So I finally managed to get my hands on the Ultramarines Omnibus, containing the first three Warhammer 40,000 novels by Graham McNeill and published by Black Library. As I continue my explorations of the setting, I've turned to the narrative fiction to get a view of long-term characterization and plot. Here's my impressions of the first book in the series, Nightbringer.
I readily admit this post is jumbled, disoriented and might even have some gaping holes in it. In my defense, the book was kind of like that, too.
The Omnibus opens with a short story, Chains of Command, where Uriel and his captain, Idaeus, are introduced. There's a big battle scene where some stuff is established, thousands of guardsmen die and some Chaos Marines show up, followed by a bridge exploding; at the end of it, Idaeus is dead and Uriel's captain. Woohoo.
Our story proper opens with Gedrik, a simple herdsman on his way home after a long day of herding grox. After introducing him, his companions and their peaceful snow village, said village comes under attack by Dark Eldar and is destroyed-- on the very same page. This scene serves to set the tone-- grimdark with a side of manipulative empathy-tugging-- and introduce the Dark Eldar as the de facto adversary of the story, for all the good it does.
Now we're taken to Macragge, where we meet our protagonist, Uriel Ventris, recently made captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company following the death of their former captain, Idaeus. According to Ultramarines chapter master Marneus Calgar, the planet Pavonis is having trouble with Eldar pirates, as well as having management problems such as not turning in the required Imperial tithe, so an adept is being sent there to check things out and the place back on track. Uriel has to transport this person safely.
Out on Pavonis, things are a mess; people are in the streets protesting some new tax the governer is imposing to help pay the lax tithe, and the Arbites are attempting to stave them off until the governor can escape. We meet their leader, Judge Virgil Ortega, trying to fend off the crowd, assisted by his compratriots Jenna Sharben (an upright and dutiful career woman without much else to define her) and someone named Collix (a loose cannon, figuratively and literally, who has no qualms about shooting people who don't behave). They don't really do anything character-wise, so just pretend that whenever I mention the Arbites it's these guys in some capacity.
Now we actually get to the Dark Eldar. Admiral Tiberius and the UMs are making their way to Pavonis. Barzano shows up and annoys everyone on the bridge by being nosy and chatty, then suddenly gets really serious and starts issuing orders as the Dark Eldar swoop in and attack. There's some shooty tactical stuff, but nothing you haven't seen on Star Trek nine hundred times, albeit on a slower time scale.
When the battle is complete, Uriel and Barzano make their way down to the planet for a meet-and-greet with the local authorities-- in this case, the family leaders of the various manufacturing cartels. A bunch of cartel leaders and some of their lackeys are introduced, but they're all samey, sleazy big business types painted over with foppish regal glamor; you could replace the lot of them with the cast of The Libertine almost to a man. The popularity of pelisses certainly doesn't hurt. There's Vendare Taloun the generic aristocratic scumbag, Solana Vergren the bossy boisterous woman, Taryn Honan the fat fop who likes boys and has no business sense, Beauchamp Abrogas the lazy stoner and maybe another one that slipped beneath my attention entirely. Oh, right, Kasimir de Valtos, the veteran type who got skinned and tortured by the Dark Eldar, has frequent surgery and lots of vivid flashbacks. His villainhood is without question almost immediately, so I feel no qualms in just stating that right now.
There's a meeting where all the leaders get together to decry the governor and everyone is described in more detail, but few of them actually matter and the whole thing is actually pretty boring. We're only a few chapters in, and already the story is bogged down with far too many characters with too little interest to spread between them for any of them to be worth keeping track of. You can entirely forget fully nine-tenths of the people in that meeting and still have the same working knowledge of the story thus far ten chapters from now.
Now we come to chapter five, and what I think is quite possibly one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, taking up all of a single page: the surgery of the kyerzak. This scene, short as it is, illustrates the core themes of the Dark Eldar clearly and concisely: torture and sex, often at the same time. We're shown in graphic detail all the surgical torments inflicted on the human subject, paralyzed but capable of full sensation, by the mysterious Surgeon; his body is dismantled as one by one, all of his guts are removed, put on life support and paraded in front of him, all while the curvaceous vampiric wych does nude gymnastics over his helpless body, inflicting erotic bites and nips upon it. At the end of it, the human comes out of the room in a bathrobe, cleansed and reassembled good as new, with the wych on his arm like Hugh Hefner after a night on the town.
The entire torturous, hours-long operation was a sex thing.
...okay, so it's explained a bit later on that it's more about cleansing his organs and stuff than kink, even if there is that, but "sadomasochism cranked up to 11" sounds cooler than "dialysis cranked up to 11" to me, so that's what I'm taking away from it.
Now we have one of a number of scenes involving the mines and how creeped out the miners are, plus how the generators are operational, but no power's coming out of them. What I think we're supposed to take away from this is that the generators keep not working because the Nightbringer is draining them of energy, but
All the way over in chapter 13, we have Taryn Honan just sort of wandering into de Valtos' mansion, taking a moment to sniff Solana Vargren's pelisse like a dog. Look, I get it already: Honan is supposed to be a perv. That was the sum of his existence when we first saw him, and nothing's happened to change that in the intervening period.
De Valtos comes downstairs with a terrified Vendare Taloun; Kasimir's apparently in a really gnarly mood and decided to just go ahead and show Vendare all his bloody surgical tools and let him know about he dices people like green onions to keep his blood clean or whatever. Taryn is whining about how the inquisitor was mean to him and asked uncomfortable questions, so Kasimir tells him he's useless and stupid, which makes him cry. Mercifully we don't have to endure it for long, as the Surgeon shows up and stabs him in the throat with a needle full of Space Morphine.
One gets the impression Kasimir simply got fed up with the fake pleasantries he kept forcing himself to make to everyone else and goes about letting them know he's actually evil-- that is, more so. Everything is going to hell; the city's a warzone, his enemies in the cartel leadership are dead or worse and his plan is almost complete. What difference does it make?
Barzano, the governor and her advisors are holed up inside the governer's palace while the city outside tears itself apart. Somewhere in the building, some kind of demonic monsters materialize out of nowhere and start hunting for the governor. Some Ultramarines get killed, the fight drags right into the room the governor's hiding in, but finally the day is saved when Barzano comes at them with his secret power sword. Which, along with the rosette, reveals that he is, in fact, an Inquisitor.
Somehow this just doesn't change the dynamic of the character much at all for me.
Now that Barzano's been outed as an Inquisitor, he takes a moment to conduct some exposition explaining just how bad everything really is. He brings out a big book and uses some psyker power to open it, which makes the humans apprehensive and the Space Marines offended and on guard. These reactions are supposed to denote the seriousness of the presence of Sorcery! among faithful Imperials, but in practice, it makes the Ultramarines look naive, which only reinforces their "goody two-shoes" stereotype. Surely a Space Marine, of all people, would know that the Inquisition sometimes makes use of "radical" methods, not the least of which is the widespread use of psykers? This is not a thing that should have come as a surprise to anyone in the room beyond it coming from someone who was supposed to be a simple adept.
Following this revelation, clues come up revolving around the word kyerzak, and with a bit of finesse the old adept with Barzano explains just what it means in the Dark Eldar tongue, based on some research someone did on them a while back.
Now, this is an interesting point; just how many long-term firsthand anthropological studies have been done on the Dark Eldar? How long would it take the Sisters Dialogus to sift through thousands of hours of recorded audio of Dark Eldar language to decode and translate its meanings enough to so much as get a working definition of a single word? I imagine quite a long time, especially counting all the breaks they'd have to take for prayers, showers and vomiting.
Assaulting Kasimir's estate on the off chance he's home and based on the tenuous assumption that he is guilty of various ill-defined crimes, the Ultramarines discover all manner of horrors, including medical instruments, Solana's flayed corpse and a couple of powered-down Necrons hooked up to some batteries (the latter being the most important, if you can believe it).
Continuing their raid, they break into a separate building to find a second "vivisectorium" like the one the Surgeon used in his first scene, only this time it's Honan on the slab. As flaccid a character as he was, I can actually feel sorry for him here; but then, something like this is gruesome, graphic and presented pitifully enough that it could be any nameless extra and it'd evoke a reaction. And feeling pity is not really the same thing as caring about the character; as nightmarish as this must be for Honan, I don't think it's done anything to make him less of a prick or more of a meaningful character. Lacking either of those benefits, I can only call the scene manipulative.
The Ultramarines take mortal offense at the entire affair, and after ceremonially euthanizing Honan proceed to cut loose on the place with bolter fire until everything is in shreds.
As an added note, I really think this scene would have been more effective if we hadn't had one a lot like it earlier. An image like this one is powerful, but we've already seen the whole dissection shpiel earlier, and while this one has a different tone behind it, using it more than once in the same story cheapens it as a dramatic device.
At this point, Kasimir's motorcade is headed out of town towards his spaceship, along with the sexy wych, Kesharq and the Surgeon. This tells us the story is almost over and the Grand Scheme is about to go into motion. Uriel and company, not realizing quite what's happening, go back to the ship to pontificate. After discussing the matter for a bit, a miraculous hint occurs to Uriel in the form of the label on the batteries the Necron warriors were hooked up to, which turns out to be the name of a certain mine. Absolutely convinced that this vague hunch will lead them to victory, the Fourth Company prepare once more to deploy.
Meanwhile in town, the Arbites are still in trouble and the Ultramarines are still hunting the rebels who triggered the riots in the first place.
Amel Vedden, their leader, is a character who seems to exist for no reason other than to give a bad face to the PDF rebels. He's crass, murderous and not especially smart. In the few scenes we see him, he's either mumbling to himself about how awesome rebelling against the government is, or salivating over killing helpless people. Reasonably, the PDF should be composed of unique individuals who share similar but certainly not identical views and have their own motivations for participating in the rebellion.
However, 40K has the tendency to reduce masses of people to carbon copies of their representatives; we get the impression that Amel Vedden is not just the face of the PDF, he is the PDF, and everyone else in it is just him copied over a few million times. This makes everything quite cut and dried, and leaves very little room for complex characterization, and what's worse, that was probably the whole point.
Virgil Ortega basically destroys the capital city to stop some rebels from getting guns, even though they all have guns and worse already. Maybe it would have given them enough power to take over the city, but would that be worse than destroying it? Well, given that in this same story, Barzano was advocating destroying the entire planet just to make sure Kasimir and his coterie couldn't get to the Nightbringer...
Planetary destruction makes me tired; I just don't have the mental fortitude to comprehend it without savagely trivializing everything on and in it, which is probably a mercy. At the same time, that's probably at least one of the perspectives from which we're intended to view it.
Kasimir's headed off to the convenient Final Boss chamber at the excavation site, along with his coterie, including an increasingly annoyed Kesharq and his daemon chihuahas, plus the sexy, sexy mute wych. There's some non-witty banter and fawning over the Great and Terrible Power they're about to Unleash, which is a good indicator they're all going to die. Out in the tunnels there's some more fighting and "suspense" via Uriel et al having a brief but violent fugue caused by the awakening Nightbringer. At any rate, they eventually get to the chamber and commense the final showdown.
I'll be frank; the titular Nightbringer itself looks like something out of Kingdom Hearts. While not a bad thing in and of itself, it clashes a bit with the intended effect of an ancient god foreshadowing inexorable doom. The thing starts swinging its scythe-arm and a bunch of Ultramarines die. Some Necrons wake up and join the fight. Dark Eldar join in. Kesharq gets killed. The wych gets vaporized. They try to fight back while avoiding the Nightbringer, but they're being tossed around like rag dolls. While all that's going on, Kasimir tries to finagle immortality out of the Nightbringer and is promptly eaten alive.
Show of hands; how many people saw that coming?
So they fight some more. Pasanius gets his arm sliced off, Uriel gets his ass beat, and finally with some psychic contrivance from Barzano, they finally realize that the artifacty thing in the center of the dark mass is what they need to go after. Uriel does so, grabbing it with some effort, slapping a Melta bomb to it and threatening to destroy it. The Nightbringer is somehow put off by this, flying up through the ceiling and disappearing. I guess he couldn't bear the sight of someone threatening what amounted to his car keys.
The entire Nightbringer battle-- and indeed, the C'tan itself-- just reeks of thoughtlessness. It's a god that gets intimidated by a human being under threat of being buried under ten kilometers of rock, then effortlessly flees seventy thousand light years. It gets more energy from a few people's feelings than from sucking the life from the sun. It longs to have the power of its starship, which is depicted only as a device through which it can feed on stars, but then it goes ahead and feeds on stars anyway. It's sealed underground and able to leach energy from its surroundings long before being released, and yet is in a highly weakened state when fully awakened-- at least that's what Uriel says; the thing seems pretty capable of taking care of itself.
In the end, Brandon Gate has been reduced to crap on toast. The city is rubble, the army and police have been wiped out, the cartels are in shambles with most of their holdings destroyed and without leadership of any kind, and virtually every named character is dead except the three main Ultramarines and the governor.
Praise the Emperor.
With the summary out of the way, let's tackle the concepts.
The concept of "plot armor" becomes especially blatant when used in novels like these. Warhammer 40,000 is a setting where truly massive numbers of people die all the time, often on a planetary or even solar system-ary scale, without respect to station, rank or merit; death is the great equalizer. In Nightbringer, characters like Uriel, Learchus and Pasanius seem to survive even the cruelest onslaughts. And it's not just Space Marines; even the planetary governer-- a grey-haired woman with no combat training at all-- lives through the entire war event on Pavonis. Okay, so Pasanius wound up losing an arm to the Nightbringer and now he's got a bionic one, but it's not like it's even disadvantage.
While it's an obvious gimmick, it's also a necessary one; in order to tell these stories in any meaningful, relatable (and profitable) way, things have to be lightened a shade or three. Characters have to survive so we can get to know them, and the normally random, uncaring universe has to behave somewhat purposefully in order for there to be anything like drama.
A "true" 40K novel-- one that proposed to adhere to the spirit of the setting material in its purest form with the greatest of summary precision-- would be virtually nothing but long, nightmarishly bloody combat on an incomprehensibly vast scale, with no characters, no plotline and an ending where everyone dies for nothing since none of it really matters on the large scale anyway. While this book would capture the essence of things well enough (certainly better than Nightbringer does), it would be a damned depressing read; it'd be like reading the phone book, in the knowledge that every single person in it had just been senselessly murdered in cold blood the second your eyes passed their name.
Nightbringer, attempts to bring together a sizable cast of largely disposable characters to face an unknown enemy with unclear goals, coordinating the revival of an abstract evil with vague intentions.
When I first got my hands on the book, I actually had slightly higher-than-normal expectations, since I tend to associate 40K with quality-- but I think that's because I garner so much of my impression of 40K from the great abundance of artwork, which is almost universally brilliant. I was prepared to like it, and I think I did, at least for the first while; once it all began to come into perspective, it decayed from good to mediocre to bad to really awful.
You see, the problem is that this book has nothing to say. It's not making a point of any kind; it's pointless. There are bad people doing bad things, and some slightly less bad people are out to stop them. There's no objective reason to care who wins, nothing to truly separate good guys from bad. There's some attempt to appeal to the common conceptions of right and wrong-- generally measured by how much the character enjoys the inevitable killing-- but it's drowned out by the factions' own prejudice. The only way I know how to invest in it is by just picking a side based on how much I like their themes and designs-- much as one would do with the wargame, I imagine. The novel functions not unlike a football game on that level, only with an outer layer of "normal" moralization attempting to make an otherwise intolerable universe palatable for a mainstream audience.
In brief, the book was pointless, shoddy, lame and reliant on shock value to function.
This concludes the Nightbringer review. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who's taken the time to comment on my blog (all three of you); your time and attention are appreciated.
Next in the series is Warriors of Ultramar, but that's another post.
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