When I read the second and third Attolia books later, I was happy to discover that they are just as good as the first book.
I get sucked in very easily by books that are smooth on the surface. If a book has glossy enough writing and a well-paced storyline, then I’m almost always a sucker for it. But when a book also has something intriguing going on underneath the surface, then I feel like my optimism has been rewarded—and that’s when I really love a book. Enter Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief.
The Thief is a young adult novel from about a decade ago. It was Turner’s first novel, and kicked up some fuss, including a Newberry Honor. It’s ostensibly labelled fantasy, and you can easily read it that way. But it’s closer to Guy Gavriel Kay’s way of creating historical alternates than, say, Dungeons & Dragons. In this case, Turner models ancient Greek city-states, with a few anachronisms like guns, and a very subtle case of polytheism. That the gods are listening makes it a fantasy? I guess. There’s also a quest for a magic object.
Gen is in the king’s prison; he’s the thief of the title. The king’s advisor, the magus, will free Gen on one condition: that Gen helps him steal the aforementioned magic object. The magic doodad, Hamiathes’s Gift, will apparently guarantee the holder the kingship of a neighbouring country. The magus, Gen, and a few soldiers go on a trek, locate the hiding spot, then turn the success of the expedition over to Gen and his thieving ways. All along, they’ve been telling each other stories of their gods and goddesses.
The bits and pieces in my summary resemble a stereotypical fantasy novel much more so than when you’re reading the book. The difference is in the characterization I guess, since there are some remarkable moments along the way, and some puzzling aspects click together with resounding elegance at the end. It’s adventure, sure, but unexpectedly coherent and impressive.
The difference is also in the smooth writing. Turner’s style reminds me a great deal of Ursula K. Le Guin, who always stands in for smooth prose when I think about such things. The Thief is like a less gloomy version of Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan, to be perhaps too precise.
Turner has written two sequels. I must say, though, that as much as I’m looking forward to those next two books, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, the delicious sense of anticipation—yes, the author has written some more books in the series!—is mingled with a large proportion of wariness. I’m jaded, but I’ve been burned too many times. It’s started to affect my enjoyment of a book, even if it stands alone.
A few examples to illustrate. My clearest example is always His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I loved The Golden Compass, thought The Subtle Knife (book two) was ok, and hated the concluding book, The Amber Spyglass. But even if the follow-up books are not giant disappointments, they very seldom live up to the first book. I liked Garth Nix’s Sabriel quite a lot, but books two and three were simply... passable. Similarly, one of the reader reviews for The Thief on Amazon mentioned a similarity to Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, which brought back a flood of memories for me. I had managed to block that series from my mind for years, so I went back and checked my notes. Sure enough, I loved the first book, but as it turns out, books two and three were awesome too - right up until the grand finale, which was hideous and random. I had been burned by recommending The Golden Compass to a bunch of people before finishing the series myself, so I was holding off on doing the same for Hearn’s series. It looked so promising! And book three so good too, I was looking for boxed sets for gifts, the whole deal.
Will the same thing happen for Turner? I’m a weird mix of gloom and optimism, as I’ve mentioned: I would love to have an example to counter my reasons for despair. At this point, all I can say for sure is that I’m glad that The Thief is a relatively self-contained work, just like Sabriel by Nix. If the next two books are ho-hum, I’ll just have to come back and read the first one again.