Ravenor (The Ravenor Trilogy, Book 1) (Part 2)
Hello, all. I hope you’re having a happy Sunday.
This is the second part of the 2-part review of Ravenor. Please see Part 1 if you want to see the breakdown of Premise, Rating, Plot, and general bookkeeping. This part will focus on Characters, Worldbuilding, and Prose.
Let’s dive in.
STATS
Title: Ravenor
Series: The Ravenor Trilogy, Book 1
Author(s): Dan Abnett
Genre: Science Fiction (Space Opera)
First Printing: March 2005
Publisher: Black Library (Games Workshop Publishing)
Rating: 6.5/10
SPOILER WARNING
Both minor and heavy spoilers for Ravenor will be provided throughout this review. I will try to keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible and will confine heavy spoilers to clearly labeled sections.
Minor spoilers for the Eisenhorn stories will be provided during this review. There will also be mild spoilers for “Playing Patience”.
CHARACTERS
Ravenor
As mentioned back in the “Playing Patience” review, Ravenor is functionally a cross between Professor X and Batman Beyond’s Bruce Wayne, using his immense psychic prowess to coordinate his operatives across great distances and applying said prowess as a scalpel or hammer as the situation calls for it. Despite the immense power at his disposal, the book also takes advantage of his limits. Ravenor can only go places that his chair can, and said chair is not inconspicuous. His contributions are therefore mostly limited to him being the Man in the Chair. If anything happens to disable his chair or limit his psychic powers, or if he crosses paths with a more powerful psyker, he can be neutralized.
In terms of personality, Ravenor is a lot more approachable (both in-world and narratively) than Eisenhorn. He’s still a cold and calculating person who saves lives because they are useful to him, tortures people with casual ease, and will leave people temporarily marooned in space just so he doesn’t need to worry about lugging them around in his own brig. However, he is not as hyper-fixated on his mission, and when he is guiding his team through danger, his concern for their well-being is much closer to the surface.
Because of this, I’m a bit puzzled by the assessment that the Ravenor stories are darker. Maybe something will change in future books. For now, though, Ravenor feels like a beacon of light in this setting.
The Entourage
Whereas the Eisenhorn books was basically just Eisenhorn and a bunch of functional team members in his orbit, Ravenor takes time to flesh out the entourage.
Zael - a young teen with latent psyker powers - gets his origin story in this book, struggling with the loss of his sister and with keeping up with the danger he now finds himself in across Ravenor scoops him up.
Harlon Nayl, would was just muscle in past books, gets a long scene where an injury he suffers early in the book (the loss of a finger) has him reflecting on his morality and the people he’s lost while serving Eisenhorn and Ravenor.
Kara Swole and Patience Kys don’t get deep character moments, but each of them gets scenes focusing on the challenges they face.
Cynia Preest, the rogue trader who is Ravenor’s uber, has an ongoing internal (and somewhat externalized) conflict about whether she wants to keep working for Ravenor, due to the danger that he keeps putting herself, her ship, and her crew into.
Carl Thonius, Ravenor’s interrogator, who … well, actually, he’s the second problem we have to discuss.
Badly Shuffled Arc (Heavy Spoilers)
In fiction, there is a trope known as the Bunny-Ears Lawyer. This trope describes characters who is so eccentric, for whatever reason, that it seems like they have no place in an group trying to get serious work done, yet are so incredibly competent in whatever they do that it outweighs the quirkiness.
Carl Thonius is a Bunny-Ears Lawyer in the Inquisition. He always dresses flamboyantly, can barely handle of weapon, and is, quite frankly, a coward. It’s a bit baffling that Ravenor keeps him around, especially in an entourage that is otherwise composed of hardened killers. However, he is also implied to be an incredibly skilled hacker, in addition to knowing enough trivia about any place they visit to be able to win the local equivalent of Jeopardy.
Unfortunately for Thonius, he is a flect addict, and his addiction only deepens when he starts using it to cope with a traumatic injury is suffers midway through the book.
How did he become a flect addict? When did he become a flect addict?
Excellent questions that are not answered.
In Part 1 of the book, it’s implied that he’s using a flect at one point when he’s supposed to be working. (He’s so good at his job that no one notices the time he lost doing this, with only Zael picking up on it but deciding not to say anything.)
Later, when he uses it to cope with his injury. In that scene, it’s framed almost as if this is a new vice for him: he only has one flect on hand, with no indication that he’s thought ahead to getting more.
At the end of the book, he swipes one flect - just one more - from a ship filled with them, giving off very strong, “This is the last one, I have this under control,” energy.
So, is Thonius sinking into flect addiction? Or was he already struggling? How are we meant to read this arc?
If the idea was that his is descending into addition, it seems like the book should have made it clear that him using for his injury was the first time. However, if the idea is that the addiction is always with him, it seems like it should have come up in more of his POV scenes.
As stated a few times now, it’s early in the series. Maybe things will be smoothed out as the story progresses. It’s just, for now, Thonius’s addiction comes across as something thrown in at the last minute to set up the next book, without much thought into how it fucntions as part of this character in this book.
WORLDBUILDING
Flects
The flects are a fun concept that feels deeply connected to WH40K. The idea of the Warp itself being used as a drug makes a lot of sense, especially since one of the four Chaos Gods is all about hedonism and pleasure. The explanation for their origin (which comes at the end of the book) also feels like a very natural expression of the setting.
Scenery Setting
Abnett really went hard on coloring in the different worlds visited in this book. Whether it’s a hive world where acidic, carcinogenic rain from industrial pollution has reshaped the culture, a world dedicated to livestock husbandry, or an interstellar free trade port, he takes the time to color in these environments. I think there’s discussion to be had as to whether his descriptions run a bit too long, yet the results speak for themselves. Each of their worlds have a vibrant and lived-in feel to it.
This has a very potent impact on the grimdark elements of the story. As we touched on in the content warning, Ravenor dials up these elements from the levels we saw in the Eisenhorn books, yet at the same time, it never feels obtrusive. Abnett doesn’t just show us that life in this galaxy is generally awful - he explores why, as well as how people make the best living they can despite that fact.
The hive world isn’t just a toxic pit where the lower denizens are doomed to die by either skin cancers or drug addition - it is a world where life cycles are dictated by adaptations to the toxic rain, with an entire industry of “gampers” who can be hired for a few coins to hold a giant umbrella over you while you walk from Point A to Point B.
The free trade port is a wretched hive of scum and villainy where you can be freely assaulted by any bounty hunter or dissatisfied merchant you cross paths with, yet the scum and villains all understand just how precarious the port’s situation is and won’t do anything to violate its codes of content.
Even the livestock husbandry world, which is doomed to overtax its resources and suffer economic collapse within a century, is explored as a culture of people just doing their past to meet the demands of a galactic market.
So, while I can see how people might read this book and conclude that the galaxy is a worse place than what Eisenhorn revealed, it ends up adding to the richness of the setting rather than just being a vibe.
PROSE
The POV in this book is not handled well.
At first, when I saw 1st Person POV in Ravenor’s scenes and 3rd Person Omniscient POV in everyone else’s, I assumed that this would play out the same way as “Playing Patience”. The story is really meant to be entirely in Ravenor’s 1st Person POV, and all the other POVs are Ravenor either observing his entourage in action or else retrieving memories from them after the fact. Mostly, this checks out.
Mostly.
There are multiple scenes in this book where Ravenor is present, yet he is described in the 3rd Person. There’s no clear reason for it. He is actively using his psychic powers in at least one of these, so even things that are arguably the POV of other characters should still be accessible to his POV. Even in the few scenes where Ravenor can’t access his psychic powers, he could have retrieved the memories from people after the fact. He should still be able to tell this story and refer to himself in the 1st Person.
Near the climax, we also get some scenes that Ravenor couldn’t have accessed. There are scenes from the POV of the antagonists that occur while Ravenor is not in the room, when he can’t be using his psychic powers, and when the only member of his entourage who’s present really isn’t in any shape to be capturing so much detail. I thought this was signaling that these antagonists would survive long enough to cross paths with Ravenor and have their memories read by him, but that doesn’t happen. So how is this POV at all accessible?
I really do like this hybridized POV. It really immerses the audience in what it’s like to perceive the world the way Ravenor does, while also making the scenes that are wholly the main character’s POV feel distinct from scenes where his entourage have POV moments. It’s just that the execution makes it seem like Abnett thought up this POV at the last second and then didn’t properly edit the book to make sure things were consistent. These moments of Ravenor in the 3rd Person and scenes he couldn’t have access to feel like they come from a completely different book. The end result is that the book feels messy and amateurish despite its positive qualities.
THE MASTERMIND
Ravenor is a flawed book, yet it is still a good book. I do highly recommend checking it out. Even if I hadn’t set a goal for myself to do this entire omnibus, what I saw here is enough to convince me to go into the sequel, Ravenor Returned.
THE RETURN
Speaking of which, we’ll be reviewing Ravenor Returned next month. This will be another 2-part review, split between Friday, February 20th and Sunday, February 22nd. I hope you’ll join me for that, as well as for the review of the short story “Thorn Wishes Talon” on the preceding Sunday (February 15th).
Thank you all for joining this week. Please remember to subscribe to the newsletter if you’d like weekly emails with the latest links and to share this review around if you enjoyed it. Take care, everyone, and have a good weekend.
On Tuesday, February 3rd, Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, premieres!
Kabarāhira is a city of necromancers, and among these necromancers, none are more honorable or respected than Master Japjot Baig. Yadleen has worked under him since she was a girl, learning how commune with bhūtas and how to bind these ancient spirits into wights. Her orderly world is disrupted, however, when a stranger appears with the skeleton of a dishonored woman, demanding that her master fabricate a wight for him.
To protect her master from scandal, Yadleen must take it upon herself to meet this stranger’s demands. Manipulating the dead is within her power, but can honor survive in the face of a man who has none?
You can see the full schedule for Volume I here! I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.
