Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist, film critic for the National Review, and the author of several books including The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, and Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. In December of 2022 he shared part of a new project on his Substack: the prologue and first chapter of the “rather fat, overly ambitious, probably-undercooked attempt at the first novel of a fantasy trilogy”. The sixty page PDF can be downloaded here. The story behind the gift is that over the previous year several publishing houses had declined the manuscript, and Douthat is now polling his readers for a plan, whether self-publication of the entire novel or consignment to the trash. It is to be hoped that either he takes the former course or that a clamorous grass-roots internet campaign can motivate a sensible publishing house to gather, bind, and jacket this sterling fiction, The Falcon’s Children.
The prologue begins with the miscarriage of a child by a Lady named Ylaena, her second miscarriage after two stillbirths. She and her husband, attended by servants and guardsmen, are staying in his manor by the Mar Tyogg forrest, but lineage and geography are not much detailed here unlike in the first chapter that follows. In the Autumn she goes riding, and one day she escapes her retinue for a purposeful walk in the woods. Following instructions given her long ago, she finds her way to a hilltop where she meets a pale stranger. She asks him to give her a child, a healthy child with a long life ahead, and in return he asks for an eye. She accepts and allows him to perform the ritual. The shock of the dagger, and the pain, give way to a vision of an infant girl and a raven, which she pursues before an encounter with “the true and only king”, whose ecstasy-bringing touch ends the dream. Back on the hilltop, an enfeebled version of the stranger tells her he has saved her from this “king”, and that she now has more than she bargained for: twins.
Chapter 1, “High House”, is about the childhood of Princess Alsbet. Her father’s empire is Narsil, and her mother’s people, in the Brethon kingdom Allasyr, are distant allies. News reaches High House, the royals’ summer refuge from Rendale’s castle, that Brethon neighbor Capaelya has invaded Allasyr. Four years later Emperor Edmund has won the war, and his daughter has learned much of sieges and surrenders, of the enemy, King Agaven, and her father’s greatest general, Aengiss mac Cullolen. Alsbet’s brother Padrec excels as military adjutant, while sickly Elfred is sent to university to learn diplomacy. The queen of Allasyr, Aslbet’s mother’s sister, dies of the “redeye fever”, and there is a struggle for succession. Padrec, with his family tie, looks have the strongest claim, but he and Aengiss will have to take Allasyr’s throne with his legions in tow. Having liberated Allasyr four years before, General Aengiss will be conquering it for the empire, and the tired Emperor Edmund will stay in Rendale. The day Padrec and Aengiss take Tessaer’al Yrgha, the capital, Padrec’s and Alsbet’s mother dies, the doctor having diagnosed her with a wounded heart.
Thus far The Falcon’s Children is a well-told tale. The prose is suitably dignified, with the occasional tasteful archaism: “brigandage”, “unbidden”, “greensward”. Scenery is given pleasing representation in figurative language, as when the paving of a forrest path with “curious white stones” opens out, “unfurling like a gleaming cloth around the fringes of a woodland lake”. There are some spooky effects that are just not effective, like the “black cloak that was darker than the dark”, and “a face, such a face”, vague and also would-be spooky speculations such as “she felt they meant something, they reminded her of something.” Compared to Chapter One, the prologue is more fanciful, and it uses a couple of formal tricks which are more gimmicky than compelling. Douthat tries to find an analogue to the discontinuity of Ylaena’s dream in the aborted and unpunctuated beginning of a question “Was that” at the end of a paragraph. When the haggish version of the stranger on the hilltop speaks, the font is not just in italics but a few sizes smaller. Mood and setting are well conjured, whether among “branching eldritch shapes” of the forrest, or cramped in a castle “while the spring rains drummed on the slate and beams above”.
In a review of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones television spinoffs, Douthat wrote that “Great fantasy, to generalize, offers a conjunction of two storytelling modes: The mythic and metaphysical on the one hand and the political and historical on the other.” Clearly the prologue of The Falcon’s Children has front-loaded the supernatural, being a grownup fairytale as well as a mortal and natal drama, while Chapter One busily builds a medieval world with recognizable human machinations. Presumably these elements are to be put in some dynamic as the story progresses—the setting of Ylaena’s story is somewhat abstracted and “once upon a time”, but her Mar Tyogg forrest is mentioned in Alsbet’s story. What Douthat brings carefully to both modes is an attention to perspective which for this reader, a near novice in the Fantasy genre, does seem novel. Ylaena’s journey in the woods, along a “winded path roofed with oak limbs and carpeted with moss,” is a familiar one, from film if not Fantasy literature, but her progress is not so mechanical as expected: when she’s stopped at a tangle of thorns, and offers a few drops of blood, “it was not that a path opened in the hedge, that the knotted branches somehow shifted and opened and gave way. No, the path had always been there, narrow and thorny but obvious now that she noticed it”. In similar manner, when she throws salt onto a lake to summon a boat, “appeared was the wrong word. It was more that her eyes had not been looking in the right place to see it”.
Chapter One, with its span of Alsbet’s first fifteen years, is sometimes concerned with the trickiness of memory if not immediate perception. The news of Allasyr’s invasion, enigmatic at the time, is to be transformed for her by her education, “the exotic words fitted neatly to places and people and the tidings matched to their precise significance”. The troubles that will later beset the royal family are presaged when a “shadow passed over the emperor’s countenance”, but this kind of detail, Douthat allows us to speculate, may be a later fabrication by Alsbet’s mind. Leaving aside the double exposure effect of narration and memory, Douthat is also just trying to solve the problem of exposition in Fantasy by teaching us through Alsbet, who is taught by Aeden, an older boy at High House; the reader grows up with her, and becomes aware of Narsil’s vulnerabilities just as her adolescent questioning begins. This is largely successful, though an irreducible problem remains in the sheer volume of names, titles, and cities. Aeden has one teaching tactic which Douthat might have used more, though it would have compromised the contrast between the prologue and Chapter One. When he “didn’t want to bore her with genealogy, he always said ever-so-great, and it sounded romantic and fairy-tale-ish”.