Like Armor? Fantasy Novel The Red Knight – Miles Cameron

If you like armor or sword and sorcery or just fantasy / alternate history novel you’ll enjoy The Red Knight (The Traitor Son Cycle). The novel is billed as book one of The Traitor Son Cycle, with book two recently published.

The Red Knight is the first fantasy by Miles Cameron, who has written historical fiction under a different name. The Red Knight is heavy with medieval combat, armor, knighthood, set in Alba which is somewhat similar to England.  They are at odds with The Wild, a poorly defined bunch of humans and non-humans, many with magic.  The Wild wants to take back their former stronghold, which a religious order now owns and is using as a convent.  It is the Abbess of this convent who hires the Red Knight’s mercenary company for security.

The Red Knight is complicated and long, over 600 pages, with at least 6 main groups of characters and over 50 individually named people. When I finally got to about page 500 I started skimming a little since some of the character groups did not seem germane to the story and did not interest me.

This story sprawls over and could benefit from editing. Do we really need to know the Sossig bands? They are barbarians in conflict with the Kingdom of Alba who played a peripheral role in the story, yet we had a good 50 pages and another 10 or so characters. The drovers and their group also did not seem important and didn’t add much. The last episode where they visit the Wyrm is a set up for sequels, but again, adds little except word count.

Two big improvements would be a list of characters and a map to make it easier to keep track of the people and places. Some characters had the same last names or similar first names that made them hard to keep straight.

Another huge improvement would be to cut down on the armor and weapons descriptions. Over and over and over we get to read about the armor, how costly, how heavy, how time consuming to put on and take off. Rinse and repeat, and then do it all over again. Frankly, I’m not real interested in armor. Tell me once and I’m happy. The author says in his Afterword that he is involved in medieval re-enactments and the novel shows his expertise. But unless you are really interested in swords and bill hooks and gauntlets and and and, you won’t care and you’ll wish he just GOT ON WITH IT.

These are flaws that made reading longer and a bit tedious, but overall the book is good. There were a few surprises.

One odious character was the Galle (aka French?) pompous knight, who said with complete sincerity that his sword was all the justification he needed to exert low, middle and high justice. He killed two squires, burnt an inn and threw the town constable tied up into a stable. Why? Because the innkeeper and the squires’ knight didn’t immediately recognize his innate superiority and give him the best room.

I expected that this creep would take the Lancelot approach and try to win over the Queen, but that never happened.

Another was that the Queen and the Abbess both play prominent roles and are figures of power. And the Red Knight does not win his fair lady.

Besides adding a map and character list, editing out a few groups of characters, telling us only once about each piece of armor and weapon, there are a few other factors that limited my enjoyment.

• We never learn much about the main character, the Red Knight. We get glimpses, but little background and very limited character development.
• The world building is sketchy.   Alba is a land that is recovering from a massive fight with The Wild a generation ago. Clearly there should be a lot going on politically and personally, but we don’t see it.
• There are allusions to political brangles and possibly traitorous vassals, but I’d have liked more meat as that would explain a great deal of the back story.
• For some reason Alba has a major agricultural fair at the convent, even though it is implied to be out of the way.  That begs the question of why there?  What’s going on behind the scenes that keeps a convent and its territory as the prime destination for millions of gold pieces?
• We don’t know much about The Wild. Some are monstrous, some are described as “guardians” or “just folks” yet will eat their human enemies alive.
• The magic system is sketchy.

I enjoyed The Red Knight enough to look for the second book. But if The Fell Sword (Book 2 The Traitor Son Cycle) is another 600 page rehash of armor, weapons and irrelevant characters then I won’t finish it.