From My Bookshelf... ‘Child of an Ancient City’ – Tad Williams & Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Tor)

Being given a copy of Howard Andrew Jones’ ‘The Desert of Souls’ the other day reminded me that not only did I have a copy of ‘Child of an Ancient City’ but it’s been a very long time since I picked it up. The way things have turned out, that read will have to wait a little while longer but I thought I could still post about the book in the meantime. I’ve talked about some of Tad’s other works here and there on the blog and, in the interests of completion, it’s probably time ‘Child of an Ancient City’ got a mention here as well.

After devouring the ‘Memory, Sorrow and Thorn’ trilogy (or quadrilogy, depends what editions you have) and a large chunk of the ‘Otherland’ series I knew that I’d end up searching out everything else written by Tad Williams that I could lay my hands on. Sometimes you just know that’s how it’s all going to pan out. Save yourself the stress and just go with the flow; we’re talking buying books here people! As I went about my ‘Tad spree’ it dawned on me that the larger a book of his is the more likely it is to be on the shelves. Seriously, go into your local bookshop and I will guarantee that you are more likely to find a copy of ‘City of Golden Shadow’ than you are a copy of ‘Caliban’s Hour’. Thus it was that my search for a copy of ‘Child of an Ancient City’ ended up with my taking the plunge and ordering a copy from America; a pretty big deal for me way back in those days. The book turned up and I dived straight in but, by the time I surfaced from the read, it proved to be a singular book of Tad’s in that I was left feeling a little let down by it all...

During the reign of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, a caravan of soldiers sets forth from Baghdad on a mission to the lands of the north. Disaster strikes when a bandit raid leaves the soldiers stranded in the mountains with no horses and things are about to get much worse...

An ancient and powerful vampyr stalks the hills and his eyes are fixed firmly on the stranded soldiers. One by one they are slain until the vampyr approaches the survivors and challenges them to a contest. Sad tales will be told around the campfire and if the vampyr judges them to be sad enough then the remaining soldiers will go free. The vampyr has a tale of his own to tell though...

Being a big fan of Tad Williams, ‘Child of an Ancient City’ will always have a place on my bookshelves (it’s the collector in me). Out of all the books of his that I have though it’s probably the one that I’m least likely to pick up for a re-read.

It all starts off promisingly enough with the seeds of the story being sown and an account of an expedition’s fall into disaster that kept me reading. Everything is set up for the vampyr to make his appearance and, as a concept, it all looks solid enough. Even at this early stage though things didn’t feel quite right but I was prepared to write this one off to my reading experience of Tad Williams and the fact that he was writing this book with someone else instead of on his own. I was very much used to Tad Williams being all expansive with his prose and what I got here was something that was a lot tighter and very light on the world building that I look forward to in Tad’s books. Not ideal then but more than enough in the meantime to keep me going.

And then I got to the whole point of the book; the storytelling competition...
Now, everything is relative isn’t it? What doesn’t do it for one person may totally do it for another and all that. The fact is though that not one of the tales told tugged on my heartstrings at all and you’re looking at the guy who wasn’t far off crying when his pet guinea pig died (I still miss you Badger...) I really enjoyed the story about the Sufi and his perfect balance as the twist at the end was superb, never saw that one coming. Sad though? Not at all, I laughed out loud and had to explain to my wife what was so funny. The other tales didn’t elicit the same reaction but were also lacking in sadness. You may have a totally different reaction to these tales but I couldn’t help but think that the soldiers were onto a real losing streak here.

Well, that’s what I thought until the vampyr threw the whole contest away because he couldn’t get his head around the fact that the man he was about to eat felt sorry for him... I’m sorry but what kind of real vampire does something like that? Our child of an ancient city was in fact the ‘proto Edward Cullen’... The ending couldn’t come quickly enough after that.
Like I said right back at the start, the collector in me pretty much demands that ‘Child of an Ancient City’ keeps its place on the shelf but, looking back at what I’ve written, I think we all know the real reason why the re-read never happened. Despite the early promise, ‘Child of an Ancient City’ failed to deliver what it set out to. I wonder what kind of a tale this would have been if Tad Williams had been the sole author? The book would probably have been five or six hundred pages longer but apart from that, who knows...? Has anyone else here read this book?