The Tattered Banner

I just finished reading the Society of the Sword trilogy by Duncan M. Hamilton and need to share my thoughts while they're fresh. The series is available in one unit in audiobook form on Audible, which is what this review is based upon.

Duncan M. Hamilton is the author of The Wolf in the North series which is set in the same world as Society of the Sword and follows it. I've given much better ratings to those books and as a TL;DR I recommend you go read them instead of these.

I felt that this trilogy missed the mark for many of the same reasons that Brandon Sanderson's early work, Elantris, also fell flat. It comes down to 3 elements:

- The action is told and not shown.
- The main characters do not drive the action
- The characters to not evolve

In the case of Society of the Sword I could also add some extras:

- It feels like 1/3rd of the scenes end with the main character falling unconscious
- The entire second book seems to have forgotten that the love interest and main character fell out with one another (and that pesky prostitution thing)

Ultimately it's the top failings that kept everything at arms length. Our hero struggled for a year at war in the eastern lands, of which we saw his first two days and a summary paragraph. So much of his time there supposedly influenced his character and made him grow (we are told) but we never see the fruits of it nor do we witness it. Did he make friends? Did he learn to lead men? Instead, the character was left at a distance and described almost in outline fashion as having moved from one place to another, gaining such-and-such skill or reputation. These don't seem to have much effect on anything later on except in the most basic of terms (a rank carried forward, or noticing a soldier's bearing). The cloak collected through a harrowing experience in book one never matters again, despite its legendary status and the world-recognizable tale that accompanies it.

The Soren of book three is the Soren of book one, but with more listable accomplishments, money, and titles. His attitudes to those around him are not changed through exposure to various cultures and friends made from afar. He is single-minded in his purpose at all times...

Which makes it utterly remarkable that he doesn't actually make any decisions for the vast majority of the series. He moves from one emergency to another, pulled along by shipwrecks and piracy. The very moment he will wrap up one task introduces another that hijacks his actions and pushes him along. This stands out clearly as a sign of early Brandon Sanderson as well, and something that he learned from and fixed in his later books to great effect.

Duncan M. Hamilton is a good writer. His Wolf in the North series shows that. Not a lot of time has passed from this book to those, but he has shown tremendous growth in that time. It would be very interesting to see him come back now and rewrite scenes and selections missing from this story. I'm sure he could humanize Soren more, give him living and changing hopes and dreams, and so on. I think this chapter is closed, though, and it's probably for the best. He has more stories to tell of this world and I'm eager to read them.