The Deverry Cycle

[bibliogramma]

The Gold Falcon, Katharine Kerr

Katharine Kerr's Deverry Cycle series of fantasy novels is something rather special. Each book in itself follows one of the established patterns of heroic fantasies - adventures, magic, personal quests, everything you'd want in a fantasy, and all well plotted and written.

On another level, the novels tell the history of the Deverry people over the course of several hundred years, as they expand into new territory, encounter other races and make both enemies and allies.

On still another level, it tells the story of the redemption of a handful of souls as they are reincarnated over and over again through time, each time in different relationship to eachother, working out the consequences of a tragic tangle of emotions and actions.

One of the better, and briefer, expositions of the series concept as a whole that I've found describes it thusly:

The geography of Deverry and its environs is pretty standard - feudal baronies for the most part, with grasslands populated by nomadic elves in the west, dwarves up in the mountains and sophisticated slave- and spice-traders across the sea to the south. What distinguishes this series from similar books is Kerr's concept of destiny and reincarnation - characters who fail to fulfill their Wyrd in one life are doomed to try again in the next one, though with no knowledge of their past lives or failures. The first few books follow Nevyn, an ancient loremaster who foolishly vowed to stay alive until he'd fixed the destinies of the people whose lives he'd ruined; unfortunately this means tracking them down every time they reincarnate, and so far he's been trying for hundreds of years with only limited success. This allows the entertaining and successful device of showing past-life flashbacks of all the present-day characters in their previous incarnations; this device is also a neat way of describing Deverry's long history. (Source: Sandstorm Reviews)

Kerr kindly provides lists of who is the reincarnation of who in the back of the later books, so that you can keep track of the characters on both levels, and see how the patterns of interaction have changed over time as they work out their Wyrd, individually and with eachother. It is this aspect of reincarnation that fascinates me the most about the series - without it, it would be much the same as any number of Celtic/Nordic-themed feudal/medieval fantasies. With it, the whole series is bound together with an underlying purpose and intent that makes it, to my taste, irresistable.

So far, Kerr has published 13 volumes in the series, which is planned to conclude with the 14th volume. She has referred to the structure of the novels as a four-act play, but it's also interesting that the structure parallels that of an Italian sonnet, with two quatrains/quartets of novels, followed by two tercets/trilogies.

Act One: Deverry
Daggerspell
Darkspell
The Bristling Wood
The Dragon Revenant

Act Two: The Westlands
A Time of Exile
A Time of Omens
Days of Blood and Fire
Days of Air and Darkness

Act Three: The Dragon Mage
The Red Wyvern
The Black Raven
The Fire Dragon

Act Four: The Silver Wyrm
The Gold Falcon
The Spirit Stone
The Shadow Isle

I've just recently finaished reading the first book of Act Four, The Golden Falcon, and am waiting not at all patiently for the second book of this final tercet to come out in paperback, even though that means that I'll be that much closer to the end of this remarkable tapestry. After all that these souls have been though, it is intensely gratifying to see how they are finally, one by one, meeting and completing their Wyrd.