we we learn a lot more about the Beforetime and we see a lot of development across the Land, the weight of it all is a little too much. By the time I hit the last third of the book—concerning a king—I was exhausted! It’s like I too, had travelled across the sea riding a ship-fish and needed to come up for air. I really feel that there should have been another chat with the editor and the publisher here to flesh this out into at least two well developed books. The third section of the book really was in need of more work to make it more plot relevant. I have never picked up the American versions, so I don’t know whether the text is exactly the same as the original Australian ones, but I think with a little extra time this could have become two well rounded novels, not one.
Also concerning editors and publishers: I noticed a couple of errors in the novel that made their way to publication. As the queen of typos myself, I am perhaps not the best person to criticize, but even I take more care when I write professionally. I feel that sometimes the wrong place names were used, and at one point Brydda may have teleported on or off a ship… and in and out of Elspeth’s memory. Maybe the book was too much for the ARC readers? Or maybe there was some disharmony between the author, the editors and the publishers? I usually wouldn’t comment on this in a book review, but it was really jarring.
Returning to the story, I really can’t cap off the review without giving an update about Maruman:
‘Maruman has not been miserable!’ the old cat snarled. ‘Maruman has been angry!’
[…]‘Do not listen to him,’ Gahltha sent. ‘His is a contrary species. So eager has he been to come to you that he rent the night with his dreadful yowling.’
‘Singing the heartsong, I was,’ Maruman sent haughtily. ‘A pity equine ears are so dull/crude.’
So it turns out he’s completely salty about Elspeth accidentally leaving him behind at one point—even though it’s not even her fault! I love him really I do, but he is a little arsehole, and he has absolutely no empathy whatsoever for human feelings.
Overall, I enjoyed The Stone Key despite its flaws. But but just like The Keeping Place, we are seeing more and more signs of what happens when best laid plans are put by the wayside…
For for cbr16bingo, this is Cult. For the For the Hedra of Herder Isle.