The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford.

There are many vampires in The Dragon Waiting.

Either central to the action or alluded to, including two celebrated ones we know and love. There is also a very historical pair whose notorious disappearance now seems to make sense.

This is a historical novel, and many of the characters and events are ‘real’ and as they a taught and studied by professional historians.

Plantagenets war with Italian sorcerers and murderous Jesus-worshipping Scots borderer rievers. The Medicis at the height of their grandeur are faced with vampire dukes and shape shifting magicians. The defeated royalty of Europe plot and seethe in the no-man’s land crushed between two conflicting countries: France and Gaul.

And all the while, cruel Byzantium intends to shatter the world and reassemble the broken parts into a heartless and merciless universal empire. The alternative history which makes The Dragon Waiting a damned-near perfect novel is based on two conceits. The first is that the Romans of the East revived paganism in Constantinople so successfully that their Empire never declined as the Christian one did, to fall to the Muslim hordes – and therefore no crusaders to finish off the power of the City itself. In fact, as we hear about the Zoroastrian Saladin befriending the Apollo-worshiping King Richard Coeur-de-Lion, we realise that there were no Muslim hordes at all. The second is that magic survives from the ancient world and is developed throughout the Dark Ages of Western Europe and the enduring Byzantium, so that it is used as readily as some technology. There is always a price to magic, and how people pay that price for reasons of love or hate, ambition or pity, gives the novel great soul and the characters depth and conviction.

Have I mentioned it’s my favourite novel in the whole world yet? It’s my favourite novel in the whole world. The heroes are people you fall for immediately, and feel for, and really want them to survive and thrive. And they face so many perils; plots newly-hatched or centuries old; against individuals, or families, dynasties, nations, and the very idea of freedom itself. The four main heroes are all injured, and in so many ways, by Byzantium’s seemingly-invincible spies, sorcerers, and armies, and so beset by a series of concentric conspiracies like Russian dolls, and it seems that the forces of freedom can never prevail against the resources and amoral will of the East.

Vampires are variously monstrous killers, pitiful victims, or tormented heroes who struggle against their blood thirst to bring some value to their lives and a little more justice to the world. There’s something for most sort of vampire fiction fan here. The chick-lit sort is absent, but everything else is so rich and mysterious and grand as the protagonists strive and suffer and go on against the Byzantine heart of darkness, that I defy any lover of vampire fiction to have nothing good to say for the vamps and their friends in this.

The novel is brilliantly constructed, with three increasingly long and elabourate first sections introducing the heroes and their world with all its strangeness and familiarity. We meet the fourth in a gem of a locked-door mystery, which might also be a tale of espionage and magic and politics in a peninsula falling into Byzantium’s clutches.

A narrator merely tells you a thing up front: ‘He could tell that she was a vampire as soon as she spoke.’ It’s a fact. So what?

A storyteller shows you something, through the words and actions and feelings of his characters, and through his vocabulary and from the conclusions that we readers draw from them, and thus he involves us intellectually and emotionally in his tale: ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three hundred and sixty-eight years since my last confession.’

Ford shows us. As his characters go from place to place they discover more treason and more terror by seeing events unfolding, and by thinking about them. The gods know; they find it difficult to trust themselves in this novel; let alone the statements and writings of strangers.

Along the way, a Welsh wizard, a renegade Byzantine, a heartbroken doctor and a mercenary gunsmith travel through glittering royal courts and frozen wastelands. They meet and defeat magicians and murderous exiled queens, some very familiar cavalrymen, and finally come ashore in Britain where killing curses can be heard from mountainside to mountainside in the hope of healing a broken land and keeping it free from the East. How they attempt this, and how the vampires try to accommodate themselves to the living world (or to crush it), is told in tense, beautiful prose. You will learn to want to pay full attention to every sentence. Ford is a storyteller, remember. Amidst all the detail and daring-do; the likeable characters and real-seeming magic, he opens up huge and fascinating prospects of how the world might be, and how and what vampires are, as tantalizing asides that we can dwell on and treasure and envy. There are a handful of love affairs and passions in this novel that touch and convince and win sympathy, almost in passing, as Ford rushes off to some fresh triumph of mind to thrill and dazzle us.

The dragon is the best I’ve ever read about

If you never read another book with vampires in it, or another fantasy novel, or any novel, read this one. After nearly twenty years it still comes down from the shelf three or four times a year and it always delights.

AB-

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