Book review: Zavant

I managed to get a lot of reading done over the holidays. This is what happens when all you basically do is open presents and digest food. This combines well with reading, and I continued my journey through the old "classics" of GW's fantasy books with Gordon Rennie's "Zavant".

I knew Rennie's work from the excellent 40K novel "Execution Hour" as well as a few short stories here and there. To me he is one of the best writers under the GW banner. I have not read any of his other works, so I do mean specifically under the GW banner, and not in a general sense. This is probably not his best book, however...

Oh. Before we begin properly: What an ugly cover. Zavant looks like he went on to father Beavis, and Vido looks like my friend Martin from Blood Bowl. That latter factoid is of course neither here or there, but... wow.

This is not so much a novel as it is a collection of shortish stories about the character Zavant Konniger, a sort of Sherlock Holmes of The Empire. I had just re-watched the Sherlock Holmes films the other day, so the thought was not far off to begin with, but it is no doubt a deliberate pastiche. Zavant, a sage detective (or was that detective sage?) and his halfling sidekick Vido basically fight crime. Or chaos. Evil. You know, stuff that heroes fight. Because this is perhaps THE thing about these stories: Zavant and his fellows basically fight stuff. While there is some talk of deductive reasoning and a long list of cases mentioned, Zavant basically just kicks ass, and we are not treated to a great deal of mystery as such, and when we are, the answers are pretty obvious, and the plot resolves itself by means of some violence. Is this okay? Well, sure, who would honestly enjoy a book where a "Schierluck Heimers" and "dr. Wassonst" went around Altdorf cracking cases that were rewrites of Conan Doyle's books? Not me. Would I have liked a character who was a little less omnipotent and garnished with silly abilities like "martial arts taught to him by a traveller from Cathay"? Yes, I would.

I am not saying that Rennie couldn't write a true mystery to save his life. I believe he probably could. The writing is excellent in many ways, vivid, evocative and with some really nice touches here and there. I particularly enjoyed the tale with Nurgle-stuff  in it (! Spoiler!), even if that one really is a prime example of stuff just happening to Zavant and co. more so than any actual detective work getting done. So what I am saying, is that a more happy medium could have been found, if the mysteries had been turned a bit more mysterious, Zavant himself had been streamlined a bit and there had been fewer "big brawl"-endings. That may just be my personal preference though.

It is not quite clear to me if this book is conceived with the WHFRP career system and rules in mind, but it does not have any MAJOR battles where thousands die, and that DOES count for something in my book. It sometimes gives you these muddled "adventurer" types - for better or worse - who then require more personality to come to life, but in spite of Zavant Konniger's patchwork character, the cast is overall quite good, and Rennie manages to stay clear of using the same four or five German names that so many of the other books peddle, and there are some very good characters in some of the stories.

Rating? I give it 3,5 stars or skulls or whatever it is that I give these. It is a bit like Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, where some of it is delicious, but other stuff is... not as good as it looked.