Ravenor Returned (The Ravenor Trilogy, Book 2) (Part 1)
Hello, all. Welcome back for another foray into the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium and the adventures of Gideon Ravenor.
If you haven’t caught up on the Ravenor content thus far, I encourage you to do so. If you’re up to speed (or just don’t care about being caught up), then let’s dive right in.
STATS
Title: Ravenor Returned
Series: The Ravenor Trilogy, Book 2
Author(s): Dan Abnett
Genre: Science Fiction (Space Opera)
First Printing: January 2006
Publisher: Black Library (Games Workshop Publishing)
SPOILER WARNING
Both minor and heavy spoilers for Ravenor Returned 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.
Heavy, unmarked spoilers will be provided for all of the Ravenor content we’ve covered thus far (Ravenor, “Playing Patience”, and “Thorn Wishes Talon”). There will also be mild spoilers for the Eisenhorn stories.
TIMELINE
This plot of this book kicks off in 403.M41 (with a prologue set in 402.M41). This sets the book between the events of Ravenor and “Thorn Wishes Talon” (402.M41) and Ravenor Rogue (404.M41).
As a mild point of interest, according to the timeline in the back of Eisenhorn - The Omnibus, Valentin Drusher of The Magos was born in the same year that this story takes place.
STRUCTURE
This will be another 2-part review:
Part 1 (Today)
Premise
Rating
Content Warning
Plot
Part 2 (Sunday, February 22nd)
Prose
Character
Worldbuilding
PREMISE
From the Amazon product page for the paperback version of this book, we get:
On the wild frontiers of human space, Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor and his elite team of agents hunt down mankind's most dangerous enemies. If Chaos is left unchecked, mankind's future is surely doomed.
Reaction
This premise is not a good one. It’s not misrepresenting the story in any way, but that’s because it’s so vague that there’s no enough information for it to get wrong. Remove the direct mention of Ravenor and his time, and nearly any Warhammer 40K story where the Imperium of Man are the protagonists could be described by it. That’s not to say it’s inaccurate. It’s just so vague as to be useless as a means to inform potential readers about the story.
RATING: 8.5/10
The WH40K books I have reviewed thus far are not what I’d consider great literature. They’re good escapist fun, particularly if you like this franchise. That’s important in its own way. I just don't know how much people who aren’t in the built-in WH40K audience would enjoy them.
This is why Ravenor Returned surprised me. It’s a tie-in that I feel does have the strength to stand on its own, regardless of whether you are already a fan of the setting. It realizes and then exceeds the potential of its predecessor, addressing (or, at least, mitigating) its predecessor’s core flaws along the way.
Ravenor Returned is a tightly paced cat-and-mouse game that manages to juggle not only the titular inquisitor’s investigation but also the machinations of two factions of antagonists. The twist answer to its mysteries is a logical progression of established information. Most important of all, this story is founded on strong character work that gets the audience invested in not only Ravenor and his team but also the antagonists.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone who’s a fan of Space Opera or Thrillers set in Science Fiction settings. Frankly, it’s good enough that I’d also recommend reading its predecessor, just to have all the necessary groundwork for this sequel.
CONTENT WARNING
As was the case with Ravenor, I forgot to include this section until I was working on the review of Ravenor Rogue, and that’s a reflection of how masterfully Abnett handles the general awfulness of the setting. Yes, there is suffering, violence, gore, and horrifying imagery, but it never feels obtrusive. It’s an organic part of the story and the world the story takes place in. If you are still just getting introduced to this setting, I feel like this series remains one of the better ones to start with.
PLOT
The Mission
The previous book saw Ravenor and his cohorts investigating the epidemic use of a Chaos-tained drug, flects, on the subsector capital world of Eustis Majoris. His investigation led to a horrifying revelation: the flects were a side trade in something far worse. Someone in the government has been importing Chaos-tained cogitators for use in Administratum offices (which, for those not familiar with the setting, would be like finding out the Pentagon has outsourced IT support to Hell). This is linked to the shady Chaos think tank known as the Cognitae. Ravenor returns to Eustis Majoris under Special Investigation status (i.e. cutting himself off from all official support) to find out just how deep the corruption goes.
Also looming over Ravenor is a prophecy of another Chaos cult, the Divine Fratery, first introduced in “Thorn Wishes Talon”. The Fratery has predicted that Ravenor’s investigation will allow the dæmonic force known as Slyte to enter the material works. Seeing the Cognitae threat as one that can’t be ignored, Ravenor commits himself to remaining vigilant for anything that might hint to Slyte’s emergence.
On the whole, I feel this dual investigation is handled well. This is despite the fact that a large chunk of the story (at least half, it feels like) is actually dedicated to the Cognitae and Fratery taking shots at each other which Ravenor works in the background. The gradual progression of Ravenor and his team follows a logical chain of cause and effect, with any surprises or mistakes feeling like natural decisions for the characters to make.
The Fratery
The inclusion of this factions adds a destabilizing element to the story and heightens the tension. The Fratery are wholly uninterested in seeing the Cognitae’s plans come to fruition; they only care about unleashing Slyte and thus increasing the level of discorder and suffering in the galaxy. To facilitate this, they attempt to assassinate Cogniate operatives, thereby bringing the two groups into conflict.
I like the added tension and drama that the Fratery bring to the story, but they are also one reason why I can't rate this book at a 9 or higher.
The Fratery is introduced in “Thorn Wishes Talon” … if you first read the trilogy via this omnibus. The short story was actually published 10 years after this novel. In you read this novel first, without the short story, then Abnett retconned a second Chaos cult into his story with only the handwaved explanation of Eisenhorn warning Ravenor (which creates additional problems, since it glosses over the impact that Eisenhorn being alive had on Harlon and Kara). He didn't do nearly enough work within Ravenor Returned to set up who the Fratery were and what their motivation was. Slyte was also part of this retcon, so that's another layer of complication. It reads like Abnett couldn't figure out a way for the Cognitae-Ravenor conflict on Eustis Major to not end immediately and executed a soft reboot. With the benefit of hindsight, “Thorn Wishes Talon” is a supplementary material Band-Aid to rival anything out of the Disney Star Wars era.
I’m being harsh here. The soft reboot is done early in the book, while things are being established, and Abnett runs with what he establishes. And while “Thorn Wishes Talon” does feel like a Band-Aid, it is an incredibly effective one. As someone who did read the short story first, I had no problem engaging with the Fratery as antagonists.
That’s sort of my point, though. Supplementary material shouldn't be necessary to engage with one of the core factions of a story, especially if that supplementary content didn't even exist when the story was originally published.
The Cognitae (Heavy Spoilers)
While I’m not sure that the investigation into the Cognitae works all that well as a mystery, the reveal of their master plan does work as a well-constructed twist.
The Cognitae has seized control of the government of Eustis Major in secret and imported Chaos-tained cogitators to … engage in interdimensional Bitcoin mining.
Well, to be more specific, they have hijacked the local Adminstratum and are using the endless grind of bureaucratic data-crunching to develop a working lexicon of Enuncia, that Warp-connected ur-language that we also saw in The Magos. They’re having thousands of Administratum keyboard monkeys type random gibberish into cogitators so that the nigh-impossible odds of someone just happening upon a word in Enuncia becomes statistically possible. The use of Chaos-tainted cogitators is because untainted computers are more likely to overload and burn out when Enuncia gets cycled through them. They have also painstakingly arranged a ritual spanning an entire hive city so that they can use Enuncia to unlock godlike powers for themselves.
It’s also revealed that the governor of the planet is not the man he claims to be. He is actually Zygmunt Molotch, the Cognitae operative and POV character from the first prologue of Ravenor. This doesn’t come out of nowhere. Aside of establishing that Ravenor’s team never recovered Molotch’s body back in the first book, it’s established in this book that the leader of this Cognitae operation has a personal vendetta against Ravenor. Molotch was also investigating Enuncia when Ravenor’s team tried to kill him.
This all fits together so nicely. It makes sense in terms of fitting together the plot. It makes sense in terms of the characters involved. It even perfectly fits the setting, exploiting the comically excessive bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man.
Prologues
Much like the last book, I feel like the first prologue was the wrong choice, though for a different reason this time.
The first prologue this time around is that one of the surviving members of the flect smuggling group hires a bounty hunter to track down Ravenor. Don’t get me wrong, this does end up being relevant later, but it’s not necessary to understand the story. The bounty hunter’s narrative purpose is just to establish how Eisenhorn’s Uber driver for this book gets caught by the Cognitae. Given that the people who do the capturing explain to the Uber driver how they caught up to him, opening on an action scene of the bounty hunter executing a target doesn’t seem narratively necessary.
I actually think that the first prologue from the previous book would have made a whole lot more sense here. Even ignoring all of the reasons that involve heavy spoilers, that prologue was about a Cognitae operative working to unearth the secrets of Enuncia. It sets far more reasonable expectations for this book than it did for the prevous.
CAT AND MOUSE
Ravenor Returned is an enjoyable adventure, but it is built on the foundation of its characters. This Sunday, February 22nd, we’ll take a look at this characters, as well as evaluating the prose and worldbuilding. I hope you’ll join me as we wrap up this review.
Thank you all for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoy what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good weekend.
Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, is now premiering over in Tales of the Five Worlds!
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?
Chapters 4 and 5 now available! I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.
