The Red Knight
By Miles Cameron
“Vade Retro Satanus” The Red Knight page 563
Miles Cameron is one of the pen names of Christian Cameron. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1962 and spent his childhood bouncing around between Rochester New York, Iowa City, Iowa, and Rockport, Massachusetts. After graduating from McQuaid Jesuit High School, he attended the University of Rochester and graduated with a BA in Medieval History. He then spent the next thirteen years as an officer in the United States Navy (...I now have this mental image of him making sailors refer to him as ‘M’lord’ after he issues orders). There he served as backseater in an S-3 Viking aircraft assigned to Sea Control Squadron 31 (VS-31) gaining his air observer wings. Afterward, he served as a human intelligence officer with NCIS and DHS in Washington D.C. He left the Navy in the year 2000. Before turning his hand to fantasy he wrote over a dozen historical novels covering a wide variety of periods and characters. He's also a student of a variety of martial arts and a historical reenactor focusing on the medieval period (Break out the dueling shields and copies of 15th century german training manuals!). His first books were written in cooperation with his father Kenneth Cameron, who was a playwright and novelist himself. Christian Cameron released his first solo novel in 2002; The Red Knight was published 2013 by Orbit books. Orbit books was founded in 1974 and bought in 1992 by Time Warner Book Group. Let's get to the book though.
The book takes place in a parallel world to our own, where Christ existed but the history and condition of the world is very different. Magic is real and man is not alone on the good earth, but man humanity wishes it was. The nation of Alba stands on the very edge of civilization. To the east across the vast seas lies the continent, the fully settled lands of man where the only foe that you face in war is other men. On every other border however lies the Wild; the domain of inhuman and alien intelligences who hold values and beliefs that are often frightening and bizarre to civilized men (I would be very interested in a map of this world…wait, are there dog-men in the Wild? Do they have souls? Can they be converted to Catholicism and baptized? {No dog-men... Yet.}). A generation ago, the father of the current King of Alba won a great victory against the armies of the Wild but the cost was great. Where his father could raise 20,000 knights and their troops, the current king has less than a fifth of that. The population is expanding and growing, so recovery will come if there is time. If. On the very northern edge of Alba stands the fortress nunnery of Lissen Carak, which is also the name of the rich town that surrounds it. The Abbey is not that old all things considered, two centuries ago it belonged to the Wild and the powers of the Wild simply called it The Rock. They want it back and are willing to kill every man, woman, and child living there to do it. The many creatures of the Wild, insect-like Boglins who mass in great swarms, the graceful and small Irks the mighty wyverns and the powerful and hauntingly beautiful creatures that men call demons. The “demons” are actually pretty interesting although Mr. Cameron doesn't go too in-depth into their culture; they are taller than men, winged with crested skulls and beaks. They often cover their crests and beaks with engraved decorations of precious materials which suggests a good understanding of tool use. The demons and wyverns also generate fear as a magical effect on humans so panic is always a real danger from their very presence. The Wild also has its human allies, first being native human tribes that live in the wild and govern themselves by the Wild's rules. The second is a rebel movement within human civilization known as the Jacks. Men who have grown fed up with the feudal order of peasants and lords and seek to kill off the aristocrats even if they have to ally with creatures who view humans as a good source of protein to do it (Damn people, just use a guillotine already…). Because yes, the creatures of the Wild will eat you and they won't wait for you to die before they start. In the face of all this, the Abbess has her nuns, some town militia and farm boys, and the mercenaries she called from the continent. These mercenaries are hard and sinful men, in some ways as dangerous as the creatures of the Wild and expensive, but they're her best bet against having her abbey and home destroyed out from under her and watching her people tormented and killed in their own homes like rabbits in a snare.
As for the mercenaries, they are led by a man who calls himself the Red Knight. He's young, only 20 years old and leading men who were fighting wars when he was still dirtying his own diapers. That said, he's got the talent, he’s got the training and he's got the luck to be one of the greatest war leaders of the age. If a stray arrow or wyvern doesn't turn him into fertilizer first (Or dysentery. So many Great Leaders died from dysentery…). The Red Knight is also a man with a hell of a chip on his shoulder. He was born into a world of wealth, power, and privileged but because he was born a bastard, he was loathed and always at odds with the rest of his family. It doesn't help that he wasn't the child of some amusement or forbidden love, the Red Knight is the child of a rape. Because of that, he was both the target and the vessel of his mother's hate, who raised him for one single purpose. To destroy all the works of man and civilization (Yeeesh. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid…). In his own words, to be the Antichrist, but either because of the abuse or despite it, the Red Knight instead has decided to try to be if not a hero at least, not a villain. This is a man who is convinced that God hates him, but he's going to do the right thing anyway and to hell with the Almighty. This is a difficult kind of character to write well, it easy to go overboard with the angst and the grim darkness of it all or to dance around it so much that you might as well not have done it. Mr. Cameron, however, does a good job of writing someone as angry as only an abused young man can be while keeping the character from going too overboard. I mean there are times when I want to reach into the book and smack the Red Knight on the head but Mr. Cameron is sure to make it clear that the Red Knight is being the kind of idiot that only a young man can be. It helps that the mercenary company provides a good cast of supporting characters from his squire Michael, and corporals Big Tom and Sauce, who is a woman at arms and even grunt archers with colorful names like No Head, Willful Murder and so on.
The Red Knight and his company aren't the only characters moving in this world however, there is also the Galle knight Jean de Vrailly, who upon having a vision of an angel decided to grab 300 lances (each knight is the head of a self-contained unit of troops called a lance about equal to a sqaud), sail across the sea and come to Alba to do great deeds. He's considered the greatest knight in the world and unbeatable in one on one combat, incredibly handsome and incredibly arrogant, classist and frankly a jerk. It's only the company of his cousin Gaston that keeps him from starting a war with the Alban natives at every turn and restrains his behavior (My god. He is an embodiment of French Knighthood…). There's also Peter, a man who was being dragged north in a slave convoy but escapes when the Wild attacks and accidentally breaks his chain. His own voyage gives us a very different but important view of the world. Another focus of the narrative is the young Queen Desiderata who struggles to support her older husband as he prepares for a war with the Wild, with a smaller army and fewer resources than his father would have had. I should speak a bit about the book's treatment of woman, in short, it's a very good treatment. As a historian, Mr. Cameron shows us the influence and power that woman such as the Abbess (who would in the real world would have been treated as equal to a feudal lord) the Queen and other wealthy and well-born woman had in their society. Sauce is a woman fighter but it's treated as a rare and strange thing that Sauce has to earn by putting more effort and achieving better results then a man in her position would be expected to. By mixing these two elements, one very clearly historical and the other perhaps not as historical, Mr. Cameron creates something realistic and believable.
Let me actually discuss how Mr. Cameron treats the world he has created, this is honestly one of the details and medieval feeling worlds I've seen without turning into an unreadable mess. Magic is approached using hermeticism which was a real philosophical and mystical tradition that existed in Europe. I should note that hermeticism was one of the first traditions to argue that the world could be observed and tested in experimentation, so while hermeticism was not science, it did help introduce ideas that would become the cornerstones of scientific endeavor. Magic users use a memory technique called a memory palace invented by the ancient Greeks. The idea is to use the memory of location and move through it in your mind to recall memories, you do this by placing what you want to remember along the route you take through the building in your memory. Like if you're memorizing a grocery list, you put the first item, let's say carrots as a large picture on the front door of the building. This creates a mindscape that gives us a whole new mode of interaction between magical characters who can communicate with each other from their mind palaces that non-magical characters cannot interact with. It also makes magic feel like an incredible mental discipline requiring years of training that demands concentration and devotion from its practitioners. I have to applaud Mr. Cameron for finding such a simple but evocative method for that. On top of that, Mr. Cameron uses his experience as a reenactor to give us detailed but not overblown accounts of battles and the arms and armor used. Warhorses get to star as the incredible killing machines they were, knights feel like an ancient analog to light armored systems almost unstoppable unless they run into another knight or a lucky hit gets into their joints or eyes. The book is also deeply littered with Arthurian references, such as the Red Knight himself, as there are a number of characters in the Arthurian Myths that went by the name The Red Knight. Other Arthurian characters appear in various guises but I'll let you discover them for yourself. The end result is a story with medieval characters who feel medieval instead of 21st-century people in medieval dress and that’s a good thing. That said I do have some criticism, Mr. Cameron rarely explains some of the things he was doing - like the memory palace technique - and the story is vast, so at times you might lose track of characters and some of the characters don't feel entirely necessary to the story. There's also a lot of jumping back and forth between characters so sometimes you might have to go back to remember what this specific character was doing when you last saw him. That said, all the stories do come together in the end and while the book is over 600 pages, I'm hard pressed to say which of those pages were wasted but also feel that this book could have used another editing pass to make it flow easier. This is still a very good book and it is without hesitation that I recommend it. The Red Knight by Miles Cameron gets a B+ and my promise that we will return to this series.
That said, last week we closed out a series and since we started one this week, let's end another next week. Next Week join us for Darth Vader 4: End Game. Keep Reading!
Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your not so humble reviewer.
The Red Knight and his company aren't the only characters moving in this world however, there is also the Galle knight Jean de Vrailly, who upon having a vision of an angel decided to grab 300 lances (each knight is the head of a self-contained unit of troops called a lance about equal to a sqaud), sail across the sea and come to Alba to do great deeds. He's considered the greatest knight in the world and unbeatable in one on one combat, incredibly handsome and incredibly arrogant, classist and frankly a jerk. It's only the company of his cousin Gaston that keeps him from starting a war with the Alban natives at every turn and restrains his behavior (My god. He is an embodiment of French Knighthood…). There's also Peter, a man who was being dragged north in a slave convoy but escapes when the Wild attacks and accidentally breaks his chain. His own voyage gives us a very different but important view of the world. Another focus of the narrative is the young Queen Desiderata who struggles to support her older husband as he prepares for a war with the Wild, with a smaller army and fewer resources than his father would have had. I should speak a bit about the book's treatment of woman, in short, it's a very good treatment. As a historian, Mr. Cameron shows us the influence and power that woman such as the Abbess (who would in the real world would have been treated as equal to a feudal lord) the Queen and other wealthy and well-born woman had in their society. Sauce is a woman fighter but it's treated as a rare and strange thing that Sauce has to earn by putting more effort and achieving better results then a man in her position would be expected to. By mixing these two elements, one very clearly historical and the other perhaps not as historical, Mr. Cameron creates something realistic and believable.
Let me actually discuss how Mr. Cameron treats the world he has created, this is honestly one of the details and medieval feeling worlds I've seen without turning into an unreadable mess. Magic is approached using hermeticism which was a real philosophical and mystical tradition that existed in Europe. I should note that hermeticism was one of the first traditions to argue that the world could be observed and tested in experimentation, so while hermeticism was not science, it did help introduce ideas that would become the cornerstones of scientific endeavor. Magic users use a memory technique called a memory palace invented by the ancient Greeks. The idea is to use the memory of location and move through it in your mind to recall memories, you do this by placing what you want to remember along the route you take through the building in your memory. Like if you're memorizing a grocery list, you put the first item, let's say carrots as a large picture on the front door of the building. This creates a mindscape that gives us a whole new mode of interaction between magical characters who can communicate with each other from their mind palaces that non-magical characters cannot interact with. It also makes magic feel like an incredible mental discipline requiring years of training that demands concentration and devotion from its practitioners. I have to applaud Mr. Cameron for finding such a simple but evocative method for that. On top of that, Mr. Cameron uses his experience as a reenactor to give us detailed but not overblown accounts of battles and the arms and armor used. Warhorses get to star as the incredible killing machines they were, knights feel like an ancient analog to light armored systems almost unstoppable unless they run into another knight or a lucky hit gets into their joints or eyes. The book is also deeply littered with Arthurian references, such as the Red Knight himself, as there are a number of characters in the Arthurian Myths that went by the name The Red Knight. Other Arthurian characters appear in various guises but I'll let you discover them for yourself. The end result is a story with medieval characters who feel medieval instead of 21st-century people in medieval dress and that’s a good thing. That said I do have some criticism, Mr. Cameron rarely explains some of the things he was doing - like the memory palace technique - and the story is vast, so at times you might lose track of characters and some of the characters don't feel entirely necessary to the story. There's also a lot of jumping back and forth between characters so sometimes you might have to go back to remember what this specific character was doing when you last saw him. That said, all the stories do come together in the end and while the book is over 600 pages, I'm hard pressed to say which of those pages were wasted but also feel that this book could have used another editing pass to make it flow easier. This is still a very good book and it is without hesitation that I recommend it. The Red Knight by Miles Cameron gets a B+ and my promise that we will return to this series.
That said, last week we closed out a series and since we started one this week, let's end another next week. Next Week join us for Darth Vader 4: End Game. Keep Reading!
Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your not so humble reviewer.
Just a reminder that we have set up a patreon to help us sort through recommendations and possible reviews. Just one 1$ gets you a vote on what we review next month! So Join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads
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