Acacia

Rating NR Genre fantasy Author David Anthony Durham Publisher Knopf Publishing Group

If you measure your literary purchases in pages per dollar, you can't go wrong with modern fantasy.  Most weigh in at roughly the size of a brick, and that's just the paperback.  Unfortunately, most are clichéd sword and sorcery, fight the dragon and save the girl fluff.  David Anthony Durham's Acacia weighs in at a solid 753 paperback pages, but, lucky for us, that's where it leaves the clichés behind.

The comparison that comes immediately to mind is George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.  Just as Martin's epic A Song of Ice and Fire series (which he is welcome to finish any day now) builds on and reinvents Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga, Durham continues the conversation by building on Martin's work.  Acacia is a peaceful nation built on an ugly slave trade, and while the Akarans are the ruling family, they are powerless to change the order imposed by the commercial guild.  In the north, the Meins seethe under Acacian rule and the exile they suffer as a result.  In the first book of the novel, generations of planned vengeance unfold as King Leodan Akaran is assassinated by a Meinish infiltrator.  The Mein and their savage allies, the Numrek, descend on the island and destroy it in short order.  Thaddeus Clegg, Leodan's councilor who has been supplied with just enough ugly truth to turn him against his king, repents of his treachery long enough to execute Leodan's contingency plan to hide his four children, Aliver, Corinn, Mena, and Dariel, in the four corners of the Known World.

Here, we shift from beautiful, idyllic Acacia, now in Meinish hands, to follow Leodan's four children.  Dariel is protected by a palace worker and taken aboard a pirate vessel.  Aliver is hidden in the south until he is ready to awaken the ancient sorcerers who can free Acacia from the Mein.  Mena becomes the mouthpiece of an island bird goddess.  Corinn is left behind to become the concubine of Hamish, and her hate grows more and more deadly each day.  The four children grow into very different adults than they would have in the comfort of the palace, just as their father hoped when he devised the plan.  Meanwhile, Hamish realization that true power never lay with the Acacian king but with the shipping guilds league; the trappings of the throne soften him just as their exile hardens the Akarans.  But his plans continue, and just as Aliver is learning to awaken the ancient sleeping sorcerers, Hamish's people are working to awaken their ancestors, angry spirits whose vengeance will make the body count left by the Numrek at the fall of Acacia seem like nothing. 

Durham does a remarkable job of showing the flimsy structure beneath powerful governments, and how easily they can be destroyed through whispers and rumors.  Fear of military force causes entire nations to destroy themselves - when such force is used in this novel, it is purely to mop up a victory that deceit and paranoia already accomplished.  Trust, and lack thereof, form the foundation of empires, and the smallest slight, real or imagined, can linger for generations until it crushes everything.  I can't say I know where Durham is going with this series, but I'm more than happy to follow along.