Review: “Throne of the Crescent Moon”

One of the things I try to do every year is read all of the novels nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards. I don’t get to vote for the Nebula Awards (yet – working on that), but I often go to Worldcon and when I do I can and do vote for the Hugo Awards, so I try to get them all read around this time of year so that I can vote knowledgeably (if not intelligently).

While I have a fair number of books that I read during the year as they come out based on: 1) authors I like; 2) what I’ve read in the past, and; 3) books liked and suggested by friends and by authors that I like, the Hugo and Nebula nominees list makes an excellent backup checklist to make sure that I didn’t miss anything good. It’s a crowdsourced double check on my personal tastes.

With that as background, I can report that I’ve just finished reading “Throne of the Crescent Moon” by Saladin Ahmed (DAW Books). I believe from things I’ve read elsewhere while reading it that it’s Mr. Ahmed’s first novel. It won’t be his last, if for no other reason that it’s subtitled “Book One of The Crescent Moon Kingdoms“.

I’m not a professional reviewer. I got my degree in physics, not literature or English. But I read a lot, have been reading a lot for over fifty years, and I know what I like. I can usually say why I like or don’t like something and I can detail what works for me and what doesn’t.

I’m having trouble doing that with “Throne of the Crescent Moon”. It’s a fantasy populated with evil demons and ghuls set in a magic-filled, pre-industrial, Middle Eastern style universe. Doctor Adoulla Makhslood lives in Dhamsawaat, a great metropolis of the day, and a city that he loves despite all of its faults. Adoulla is a ghul hunter, one of the last of a dying profession, and he’s old and tired of the strain and dangers that ghul hunting has brought to him. But he slowly discovers that the greatest evil and gravest danger in many lifetimes is facing Dhamsawaat.

The book is well paced and we gradually get involved with Adoulla and his assistant, Raseed , a young holy warrior of the Order of Dervishes. In taking a new ghul hunting job to help an old friend they steadily get more deeply involved with black magics and an insidious plot that is far more dangerous, powerful, and far reaching that they had ever been involved in before.

There are a number of seemingly disparate plot threads that continue to intertwine (an evil local ruler who is ignorant and insensitive to his people’s suffering, a potential political uprising against him) with the first ghul hunt and the subsequent tribulations and complications that it leads to. Mr. Ahmed does a nice job of tying up the loose ends and the finale of the book is satisfying and well paced.

One of my key parameters for judging how well I liked a book is simply how hard or easy it was for me to keep reading or to put down. This isn’t a measure of how complex or simple the book is or whether it’s a book that’s breezed through or requiring you to pay attention to every word. (I can think of some books that were incredibly complex and “dense” to read but I couldn’t put them down, others that were “breezy” and put me to sleep.)

By that measure, “Throne of the Crescent Moon” wasn’t a book that I had to force myself to read, but it most certainly wasn’t a book that I couldn’t put down. I suspect that if it wasn’t nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula this year, I probably would have put it aside and read it later. For me at least, it just wasn’t a “page turner”.

Part of this is the setting created by Mr. Ahmed. It’s a beautiful tapestry of detail in capturing the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of this exotic universe. But I found these details to be a bit overwhelming after a while.

For example, the way everyone is constantly quoting scripture is pivotal to the story line and integral to the nature of the universe being inhabited, but I found it to be a bit much after a while. (It’s not that the religion in question is vaguely Muslim – I have the same “issues” with religious foundations in other works, like Gene Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, which are considered classics of the genre. Don’t even get me started on Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels.) Also, while the descriptions of food and drink at every meal never quite get to the level of “food porn” that we see in George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice & Fire” books, they do seem to drag on long past the point where I cared.

In addition, I found the changing point of view from chapter to chapter to be confusing, in large part because I had trouble remembering which character was which by name. Something about the alien-but-not-alien-enough Middle Eastern “ish” setting (and I’ll be the first to admit that it might be me that’s the source of the problem here) made it tough for me to remember who was the doctor, who was the doctor’s wizard friend, who was the tribal girl, who was the wife of the doctor’s wizard friend… Maybe it’s the literary equivalent of the “uncanny valley” in animation.

In the end, I don’t know if I would have picked up this book on its own if I had seen it in the book store, simply because it’s not quite my cup of tea. If I had picked it up because someone I know or trusted recommended it, I probably would have read it, but I doubt that I would have nominated it for any awards. (Again, that’s just me.) Having read it now because it’s been nominated for two awards, I can only assume that there’s something there that I’m not quite getting. In my eyes it’s an OK book, but not an award winning book.

I guess I just didn’t get it. That doesn’t mean that you won’t.