Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz
Kelson, the young prince of a vaguely Welsh-sounding kingdom, wants to survive his coronation. Morgan, a half-blooded Deryni magician and mentor to young Kelson, can help—so long as he escapes the executioner’s block himself.
Charissa, a full-blooded Deryni magician, has different plans for both of them. See, Kelson’s father—aided by Morgan—killed her father, and it’s time she took her revenge.
If this premise sounds simple—you’re right. It is. There are no twists or turns, no reveals that broaden the scope and make us re-think the plot.
Deryni Rising is remarkably straight-forward.
It’s not, however, simple. Deryni Rising was one of the first fantasy novels written in a historical manner.
We meet so many people and everybody—everybody—has too many names. Even one Sir Regifarth Contrivance Exilim Cointreu, Duke of the Western Plarshes of Barrington, is too much to remember.
I had to fight the urge to take notes. It doesn’t help that His Grace might be referred to by any permutation of those names or titles.
Thankfully Kurtz front-loads the meet-and-greet portion of Deryni Rising: everyone’s in town for the coronation and the narration marches us through each person in succession, mostly through the gaze of Morgan.
Given that I get a heavy whiff of Arthurian legend from Deryni Rising, I’m amused by Morgan’s name. I mean, Morgan le Fay is King Arthur’s half-sister, a sorcerer and, in many, many versions of Arthurian legend, inevitably a villain to Arthur. I wonder if Katherine Kurtz wanted to plant doubt in our head.
Morgan starts out rough. His love and devotion to the (now dead) king and prince Kelson might have made him plenty sympathetic, were it not for the worst introduction of a good character I’ve ever read: he hurts a horse to humble its rider.
Once Morgan and Kelson are in the foreground, the rest of the book is back-to-back bite-sized trials and tribulations leading up to the climax and outcome.
At times they feel contrived. Chapters end on some toothless trouble that is overcome not a page into the following chapter. Sometimes, however, the characters truly are in over their heads. This almost makes the contrived trials a positive: they make it difficult to know what to expect.
Another joint strength/weakness of Deryni Rising is its characters.
None of them behave like real people. They’re too clever, too loyal, too loving, too evil, too single-minded, too absolute in their feelings. When characters are behaving in dramatic ways in dramatic scenes, this muchness lends an authentic grandiosity to a world full of pomp. When characters’ overwhelming cleverness solves some complicated problem, it’s satisfying enough to make me want to fist-pump. But when characters are sitting around a fire, trying to figure out what to do next, it’s jarring and absurd.
And yet, I prefer it to the alternative. The relationship between Morgan and Kelson feels akin to Merlin and Arthur in The Sword in the Stone, and that helps warm up the otherwise formal, almost academic-ness of this historical fantasy.
A key aspect of the historical-ness of Deryni Rising that the story is told in narration. We occasionally dip into a character’s thoughts and feelings, but on average it feels like someone is describing past events at a high level. While not my favorite point of view, I think here it helps cover a multitude of sins.
Take, for example, a character taking an absurd risk without much payoff.
In a close POV, we would need to understand why the character chose to take this risk. It’s possible that I would be swayed, that I would truly believe that the character would do such a thing. More often than not, however, the character’s decision and rationalization feel at odds with their characterization. Depending on how vehemently I don’t buy the character’s rationalization, I might quit the book entirely.
I didn’t have this same problem with Deryni Rising because we were never given that rationalization. We were told that a character did a thing. Accept it or move on. And since I’m the sort of person who assumes that folks make rational decisions and have reasons for their actions, and the narration is distant enough that I don’t feel privy to every thought a character has, I can more readily accept a character doing something that topically appears stupid. Hell, depending on how much I like the character and how intelligent they seem, I might spin up some rationalizations in the back of my head on their behalf.
I mean, not gonna lie, a character doing something that seems foolish or poorly thought out is never satisfying, but thanks to the narration style I can get past it.
This distant narration also helps with another issue: the magic. I don’t understand it, which doesn’t bother me at all. What does bother me, ever so slightly, is its scope. It’s so … definite. Characters can set a ward and say, with finality, “literally no one can break that ward except for me.” Countless secret rooms are revealed behind melting mountainsides or recessing walls/shelves/staircases. Somehow, magical knowledge and acumen can be transferred via ritual. It all seems almost too easy to me, and yet, since it’s communicated to me via a distant historical tone, I am capable of excusing it because I can assume that there is a far more complicated explanation—it’s just not important enough for the narration to explain it to me.
And, much like I’d rather characters be unrealistically charismatic and loving than unreasonably cold and formal, so too would I rather magic be simple and obfuscated than explained to the point of tedium. I’ve read more than enough about astrolabes for the decade.
With all of these issues that are both strengths and weaknesses, it should come as no surprise that I have mixed feelings about Deryni Rising.
I finished it, and once I was past the introductions, I found it effortless. I enjoyed the retro-ness of a story about magicians and kings and coronations and dastardly usurpers waiting for a chance to seize the throne. I enjoyed the characters—when they were up to something that matched their oversized emotions—and how the writing never lacked a hook. But at no point did I feel love surge within me for the world, the characters, or the writing. I never felt compelled to discuss events as they unfolded with my husband. I didn’t go “Oh, fine, one more chapter,” even though I was exhausted. Deryni Rising was just an easy, enjoyable, even comforting (in the way that favorite childhood meals can be comforting), read.
Which makes it the perfect series to pick back up again when I need a break or an easy win.
Cover art by Unknown :(
