Dave Wragg continues to be one of the best, and most criminally underrated, authors working in modern fantasy today.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the Articles of Faith duology, with Tales of the Plains, Wragg has stepped up in terms of craft, storytelling, and sheer manic comedy.
Not many people can make you cry on one page, and then cry with laughter a few pages later. I hesitate to make a comparison this big, but I really can’t think of anyone else: his work, while being very, VERY different in scope and approach and number of expletives, reminds me in this regard of the great Sir PTerry Pratchett.
Company of the Wolf picks up soon after The Hunters, with Ree and Javani slogging through the mountains in an effort to get to the fabled Ashadi, land of milk and honey. Things are, predictably, going about as well as you would expect. They get even more like you would expect, in terms of cock-ups, miscommunication, Ree’s general levels of irritability (stratospheric) and Javani’s world-shatteringly large pre-teenage attitude, as the novel progresses.
Where The Hunters moved at a breathless, frenetic pace – you can’t really have a chase that doesn’t, unless it’s a very boring one – things are slightly slower with COTW, at least in the beginning.
Javani’s act of heroism when she saves a stranger from an attack by bandits on the road results in, well, let’s just say Ree would rather she’d left the poor man to the bandits’ predations. And so, it would seem, would the rest of the town they stumble upon not long after.
What follows is a tale of found and actual family, and navigating the joys and pitfalls of both, set against a backdrop of ever-increasing tension with the promise of ecstatic violence drawing closer by the day.
Wragg’s gift for character is matched only by his gift for giving those characters absolutely unforgettable voices, and in this we are treated to two prime examples – Captain Manatas, and Anri the hunter. Never have I read dialogue like it, and some of Anri’s truly astonishing insults will stay with me forever.
There’s absolutely no middle-book slump here, or even a slump in the middle of the book.
The characters are in the driving seat of this narrative, and whether they’re driving you off a cliff or up the wall, there’s nothing the reader can do but cling on – and enjoy every second of the ride.
Sublime ~ Anna
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