Dragonsbane is a novel I read upon release back in 1985. Obviously, the world was a different place back then, I was a different person (young teenager) and fantasy was of a different flavor. Even at the time though, I knew that Barbara Hambly had gifted her readers with a refreshingly mature fantasy which would stand the test of time.

 

In the northlands, Jenny Waynest is a not-so-young-anymore sorceress, half-trained, who splits her time between learning her craft and raising her children. The father of Jenny’s brood is Sir John Aversin, and he isn’t your typical backwoods noble. Rather, he is a man of learning, who prefers studying old scientific tomes on engineering and pig farming than fighting. Be that as it may, he and Jenny have been forced on occasion to slay some vicious monsters – including a dragon! And now John is widely known as “John the Dragonslayer” though it hasn’t changed his and Jenny’s life very much.

 

Then young Gareth shows up.

 

Gareth is a southerner from the Empire. (The Empire which abandoned the northlands once the mines dried up, leaving their old subjects to the mercies of the northern savages.) Now, though, a huge black dragon has taken the Deep of Ylferdun, killing or enslaving all its inhabitants. Gareth having been sent on a quest to bring the only known dragonslayer back to the Empire to save his people. Only, Sir John isn’t quite what Gareth expected in his shining hero, and he certainly never expected him to be involved with a plain looking, plain spoken witch.

 

Desperation finally leads Gareth to accept John and Jenny for who they are; the three braving a dangerous journey back to the Empire to confront the dragon. But once there they find that Sir John and Jenny are viewed as a huge joke by the royal court, the king might be under the sway of a beautiful witch, and the dragon could be much more than a savage beast.

 

“Traditional fantasy,” I hear some of you saying to yourself.

 

So why do I recommend Dragonsbane so highly?

 

When I was a teenager, I loved the book for its escapism and adventure. Simple enough, right? Because Ms. Hambly takes the traditional fantasy tropes, twists them about a bit, adds some complex characters like the dragon (He was a favorite of mine at the time!) and turns this familiar dragon slaying quest story into a new and exciting adventure. Pure sugar-coated fantasy fun!

 

As I’ve matured (i.e. become middle aged), what brings me back is the depiction of John and Jenny. These guys are so familiar to my own real life: two middle aged people in a committed relationship with kids. Yes, they still love one another – even though they drive one another crazy – but they are both struggling with regrets, specifically the realization that due to circumstances they are never going to achieve their lifelong dreams. Yes, that causes Dragonsbane to be sad at times (though John and Jenny’s plight went over my head when I was thirteen), depressing even, but Ms. Hambly handles it all so deftly, so delicately that there is more joy and hope than doom and gloom, as this couple lives their life together.

 

I’m pretty tough on books. Hard to impress. Difficult to sway once my mind is made up. Perhaps my lifelong love of Dragonsbane is so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I can’t see its faults, but in my eyes, this is as close to perfect as a traditional fantasy adventure can get, and I’d encourage everyone to give it a try.

 Jenny is a Mage, whose powers are weaker than she desires them to be.  Her mentor is dead so she continues to strive on her own.  

 

She lives in the Winterlands, a declining country cut loose by its King,  because there are too many troubles for him to manage all of them.  Lord John and his people have struggled ever since to keep some semblance of civilization going.

 

now the king has more problems; a dragon has come to terrorize his people.  Lord John is the only man in all the land who has been able to slay a dragon.  After many unsuccessful attempts by the King's Knights, an emissary has been sent to Lord John to negotiate for his help.

 

Gareth meets up with Jenny on the road and she agrees to take Gareth to Lord John.  Gareth is full of bubbling enthusiasm and begins a romantic ballad of the epic slaying of the dragon by Lord John,  (Averson and the Golden Wyrm of Wehr -- he wrote it himself) which is, of course, inaccurate.  Jenny tells the more realistic version.

 

"He slashed its wings first, so that it couldn’t take to the air and fall on him from above. He used poisoned harpoons to slow it down, but he finished it off with an ax.”

 

“An ax?!” Gareth cried, utterly aghast. “That’s—that’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard! Where is the glory in that? Where is the honor? It’s like hamstringing your opponent in a duel! It’s cheating!”

 

“He wasn’t fighting a duel,” Jenny pointed out. “If a dragon gets into the air, the man fighting it is lost.”

 

“But it’s dishonorable!” the boy insisted passionately, as if that were some kind of clinching argument.

 

“. . . . A dragon is upward of twenty feet long and can kill a man with a single blow of its tail. You said yourself,” she added with a smile, “that there are situations in which honor does not apply.”

 

“But that’s different!” the boy said miserably and lapsed into disillusioned silence.

 

"He fought the dragon as he would have fought a wolf, as a vermin which was harming his people. He had no choice.”

 

“But a dragon isn’t vermin!” Gareth protested. “It is the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the manhood of a true knight. You must be wrong! He couldn’t have fought it simply—simply out of duty. He can’t have!”

 

 Jenny and Gareth arrive at the holding, and Jenny introduces Lord John to Gareth.

 

For one instant, Gareth was shocked absolutely speechless. He sat for a moment, staring, stunned as if struck over the head; then he dismounted so hastily that he clutched his hurt arm with a gasp. It was as if, Jenny thought, in all his ballad-fed fantasies of meeting the Dragonsbane, it had never occurred to him that his hero would be afoot, not to say ankle-deep in mud beside the local pigsty. . . .

 

Gareth, still gazing around him in mystification at the cluttered room, said nothing, but his narrow face was a study of mental gymnastics as he strove to adjust the ballads’ conventionalized catalog of perfections with the reality of a bespectacled amateur engineer who collected lore about pigs. . . .

 

With the promise of the King's renewed protection, Lord John agrees to travel south with Gareth, and Jenny accompanies them.  Gareth, disillusioned and disenchanted, is a less than congenial companion.

 

“He feels cheated, is all,” he said easily. “And since God forbid he should have cheated himself with his expectations, it must have been one of us that did it, mustn’t it?”

 

20% finished.  Really like it so far. 

 

there are 166 books on my KU wish list.

 

i think it's time to get with it.

 

i'm starting with these -- four of my favorite authors.

Hey, this is really good! It doesn’t beat out The Ladies of Mandrigyn as my favorite Hambly, but that’s because Mandrigyn is awesome; this is a strong second. Please ignore the cover and blurb, though, as they appear designed to fool you into thinking this is a different sort of book from what it actually is. You’d never guess that Jenny is the main character, for instance. I’m not sure why the deception, as this will be immediately obvious to anyone who opens the book.

Jenny and John are not your typical fantasy couple. She’s 37, he’s a couple years younger, and they have two young sons. John is a minor lord and renowned dragon slayer, but we first meet him knee-deep in pig muck and the dragon slaying wasn’t romantic either. Jenny is a witch, and lives apart from her family to better practice magic, but the time she’s devoted to family and community has still hindered her development of her talents. Yep, it’s family vs. career, but unusually, Jenny is far more bothered by the magical potential she’s sacrificed for love and family than the other way round.

The plot is fairly straightforward: a starry-eyed young messenger, Gareth, begs John to come kill a dragon, and the trio sets out to do so, though the ugly political situation will turn out more dangerous than the dragon itself. It is a fun plot, satisfyingly wrapped up at the end of the novel (there are sequels, but they were written many years later and apparently aren’t up to snuff). There is a bit of journeying, but it doesn’t go on too long, and if the action scenes sometimes seemed a bit drawn-out to me, I say that as someone who isn’t looking for action-based fantasy anymore.

What I do look for in fantasy are great characters, and this book has them. It is a very small cast, with only a few secondary characters in addition to Jenny, John and Gareth, but the principals are interesting, textured, and well-developed, such that it’s easy to believe these are real people. Often in fantasy novels heroics inspire no more than a shrug from me; the standard fantasy hero is courageous in such a knee-jerk, pre-programmed way that it’s hard to be moved once you’re over age 16 or so. But such is not the case in Dragonsbane: this is a mature fantasy novel (in the best sense of the word, not the “full of gore and sex” sense), with mature heroes who are heroic in a real and believable way.

Speaking of heroics, this is one of those fantasy novels that takes pains to distinguish the myth from the reality; Gareth, a lover of dragon-slaying ballads, is perhaps intended as a stand-in for the typical fantasy reader, whose illusions are shattered as the story progresses. Today, with the market swamped with “gritty” fantasy, this is nothing new, and Hambly’s use of realism for shock value may seem a bit dated. Presumably when it was published in 1985, the practicality and realism actually was subversive. But it doesn’t go over-the-top in grittiness either; the reality is more prosaic and more complex than Gareth expects, but heroism still exists. And some of the subtle commentary on fictionalization is just as relevant today. For instance, in the ballad, John rescued “maidens” from the dragon. In reality, it was a boy and a girl (though really just a boy, because the girl was already dead). This is exactly what we do in real life! I remember being shocked – shocked! – to learn that 2/3 of murder victims in the U.S. are male; in fiction it’s skewed at least as heavily the other way, because Victims Are Female.

As for the writing, in general it’s better than most fantasy, though Hambly’s sentences still sometimes trip me up. It is nicely visual, with good imagery. The point-of-view is a bit odd, though. We spend the book in Jenny’s head, but in the first couple of chapters, many of the observations are Gareth’s: the village is squalid, John is a yokel, the boys are urchins. This weirdness fades after the beginning, but there’s still the occasional description requiring familiarity with a place that Jenny doesn’t know. This too may be a result of changes in the genre; authors today stick tightly to their POV character’s head, making deviations jarring.

Overall, I really liked this book – fantasy that can be enjoyed by thinking adults, with strong, believable characters and an intriguing take on dragons. Definitely recommended.

Dragonsbane (Winterlands #1) - Barbara H... I first read Dragonsbane, um, decades ago, when I was probably in my early teens. My recollection - faint, very - is that I enjoyed parts of it, but was somewhat bored with others.

Fast-forward to now, and my assessment is the similar. I suspect, years ago, my teenage self found Jenny Waynest's middle-agey angst a little incomprehensible. Similarly, her struggles with the idea of motherhood. There's a strong chance that I also struggled with Hambly's lovely, but sometimes overcooked turns of phrase.

Let's address the second issue first. In a nutshell, Hambly's writing is quite pretty, using all manner of interesting similes and analogies to describe the settings of the world of Dragonsbane. Me, I'm a big fan of a well-used analogy. But...it seems that a tree can never be simply described as a tree. Every aspect of the geography and scenery gets a detailed, verbose description. And quite frankly, a good deal of the verbiage expended on scene setting is unnecessary. Because, quite often a rose is a rose, and a tree, a tree. It was funny, because part of me wanted to spend the time reading the description, just for the benefit of my own writer's brain, to stimulate ye old white matter with the interesting prose.

But...for the most part, my short attention span demanded that I skim, skim, skim.

This time around, however, I totally "got" Jenny's existential angst. Jenny Waynest is a witch, living on the fringe of an isolated community, where she serves as mid-wife/healer. Magic, as taught to her by her mentor, is a cruel taskmaster and acquiring any degree of proficiency requires an austere lifestyle of contemplation with few distractions. Jenny's relationship with Lord John Aversin (the dragonsbane) is just the kind of distraction she should avoid. Particularly, since the affair has produced two children.

So, as she approaches middle age, Jenny finds herself torn between the good things in her life (children, John) and the inevitable frustration of wishing she had done more with her magic, her chosen vocation. Basically, she reaches that point in life where she looks back at her accomplishments and thinks, "That's it? That's all I am? Well, fuck." Yeah, Jenny, I hear ya.

What I particularly liked was that the story acknowledged an unspoken truth: that not all women are at ease with the idea of having their identity utterly sublimated by the word "mother." That some women approach motherhood with a degree of ambivalence.

Jenny loves her sons; she is, in fact, utterly floored by how much she loves them, but she still chooses to live on her own, away from the boys. (She sees them frequently; but someone else does a good chunk of the mothering.) She admits that magic continues to be the defining aspect of who she is.

At the beginning of the story, she is pretty much muddling along with a vague sense of discontent, but with no idea what to do about it. When Gareth, a young nobleman, arrives with news of an attacking dragon in the capital city and begging for John's help in slaying the beast, Jenny knows she must accompany John on his mission. This decision puts on her on a collision course with everything she has hoped to be but isn't, and eventually, the hard choice between family and magic.

Although the villain is a stock character straight out of central casting -- beautiful, power-hungry witch -- the rest of main characters are vivid and real people, including the dragon, Morkeleb. John, in particular is a fabulous mixture of soldier/scholar/geek.

Worth the reread, although the rather dense description keeps Dragonsbane from being a "keeper."