#ensemble cast
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A foul-mouthed and irritable boy, with little regard for self or others, stumbles into the magic-hewn machinations of courtly villains who themselves forsake the health of the people for the benefit of the crown. And along for the ride is an ever-widening cast of foolish optimists, awkward pedants, and wandering souls. MASTER OF ONE is not a compelling, driving epic, but it certainly puts in the effort and the word count so as to convince one otherwise.
MASTER OF ONE is entertaining but suffers for itself. The multiple point-of-view narrative lacks balance. The story’s scope, while workable, frays for lack of consistent, practiced plotting. And the ensemble cast of nearly a dozen characters stretches readers’ care and interest untenably thin. One might indeed be wholly invested in a boy named Rags who finds himself under the heel of a bitter sorcerer and thus tagged to do the bidding of a corrupt court. But Rags is a grudgingly compliant character; his dynamics/interactions with others are so heavily transparent as to render their resolution cringe-worthy, and by the time readers grow accustomed to his strengths, his weaknesses, and his goals, the point of view shifts elsewhere.
To begin, the book’s premise is clever. The dark hand of the court of Queen Catriona Ever-Bright aims to acquire mystical power and weaponry that would transition her multi-century reign into an eternal one. Or something like that. It’s not entirely clear. One of the novel’s plot holes regards the absent motivation of its arch-antagonist (i.e., power for its own sake isn’t a character motive, it’s a crude, childish indulgence). Regardless, Rags is prodded into service by a rather nasty sorcerer, the so-named Morien the Last, and soon learns his tendency to avoid becoming a disposable thief could ensure he sees this awkward power struggle through to the end.
How awkward? Rags sees to the resurrection of a fae prince from 700 years of slumber, the sourcing and discovery of magical steampunk creatures of unimaginable strength, and the unifying of said fae prince and magical creatures with their human handlers. That’s a lot for a street rat. Essentially, Rags is instructed to purloin a new weapon for the crown. Alas, he locates multiple weapons, of a kind, but decides it’s better to leave said fantastical weapons to their masters than to hand them over to the dirty desires of the queen.
MASTER OF ONE is not particularly exciting for nearly 200 pages. The first one-third of the book concerns a sometimes-fun-but-often-predictable jaunt through ancient ruins and the subsequent meandering toward a narrative inflection point. Rags is the only point-of-view character for the first 100 pages, after which, the story shifts, or rather, attempts to shift, such that Rags’s efforts serve as a fulcrum over which other characters might pivot their individual needs or troubles. Not problematic as a manner of function, but in time, problematic in design. The reader spends so much time attending to the irascible thief, that as soon as one emerges into the points of view of other characters, the trajectory of the novel is exposed to be circular, wearisome, and puffed-up with motivation for motivation’s sake. The book’s clever premise promptly gives way to tedious adventuring.
The second half of the novel is far more intriguing than the first half. The reason as to why may or may not be multifaceted: such as an initial overemphasis on a limited array of character relationships (rendering them fatally transparent and interminably uncomfortable) or the novel’s visibly distressed plotting (there’s a lot running around in this book, through forests, through tunnels, through hallways, through sewers, through caves, through alleyways). Or it could be something far simpler, such as how the novel was drafted by more than one person. The disconcertingly creepy author(s) photo aside, MASTER OF ONE wields it’s third-person-limited perspective with modest adeptness. A difficult effort to maintain, one imagines, while articulating the idiosyncrasies of more than a dozen characters, most of whom communicate telepathically.
The novel’s heavy-handed interest in Rags, over other characters, becomes an in-kind burden when other characters demonstrate they are far more emotionally intuitive and ready for the challenge of the story than the central protagonist himself. Prince Somhairle Ever-Bright, a physically disabled and a disgraced royal, is a naturally curious man with a poet’s heart who uses his introspection to contextualize his purpose (as opposed to Rags, who privileges deniability and a suicidal manner of arrogance). Inis Fraoch Ever-Loyal, an exiled heir to a family of traitors, holds her quest for vengeance so close to her heart that everything she touches threatens to go up in flames; the woman’s ferocity is absolutely brilliant. When these two characters are matched with fantastical animal creatures, familiars, their identities further crystalize and their personal ambitions pull readers in. Rags, on the other hand, exhibits little maturity; he rambles aimlessly about his attraction to another character and lingers on the shame he feels at having lost a childhood friend several years prior to the book’s events.
Perhaps these other characters would have buoyed the narrative more substantially if the shifting points of view didn’t presuppose the weight of their purpose, but considering one might argue this for multiple characters, the observation is mere conjecture. Examples abound. After all, the fae prince character, Talon, is just plain annoying, while Morien, the sorcerer, is genuinely intriguing, but is also quickly written out of the story’s foreground.
Talon speaks little and emotes less. And yet, despite the character’s role as the highest ranking remnant of a dead culture, adept readers will notice his role is dangerously slim to being reduced to that of a prop: helpful when necessary, irrelevant when not. Elsewhere, the dark-hearted sorcerer doing the bidding of the queen is an engaging and entertaining character, until, sadly, he’s written deep into the background and holed into the role of a boogeyman: dangerous, but only if one remembers to be afraid of him. Later, when Morien is officially regarded as the baddest guy around, readers have neither seen nor heard from the man in ages.
Altogether, the ensemble cast, the constant running around, and the antagonists absent a suitable motivation beget a plot hole or two. Interestingly, the problem with the novel’s plot holes don’t concern their prevalence, but their type. The tidiest of these, for example, occur early in the novel, when readers frequently encounter information the narrator claims was supplied beforehand, and yet a closer reading of the text clearly proves otherwise.
When Morien the Last places a shard of mystical glass into Rags’s heart, the boy is doomed to the man’s control. Rags understands he serves at the man’s will, but the narrator rationalizes, inexplicably, “Morien, true to his word, didn’t give him any dreams” (p. 29). Never in the story does Morien declare his capacity to give, take away, or spy on the boy’s dreams. Later, when Rags frees a sleeping fae prince from a glass coffin, he observes “the thing that rolled free from the coffin” (p. 77), thinking the glimmering object to be a precious gemstone of some kind. This “thing” becomes a significant facet of the story moving forward; except, the story never mentions the lump of silver ore, in the coffin or anywhere, until Rags conveniently lurches toward it to snatch it up and pocket the artifact. These types of plot holes, inventions untethered to the reality of the story, in which readers are made to believe they have always known of something in spite of never having truly encountered it, are but flights of imaginative authorship.
MASTER OF ONE doesn’t have a payoff. That is to say, discounting the sticky and obvious contrivances that were most obvious from the novel’s outset, the book doesn’t lend readers the undeniable courage to believe these characters’ journeys will be entirely worth it. Inis seeks her vengeance, yes. Einan Remington, a squirrely young woman in love with theater, seeks friendship, true. Rags, the main character, routinely falters into usefulness, yes. But beyond these perfunctory stamps of attitude that tint the title’s emotional shade in one direction or another, by degrees, MASTER OF ONE throws a bunch of strangers together to solve a problem none of them are truly responsible for. Indeed, the queen still hunts for her mystical-weapon-thing. Only now, she must rely on someone else to get it for her.
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