Bright Steel (Cameron)

[jsburbidge]

This is the third and final installment in Cameron's Masters and mages series; reviews of the previous volumes may be found here and here.

The thematic and narrative arc of the entire work has been towards the avoidance, if not quite the renunciation, of violence, and particularly killing, as a means of resolving disputes. As such this third volume faces a challenge: how to present the climax of a high-stakes plot while remaining true to the theme.

It does so by consistently declining direct fight-to-the-death confrontation in ways which raise the immediate risks. In other words, it's a series of gambles with high stakes: the empire and rhen the world: the latter involving direct conflicts with principalities and powers. Most of the fighting is against extremely powerful adversaries, combining arcane and more prosaic forms of engagement, with a large admixture of strategy.

Aranthur continues to move in the direction of becoming a lightbringer; some of the things he learns cast the early events of the series in a different light. The degree of success they have can be traced directly to his willingness to do well, to trust and communicate with entities whom others reject, and, finally, to release the bonds of those unjustly bound.

The novel evades the standard pattern of defeating a great evil in an apocalyptic showdown, or even a Tolkienian end of an age; it's clear that in many ways the result of all the conflict plus a world which still incorporates good and evil, if only at a reduced level of risk - for the present - even if the immediate prospects are upward rather than downward.

This is an effective end to a good trilogy.