Review -- The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick

The giant, glowing review by Terry Brooks was the first thing I noticed when I visited the product page for Robert V.S. Redick's The Red Wolf Conspiracy. I haven't read any of Brooks' work, but I recognized the name--a fantasy heavyweight. It made me take Redick's novel a little more seriously. I added it to my wishlist, and finally bought it a couple of weeks ago. Did the novel live up to the hype? No. There are some really great ideas in The Red Wolf Conspiracy but some very, very strange issues with their execution.
Here's my ultimate analysis: the book didn't know what kind of book it wanted to be. That's my biggest issue with it. But of course, what does that mean?

The Red Wolf Conspiracy tells the tale of the Chathrand, a massive six hundred year old Imperial Merchant Ship from the Empire of Arqual and its mission to broker peace with the enemy Mizithrin Empire. However there is a sinister purpose hidden beneath the banners of peace. The Chathrand has been outfitted for war, and that war "threatens to rekindle an ancient power long thought lost."

The book's plot is pretty standard epic fantasy, except it has a dash of "murder mystery dinner" a la Clue (yes the movie with Tim Curry) to it because most of the action takes place aboard the ship. It felt reminiscent of a "whodunnit" type of story, but that's about all that sets it apart from other similar novels.

The problem with epic fantasy novels is that they are never standalone novels. They are always part of a series, and The Red Wolf Conspiracy was not the exception to the rule. By the time I finished the novel I felt let down and disappointed. In epic fantasy, the idea is to answer most of the questions in the "first part" of the series, but then create new ones  that will be answered in the sequel. The Red Wolf Conspiracy tries to do that, but not very well. The entire novel hinges on a noble girl's wedding to a Mzithrini Prince, but the wedding never takes place! Even though the novel is over 500 pages, I will still have to read the sequel before I get to witness what it assured me is an absolutely pivotal event.

As far as characters go, I liked some more than others. Pazel Pathkendle, a young teenaged sailor, has a great name, but not a whole lot of personality. He's the young orphan boy character who gets caught up in events larger than himself. He has to learn to navigate deeper waters so to speak and realize his destiny. Very standard stuff. Thasha is a little more interesting. She's a noble girl of sixteen who is to be married off to the Mzithrin. She resents being used as a bargaining chip, and she is also a skilled warrior. The rest of the characters don't get a lot of page time, so none of them really get fleshed out. For example, I was told that Hercól is a skilled warrior, but he was absent for most of the novel, so I never really got to find out more about him, or even see his personality in action.  The mage, Ramachni, while confined to the body of a mink in Thasha and Pazel's world, came across as the wise mentor type character, but that was about it.

Those are the human characters. The Red Wolf Conspiracy tries to set itself apart by including other characters: "woken" animals and the ixchel. Woken animals are animals that have somehow "awoken" to a higher consciousness and intelligence. So, the reader gets stuck reading about Felthrup the rat. His chapters were some of the most annoying ones in the entire book. He came across as a throwaway character that got too much page time, before becoming a throwaway character again! Felthrup serves his purpose by advancing the plot, and then he only gets mentioned in one line during the denouement.

The ixchel are a race of people, I'm assuming that look like humans though it isn't specified, that happen to be a foot tall. They're seen as pests  by humans, and their presence aboard ships is considered a bad omen--a cross between gremlins and vermin. They were written in a very similar fashion to any kind of "noble tribe warrior" society in other fantasy books. The only difference was their height. I found their chapters to be boring too, especially when there were more of them in the beginning half of the book and then none at the end.

The Red Wolf Conspiracy has wonderful ideas; it's almost full of them. Ramachni comes from another world, either a planet or plane of existence, and throughout the novel there were references to other worlds out there. Even the ixchel say they come from a place that suspiciously sounds like another world. I wanted to know more about that concept, but most of these types of things were treated like throwaway lines.

And this leads me to my biggest complaint: identity crisis. The book clearly belongs in the epic fantasy genre and is written as such. However, there are sections where the chapter heading says "From the Secret Journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt, Quartermaster." These sections are written like journal entries by one of the minor characters. There's only a handful of them, and Fiffengurt is a really minor character. Then there are chapters that are written as letters from one of the more main characters to his father.

This isn't that big of a deal, except that these two types of anomalous chapters have footnotes as if this is a "found manuscript!" It makes no sense! Nowhere else is it mentioned that this is somehow an account somebody wrote down. It goes against the "normal" chapters were things are told from a roving third person point of view. What's even stranger is that these chapters occur (along with Felthrup's chapters and the ixchel chapters) with more frequency during the first half of the book before disappearing completely by the end. By the end the chapters are all told from Pazel's point of view.


Then, there's the appendix in the back of the novel which has entries written as if The Red Wolf Conspiracy was a text book or something, and a list of "Key Dates in the History of Northwest Alifros" of which half of them are for events in the past and not even referenced in the novel. And finally, the appendix names Pazel's sister (who never makes an appearance) as the assassin Neda Ygraël. What? Why is she being called an assassin here when there's never any mention of her being an assassin during the entire novel?

These errors and anomalies felt like the results of poor pacing. I'm all for a book taking stylistic risks. I enjoyed some of the epistolary chapters, but I could never shake the feeling that their inclusion didn't make sense in a cohesive stylistic kind of way. To me, The Red Wolf Conspiracy is a book that tries to do too much, and as a result, ends up with an identity crisis. It doesn't know if it wants to be a serious epic fantasy, a conspiracy book inside a fixed location, a more lighthearted fantasy because of the talking animals, or a "found manuscript." The novel is definitely competent and adequate, but because it tries to do too much, The Red Wolf Conspiracy doesn't do anything exceptionally well.