Ralph Azham, Vol.3: You Can't Stop a River by Lewis Trondheim

If there's one lesson from Lewis Trondheim's fantasies, it's that you don't get what you want, no matter how powerful or rich or connected you are. And even the subset of what you do get will probably change you, maybe without you even realizing it, until you turn into a person the old you would have hated.

The world is vast and cruel and relentless; people much the same. Death is inevitable and often sudden.

And, as title character Ralph Azham is coming to realize in this third omnibus of his adventures, You Can't Stop a River, you can't get away, either. Running works as well as fighting does, or possibly slightly worse.

Ralph Azham, the series, is twelve books long; each omnibus collects three of the original French albums, in an English translation by Joe Johnson. All of the books have been published in France; the fourth omnibus, The Dying Flame, is scheduled for this fall in English. I'm going to avoid details about the plot of this omnibus, since we're just past the halfway point of the series, but I will link to my longish posts on the first two books: Black Are the Stars and The Land of Blue Demons.

Ralph is powerful and smart and sneaky. He, by this point in the series, has assembled a group of other smart and powerful people around him, and they mostly trust and rely on each other. He seems to have the best interests of the land of Astolia central in his mind. He is deeply unhappy about killing people and causing mayhem, though he's, like so many other Trondheim heroes, very good at it. He's about as good and grounded and honest a protagonist as we will ever see from Trondheim.

And we can see, like Herbert in the Dungeon series, the seeds of what would turn Ralph into a Great Khan-like figure. What's more, Ralph can see it, and he doesn't like it. But how can he get away? In a world of destructive magic and superpowerful artifacts, his very existence can be a problem to would-be conquerors or reformers or religious zealots or ambitious magic-users.

By the point in the series, the initial conflict has been resolved: Ralph was originally trapped between two vastly powerful, very old magicians, the King and Vom Syrus. Now Astolia is in a state of what most people would think is peace, and the magicians - the "blueys" - have better, longer lives to look forward to.

But nothing stands still in a Trondheim fantasy world. There are always other schemers, other powers, other threats. If you have something, there's someone else who wants to kill you to get it.

It will be interesting to see how Trondheim wraps this up; his work outside of Ralph Azham is mostly made up of single volumes, where problems are resolved, for good or bad, by the end of that book. Maybe Dungeon is the exception: it's more to the opposite end, a series of unsolvable problems around that essential Trondheim fantasy dilemma, an endless story-engine that can never be depleted. Ralph Azham will need to fit somewhere in the middle: to end, solidly, with some kind of resolution greater than just the stopping point of one volume.

I'm looking forward to it: this is a rousing, thorny, exciting series with all the set-piece action and sarcastic humor you can expect from Trondheim, plus a deep concern for doing right and ruling wisely and finding stability among warring groups. Each piece so far has been excellent: I'm expecting the end will be as well.