Other Voices

Daybreak #3

by Colin Greenland

In the Royal Palace of conquered Luscany. Princess Nette chafes at the bonds that confine her to a life of empty ceremony. Meanwhile, in a less salubrious quarter. Serin Cuille's father scents success in his search for the secret of immortality. Then a gypsy blade flashes at the ice fair. An imperial emissary lies bleeding by the frozen river, and the uneasy peace is shattered. The Kschalan overlords will not rest until they have revenge. Serin saw it happen, saw the blow fall. Now she can never go home. Colin Greenland's The Hour of the Thin Ox was praised by The Guardian as being both lush and compressed, like a happy-ending Heart of Darkness. Other Voices takes us out of the jungle up into the mountains, and the no-man's land between the living and the dead.

Genres: Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1988

About the author

Colin Greenland's fiction and criticism have been translated into a dozen languages and broadcast on BBC national radio. His multiple award-winning science fiction novel Take Back Plenty, long out of print in the UK, is available again in the Orion SF Masterworks series, and for e-readers at SF Gateway.

Colin lives in Cambridge and Foolow with his wife Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Piranesi . He is sometimes to be found writing something, goodness knows what.

Reviews

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is apparently the third in Greenland’s Daybreak series but I wasn’t really aware of this when I bought it recently. I read The Hour of the Thin Ox many years ago and Daybreak on a Different Mountain on the blog in 2009.
Other Voices is a slightly unfocused tale set in the standardised pre- (or never-) industrial fantasy milieu. Greenland doesn’t fall into the clichés of the genre though, he’s too good a writer for that.
At the novel’s start Luscany is on the verge of being conquered by the Eschalan, a people to all intents human, but orange. The book promises to be the story of Serin, daughter of Tarven Guille, a medical experimenter. It soon spreads out, though, to encompass the life of Luscany’s Princess Nette kept unwillingly in her palace by the victorious Eschalan as a figurehead.
Tarven and his wife Amber’s first two children either didn’t survive birth, or only barely did. Nevertheless, their bodies are kept in the house in a drawer in which Serin is forbidden to look. For Tarven is on the point of discovering how to bring the recently dead back to life.
The fantasy elements don’t overwhelm the story which is mainly one of accommodating to the occupying power and of resisting it.
Not one of Greenland’s major works but eminently readable.