Cold Iron

Fantasy bildungsroman examples tend towards the very good and the relatively bad. Miles Cameron's Cold Iron, though indisputably a bildungsroman, falls into the very good category.

It begins with a precipitating set of events which bring together some important characters (some already important in terms of their society, some about to be) which set off a year or so of cascading results. Aranthur, the viewpoint character, finds himself at the centre of a those results, sometimes by the internal logic of events , sometimes by chance. (It's subtly suggested that the chance may be apparent – that Tyche, the goddess of chance, is actively nudging things around. There's no agreement in this world about the gods, but their influence isn't ruled out, either). He's a student, full-grown but still between worlds (his family are farmers; he's a student in magic at the equivalent of Constantinople), competent but no genius, and he has a good deal to learn as far as maturity goes (it's the growth into greater maturity which makes this a true bildungsroman and not simply a tale of conflict between the relatively light and relatively dark). Cameron's prose and characterization are engaging, and his world-building interesting: there's no point at which the narrative hits slack points.

Alternatively, this can be viewed as a novel with a secondary primary viewpoint character (think of Watson, or Julian Comstock): one where the narrative viewpoint is on the outside of what is going on, not a principal in it. For most of the book, that's Aranthur: the people he sees, he doesn't understand (either with regard to motivations or the real roles they are playing); much of the action in which he is involved takes place in the background (to such a degree that there's a massive context switch on the last page of the book that resets a whole set of things which the reader, and Aranthur, thought up until that point). He picks up more knowledge, maturity, and skills as the novel goes on, but until about the last forty pages of the novel he's fairly peripheral to the overall plot in the background. (This is one of those novels where you have to read the novel twice, a second time to appreciate the details which mean something different with more knowledge). From this point of view, the book begins in medias res, well on in an overall plot arc of which we learn only a little of the earlier part.

Cameron's previous fantasy series was organized around battles: this volume is structured to show a succession of one-on-one (or few-on-few) swordfights, with attention paid to the details of different styles of fighting and types of swords; the details are authentic. The worldbuilding is careful: social structure is based loosely on Venice, but the location is an analogue of the Byzantine Empire and the linguistic cues (names, brief citations) are precisely set up.