The Wanderers Tale

By David Bilsborough

I’d been saving The Wanderers Tale for a while because after reading that this, David Bilsborough’s debut novel, was an “epic fantasy series in the very best tradition of Tolkien” I was pretty excited at the prospect and didn’t want to read it in a hurry. I needn’t have bothered. Started in earnest and finished only after monumental effort, the words ‘epic fail’ spring more readily to mind. It’s difficult to put your finger on any one, big, specific thing that is wrong with it, but there are so many little things wrong with it, and they all add up.

To start with the writing is bloated and juvenile, stylistically veering between BBC sitcom and old-school D&D, and it’s overlong. Shaving 25% from the page length would not compromise the story one iota. The names of people and places are also overblown and confusing. I can suffer dodgy names in fantasy writing but there needs to be some structure to them and, more importantly, some consistency of language within each faction. In this case however, it seems that the author just went for the most weird-looking group of vowels and consonants he could think of each time with no thought for how they knit together. The dialogue too suffers from inconsistency, with characters who are, by turns, verbose and grandiloquent, or mired in modern-day slang, and I shall never forgive him for using the lyrics of a Rolf Harris song as action-sequence dialogue.

And there’s more. The characters are cookie-cutter stereotypes, never fully drawn, and, oddly for this day and age, pretty well all male. The point of view switches around in a haphazard fashion and the story itself is the type of clichéd, quest-driven nonsense, each plot-point hammered home with the subtlety of a crowbar, that prevailed in the the late 70’s early 80’s and should be well and truly past us by now.

To give him some credit, Mr Bilsborough can do world-building as well as anyone. The land of Lindormyn is richly woven and the monsters, culture and mythology of the place are well crafted but, given that it apparently took 12 years to write, I would expect nothing less and frankly, if he’d spent that time fleshing out the plot and characters instead, it would have been an infinitely better story.

The Wanderer’s Tale aspires to be a great fantasy but falls far short of that by being poorly thought out and badly written. It was, by all accounts, rejected by 130 agents and by 60 publishers and that should have told the author something, so you have to admire his tenacity, but I can’t imagine anyone will be waiting breathlessly to read the sequel.

The Wanderers Tale is published by Tor through Pan MacMillan as is available now from Amazon, Blackwell and all good book stores.