In
many ways, John F. Carr’s Kalvan Kingmaker is a very strange
book. A sequel to H. Beam
Piper’s Paratime and Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, it is also
a sequel to Carr’s own Great King’s War, which has been out
of print since the early 1990s. Furthermore,
Kalvan Kingmaker clearly serves as a transition book between Piper
and Carr’s earlier works and Carr’s subsequent novels in the milieu.
Because of these factors, the book needs to achieve several
different agendas, some of which it does successfully, some less well.
For
those who are unfamiliar with the story of Kalvan, the character was
invented by H. Beam Piper and fit into several stories about the Paratime
police. The Kalvan stories
were combined to create a fix-up novel, The Gunpowder God.
Kalvan is really Calvin Morrison, a Pennsylvania state trooper who
finds himself in a world in which North America was colonized by Greeks
from the west. Kalvan found
himself in conflict with the priests of Styphon, who held the secret to
gunpowder (fireseed) until Kalvan introduced it more widely.
By the time Kalvan Kingmaker has begun, Kalvan has become
the Great King of the new kingdom of Hos-Hostigos, and the priests of
Styphon are still trying to overthrow him and solidify their power.
Carr has woven a Byzantine tapestry of plots into
his novel as he follows not only Kalvan’s attempts to secure the border
of Hos-Hostigos, but also follows the priests of Styphon in their battle
against Kalvan, the Nomads of the Seas of Grass, the old cultures of the
west coast, and the various factions of the Paratime organization and
time-line. The result is a book which is realistic in its complexity
and a feast for those who relish military novels, but is rather light on
characterization. By the time a reader is getting engrossed in any
specific character, Carr jumps to another character to further the plot.
Near
the beginning of the novel, there is a certain amount of redundancy as
Carr is intent on making sure his readers are familiar with the outline of
the world (and Paratime around it) as created by Piper in his short
stories and novel, as well as advanced in Great King’s War.
Eventually, the redundancy is done away with and Carr is able to focus
more clearly on advancing the story, although at the end Kalvan
Kingmaker is clearly simply setting up for the next novel in the
cycle, Siege of Tarr-Hostigos.
By the time Carr comes to his semi-ending, however, he has settled several
hooks into the reader, often by merely hinting at some of the behind the
scenes activity.
Although
underplayed, one of the most intriguing aspects of Kalvan Kingmaker
is the power struggle within the church of Styphon between those who
actually believe in the god and those who simply see the temple as a means
of achieving power. While it isn't clear that the future novels will
make this conflict more overt, it is definitely something which catches
the reader's attention.
The primary
goal of Kalvan Kingmaker is to allow the author and the reader to
enjoy the world which H. Beam Piper created more than forty years
ago. In this, Carr is right on the money. Although he has
stretched the horizon of Piper's world, everything in the novel feels
right. Piper may never have written this book, but the reader feels
as if Piper would have approved.
