Rogue Agent Series

Book 1: The Accidental Sorcerer

ISBN 9780732286040

HarperVoyager (2008)
ISBN: 9780732286040
$24.99
Buy this Book
Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack, Feb 2008

The Accidental Sorcerer turned out to be a delightful surprise. The first twenty pages seemed to be setting up a rather ordinary, derivative novel without much originality. But then the author hit their stride, and the novel turned into a lively, energetic, original romp that at times made me laugh out loud. By the end, I was already anticipating with pleasure future instalments in the series.

The Sorcerer of the title is Gerald Dunwoody, a depressingly ordinary young man, with a depressingly average level of magical talent. Resigned to his own ordinariness, Gerald has accepted his status as a Third Level magician, and with it a job as a bureaucrat in the Department of Thaumaturgy. Unfortunately, on one of his first jobs things go hideously wrong, and he contributes to a devastating explosion at a major wand factory – and creates a huge scandal. Luckily Gerald isn't entirely friendless, and he manages to get a job in another country as Royal Court Wizard. Given his lowly qualifications, Gerald has a sense that there must be some catch in the job; but it's a job, and the title alone should give him enough status to eventually rebuild a career in his native land.

Unfortunately (that word applies to a great deal of Gerald's life), the catch is a massive one – an insane King who has been secretly stealing his Court Wizard's powers, killing them in the process. Naturally that's not all Gerald has to deal with; there's also a political and religious crisis likely to lead to war with a neighbouring country. You'd think the royal family might help rein in the errant King Lional, but no; sister Melissande has recently been made Prime Minister, and her acerbic tongue hasn't been softened by the workload associated with replacing an entire Privy Council. Younger brother Rupert is quite dotty, and only concerned with his butterflies. Gerald does have one staunch ally, his talking bird, Reg; but her bad temper usually means she causes more trouble than she ever helps soothe.

The plot wasn't all that complicated, but there were two great joys in this novel: the strong characterisation and the smart, well-aimed humor that ran throughout. The plot was, however, well worked out and well-paced; the story didn't flag at any point and everything made sense and was consistent with the “rules” of this world.

The humor was a particular delight to me; humor is always difficult to pull off, and many authors seem to think that the more intelligent the humor is, the less likely it is to succeed. Much of the humor in The Accidental Sorcerer was verbal, and came out particularly in the conversations of the characters. It's smart and fast, and often acerbic, and if this was a movie you'd have to pay attention to make sure you didn't miss anything. It was one of the funniest books I've read in ages – as I said, in places it made me laugh out loud. It was also consistent. Once the novel got properly started, there wasn't a dull moment and the humor ran throughout the book.

To balance this, Mills has created strong characters that experience a range of emotions, including some desperately sad ones. The strength of the characters' emotions and experiences provides a solid core to the novel that saves it from being a piece of fluff. While Gerald wasn't the character I enjoyed most, his experiences anchor the novel and provide some genuinely agonising moments. He goes through a real journey of growth and of developing greater self-awareness; by the end of the novel he isn't the man we originally met. He's far more interesting and someone you'd be much more likely to want to invite to a dinner party.

Melissande was for me the most lively of the characters; sharp and sarcastic but vulnerable too; harassed and busy but always able to be gentle with her mentally challenged brother. Her exchanges with others are the source of much of the humor I enjoyed so much.

All of the characters are realistic and strong. I was particularly impressed by Mills' ability to make a character well-rounded without having to give a potted history of each character. We do glean a fair bit of background information about most characters, but Mills salts this information throughout the story, generally in quite subtle ways. Mills also spends time on characters you might not expect to get a lot of attention; notably the political enemies who may embroil Gerald in a war. Rather unexpectedly, we get their point of view and they're made into interesting and real characters in only a chapter or two.

This ability to have a strong impact without a lot of verbiage is a hallmark of Mills' writing. This is an easy novel to read. It's well-paced, and the writing is to the point and lively. The plot isn't the most complicated ever, but it's convincing, and Mills doesn't bury it in wordiness – it's not a sparse novel, there's plenty of information, but you won't find yourself wading through hundreds of pages of descriptions either. I liked the writing style; Mills has a light and easy touch, and manages to be distinctive without the writing itself ever being so obtrusive that it pulls you out of the story.

This is volume one of the Rogue Agent series, and the back of the book already advertises two more volumes. This isn't a trilogy; it appears more like a series of crime novels, where recurring characters face a different plot and problem in each novel. I look forward to the next instalment, and hope it'll have the same verve and energy as The Accidental Sorcerer.

I'd recommend this novel enthusiastically to a very wide audience. It'll go down well with those who like clever humor, well written fantasies, good characterisation, or good writing. And although an adult novel, many younger readers would also enjoy it. The Accidental Sorcerer is an excellent novel and deserves to find a wide audience.

ISBN 9780732286040

Harper Voyager (2008)
ISBN: 9780732286040
$24.99
Buy this Book
Reviewed by David Buchbinder, Nov 2008


We have seen, over the past couple of decades, the rise of the comic fantasy novel, a genre to which The Accidental Sorcerer belongs and which seems to be dominated by British writers of fantasy — Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt are perhaps the best-known exponents of this recent generic offshoot. I am intrigued by the popularity of this form of fantasy, even among those who do not habitually devour exemplars of high-fantasy narrative; and, reading K.E. Mills’ novel, I think I now begin to understand, at least to some extent, why.

Exponents of the critical school of Russian Formalism (also sometimes known as Russian Semiotics) which flourished in the early twentieth century — if one can use the term “flourish” in the context of the Stalinist suppression of Formalism by the 1930s — were interested in what made art Art, if you take my meaning. Viktor Shklovsky and others postulated that a work of art was actually simply the sum of its devices, thereby neatly excising from the picture Romantic notions of the artist, the suffering soul and the delicate aesthetic sensibility. Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov went on to hypothesise that when those devices became obvious — or were, in their terms, “laid bare” — particularly at the level of genre, the work of art and its genre became available to parody. For Shklovsky, this signalled the overuse, over-familiarity and tiredness of those devices: they had been worked, as it were, literally to death, and to continue to produce in that genre was merely to reproduce cliché. Parody, by which the Formalists did not necessarily mean a work intended to pillory another work or other works, or even to entertain by caricaturing other works, became the clear indicator that a particular collection of devices would no longer function adequately as a way of representing experience or “reality” (Shklovsky was the theorist who thought that the task of art was to de-automatise experience and make it fresh — “to make the stony stony,” as he eloquently puts it in one of his essays). Tynyanov, by contrast, considered parody to be revivifying, so that the reader or viewer was required, willy-nilly, to reconsider experience in the light of the distortions deliberately wrought by parody.

And so we come to fantasy narrative and its parodying by comic fantasy; for that is what the latter does. If we limit the definition of fantasy fiction to its modern — that is, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century—form, we can say that we are pretty much able just to phone in the average narrative of high fantasy, with its quest-motif, its jutting-jawed yet devastatingly handsome, clear-eyed doughty warrior of a hero, its flawless beauty of a heroine who is often as capable of swinging a sword as wielding a distaff, its wizards, witches, elves, goblins, magical rings and swords and the rest of the magico-supernatural panoply, its division of the world and its inhabitants into clearly demarcated domains of good and evil, etc. etc. In other words, the “devices”, to use the Formalist term, have not only been laid bare, but have become perhaps rather threadbare. This is not to say — far from it! — that fantasy fiction is dead, or that it is only because one is naive and deluded, or in some other way incapacitated, that one continues to read fantasy fiction. After all, there is a certain pleasure to be found in observing how a writer works and reworks the conventions of a genre or of a story: even Shakespeare reworked familiar stories and genres; and, long before him, the Greeks of classical Athens enjoyed an old story well retold.

What comic fantasy brings to a reader’s appreciation of the fantasy narrative, to take the Tynyanovian line, is, first, its joyful exposure (laying bare) of the devices and conventions while at the same time borrowing, refitting and redeploying them. It’s quite a trick of sleight of hand, when you think about it. Second, comic fantasy relishes the juxtaposing of elements of high fantasy with those of a realism that is gritty only because it is so very bloody ordinary. Holt’s characters, for instance, might work in a London office — for a firm that deals in magic and magical things, it is true, but it is still just an office; and while Pratchett’s Discworld narratives are set in exotic locations, for the most part the exoticism and the potential to veer off into high fantasy are continually undermined by the quotidian, the banal and the trivial — take the irrepressible Nanny Ogg, for example, in the several volumes centred on the Witches of Lancre: her vulgarity, her unashamed manipulation of her children and their spouses and offspring, her unabashed enjoyment of a drink or five, her frankness of language and her fondness for bawdy songs make her one of the more memorable, earthy, lovable witches in the whole corpus of fantasy fiction.

And so it is with The Accidental Sorcerer. The motif of a character who stumbles into magic or into a higher order of it, and is unable to manage it, is not a new one — even the Harry Potter books mine that particular vein, to say nothing of figures like the cowardly and incompetent wizard Rincewind in Pratchett’s narrative universe. But Mills connects this theme with the very ordinary. The narrative opens with Gerald Dunwoody’s arrival at Stuttley’s Superior Staff factory to conduct a snap inspection on behalf of the Ottosland government’s Department of Thaumaturgy. A minor Third-Grade wizard, Gerald finds himself caught up in a factory disaster brought about by Harold Stuttley’s attempts to cut corners in order to protect profits. Those attempts include poor maintenance, disregard of safety regulations, and the like. As a result of his efforts to avert complete catastrophe as magical staffs go critical because of the thaumaturgic overload, Gerald later finds that he has been imbued with greater sorcerous power than he naturally possessed.

In order to live down his dismissal from the Department of Thaumaturgy and escape the humiliation of the destruction that he, a comparatively powerless wizard and menial government functionary, has wrought on the factory and place of business of one of the oldest, most respected and best-connected manufacturers of wizard’s staffs, Gerald takes a job in New Ottosland as Court Wizard to King Lional the Forty-Third (all the New Ottosland kings are called Lional — if it not their birth name, it is the one they take upon succeeding to the throne. In fact, “king” and “Lional” appear to be interchangeable terms). Thither he travels magically, accompanied by his familiar and friend Reg, a talking, indeed smart-mouthed, female bird who used to be a witch-princess of some magnitude; and in New Ottosland Gerald makes the acquaintance not only of the autocratic, self-absorbed and increasingly dangerously looney current Lional but also of his siblings, the dishevelled and unattractively clad Princess Melissande and the vague, butterfly-obsessed Prince Rupert. The former is Prime Minister, struggling heroically against the odds of inadequate resources and staffing to run the country as it should be, while the latter appears to live in a world entirely of his own, occasionally paying brief visits to reality. Gerald finds himself reluctantly thrust into the politics not only of the palace but also of the country, as Lional, manifesting a folie de grandeur of magnificent proportions, drives his kingdom into a confrontation with the neighbouring country of Kallarapi, a state inspired by spiritual motivations. As crisis after crisis unfolds — crises both personal and political - Gerald gradually learns the extent to which his magical powers have been enhanced and need control. At the same time, the hitherto socially inept and unacceptable young wizard learns to befriend both Princess Melissande and Prince Rupert.

I hope my incomplete sketch of the novel above gives a sense of the way Mills brings the ordinary and familiar into the same orbit as the fantastic and strange: government functionaries who are simultaneously wizards and/or royalty; problems of economic stringencies in a world defined by magical abilities; the quest redefined as seeking a job; colonial sensibilities in relation to the colonising or at any rate dominant metropole (New Ottosland versus Ottosland); self-aggrandisement at the cost of the welfare of the community; orthodox religious faith in the face of “modernity” and “progress”; the definition of this latter, progress, in terms simply of image — all of these (and more) are surely familiar to us from our daily helping of the news and gossip media. They are, however, woven captivatingly into a narrative that proceeds at almost breakneck speed, and is centred around what I have argued elsewhere to be a newly acceptable model of masculinity: the schlemiel, inadequate to the tasks required of him but earnestly attempting to cope and prove himself. I will be interested to see in what directions the second volume in this series takes both the narrative and the reader.