"The Lion" by Gav Thorpe

I suspect (though, of course, cannot confirm) that ‘The Lion’ was supposed to be immediately followed by ‘Prince of Crows’ to close out ‘The Primarchs’. Chronology-wise, the two stories are as firmly linked, in their way, as ‘Feat of Iron’ and ‘Promethean Sun’; arguably more so, as ‘Crows’ seems to follow ‘The Lion’ by a matter of days. But, of course, that’s not how the table of contents ended up. It’s not impossible to believe that Aaron was a little late with the story – but then, if this was the case, one looks at the sheer quality of ‘Prince of Crows’ and thinks “Well, I don’t mind waiting.”

Still one of the cooler Legion sigils.

‘The Lion’ is a sequel to ‘Savage Weapons’, and we join the First Legion as they continue to prosecute the Night Lords in the Thramas crusade. It’s also a sequel to ‘Fallen Angels’, as it picks up Nemiel’s storyline again. However, ‘The Lion’ goes to some places you might not expect from those two starting points. Mere pages in, we’re off to a planet called Perditus (Oh, Games Workshop, I do so enjoy your creatively named planets) as the Lion chooses to go and interfere in a conflict between the Iron Hands and Death Guard, leaving the bulk of his Legion to keep fighting in Thramas. Aside from a brief cameo, Kurze’s mob aren’t here, though by the novella’s close, the Lion has procured the device necessary to break the Thramas deadlock – hence tying this story in to the terrific drubbing the Angels give the Night Lords not once but twice in ‘Prince of Crows’, the impact of which would only have increased if ‘Crows’ had been the last novella here – but I’ve said enough about that already.

I don’t think I’m alone in considering AD-B’s ‘Savage Weapons’ the best Dark Angels Heresy fiction so far. Gav tries hard to follow up that compelling portrait of the secretive First Legion and their mercurial Primarch, but by making the Lion a viewpoint character, the mystery is dispelled a little. Historically I’ve been more in favour of Primarch viewpoints than Primarchs being shown as remote and unknowable (‘The First Heretic’, ‘Angel Exterminatus’ and ‘The Unremembered Empire’ being some prime examples), but I really feel that with his near-pathological aversion to showing his motivations, the Lion is incredibly poorly suited to being a narrator, perhaps only second to Alpharius. So what does Gav do? Shows the Lion’s motivations all over the place. Rather than building on Aaron’s compelling but (by necessity) rather sketched portrait of an arrogant, imperious templar-king in space, Gav takes it back to the end of ‘Fallen Angels’: the Lion’s motivation here seems to be little developed beyond “I’M P-NOID, MY HOMIES SAY I’M P-NOID!” (A bit of Clipse humour there.) He also has apparently unexplained swerves in temper – sure, he was always stern with his Legion, but going from slightly paranoid doubts about his subordinates to straight up executing one of them over a dispute of ethics? It seems a rather dramatic swerve, but more on that later. It feels like Gav wrote with the words ‘Mystery’ and ‘Reveal nothing’ above his desk but only looked up at them from time to time – during one period of soul-searching, the Lion notices a blade from Luther on the ship, but his inner monologue gives no indication of how he feels about that character; shortly after he kills Nemiel we’re privy to a moment of the Lion’s quiet reflection, but he doesn’t even vaguely consider the ramifications of what he just did.

The Lion is a patronising egotistical bastard with poorly hidden doubts as to the superiority he trumpets; he’s also a genius strategist and a superlative warrior even for a Primarch. It’s safe to say he’s a fascinating character and while I don’t think this is a bad portrayal of him, it’s a shame it took until ‘The Unremembered Empire’ for his character to reach three dimensions. (And even there, he was mostly shown from the outside – we weren’t given much insight into his thoughts.) Perhaps it would be best for us to NEVER be inside the Lion’s head. It’s still hard to read where his character is going in the Heresy-era – though his conversation with the Lord of Change during this story seems to offer some hints.

Sadly, the ‘little brothers’ take some hits as well. Corswain goes from one of the best Loyalist characters I’ve ever read (honourable, bleak-humoured but dour, someone whose heroism seems genuinely warranted rather than lazy SUPERCOOLGUY plot armour) to a generic, habitually-bowing Space Captain Man. The others, primarily created for this story, aren’t any better. And Nemiel – well, Nemiel was always kind of shite, so I can’t say this book is worse for him, but fuck, I’d hoped they would somehow improve on him before shuffling him off. In terms of making the Dark Angels an interesting Legion dramatically distinct from their 40k-era incarnation… nope. The only slightly interesting element in the dialogue here is the Dark Angels’ overuse of “my liege” in deference to the Lion. In fact, in one three-page scene, “my liege” is used no less than eight times. A clever lampoon of the Dark Angel’s pomposity and lack of imagination, or lazy writing? You decide. Am I just an asshole for wanting Dark Angels to always talk like gloomy monastic knights, possibly ones from France or Germany? It’s fluff-appropriate, but it’s also difficult to pull off without them sounding stilted and awkward.

The Night Lords do appear here, briefly. For a while I thought this was the worst Night Lords portrayal in the whole series, but that’s unfair. It’s too short to be called bad. It is, however, a bit of a plot failure. They track the Dark Angels through the warp in a way which should be impossible (barring warp trickery) before destroying their own ship in an apparent suicide attack which allows daemons to manifest on the Invincible Reason. Since it’s been established that the Eighth had a general disdain for magic and daemons during the Heresy, this seems unusual (and also – maybe this is the Legion least likely to mount a suicide attack?) but the Night Lords also had mad enough ‘fringe elements’ to make it far from impossible. What I resent is the complete lack of an attempt to even halfway explain it. Just a few sentences on how this Captain was a radical, crazy former psyker who went mad following Isstvan, or something like that, would be enough to shut me up on that regard. But no, just more navel-gazing from the Lion.

This plot point leads into a significant action in First Legion history, the first time they face daemons (well, I guess some of those monsters on Caliban were pretty suspicious) and a wonderful opportunity to explore the Legion’s their grip on the secular Imperial Truth – but that’s an opportunity Gav seems to ignore. In fact, the daemon fights in ‘The Lion’ have the same problems the majority of daemon fights have for me in the Heresy fiction:

1) No dialogue or possibility of the two sides relating in any way other than a full-on brawl. It’s tough to get too invested in a conflict where one side will remain voiceless and receive no viewpoint narration and the other side has no emotional response beyond shocked revulsion (as opposed to the myriad other reactions traitor v loyalist battles can play with).

2) There are only so many times I can read the same old rundown of the various daemon types and then get descriptions of their basic attack methods. Yep, those are Nurgle daemons doing Nurgle shit; yep, there’s some Daemonettes being all seductive; and look, a Lord of Change for the boss battle. Now, obviously GW’s product line restricts what the writers can do – but think about the variations and fresh character the writers can give to that old Tactical or Assault squad of Space Marines. Couldn’t daemons be similarly varied in their approach? Even the language used feels like each writer is cribbing from the same hopelessly understocked pool of adjectives; from my recall, only ‘Damnation of Pythos’, ‘First Heretic’ and, weirdly, ‘Battle for the Abyss’ have been remotely creative in their physical descriptions of daemons.

3) I feel like I’ve read ten or eleven “This is the first time we’ve fought daemons!” scenes and absolutely no “We’ve fought daemons before, so let’s use that knowledge” scenes. It’s getting real fucking old. I try to suspend my disbelief a lot with Heresy books, but with daemon fights, each time I read a “NEVER SEEN THIS SHIT BEFORE” statement, I think Guess what? I’ve seen this shit too many times.

Of course, the most memorable thing to come out of this sequence is the summary execution of Nemiel. After a forceful but brief argument about the Lion’s proposed breakage of the Nikean Edicts, El’Johnson karate-chops the Redemptor’s head off. Remember what I said in my last review about Graham’s brutal murder of high-ranked characters making the point that the Heresy was perilous and plot armour was in short supply? Well, this ain’t that. I don’t know what it is. For a while I thought this ‘interrupt’ of the Nemiel/Zadkiel arc was really clever and subversive – but now, in a wider context, it just looks horribly confused. Perhaps it was a way for Gav to distance himself from ‘Descent of Angels’ and ‘Fallen Angels’, which were not necessarily the best received books in the early Heresy. But by truncating this character’s storyline so dramatically, and then apparently leaving the drama to go stale (none of the Dark Angels work since this has referenced Nemiel’s execution), it feels like a flagrant waste of a character with a little bit of potential. As it stands, it looks like Nemiel’s murder is just going to give Zadkiel some motivation to rebel against the Imperium – but he’d kinda already done that by the time 'The Lion' was published, sooooooo... hm.

One thing I do really like about ‘The Lion’ is Calas Typhon popping up, and I think it’s the first time he’s been shown since ‘Flight of the Eisenstein’. While the character is a long way off being the best-developed equerry in the series, Gav’s portrayal of Typhon at this point of the Heresy made sense – he’s not full-on corrupted yet, but he’s openly vowing to ‘the Father’. I suppose that as he’s a former Librarian, it makes sense that he’d be gifted with some knowledge of the dark powers behind this war. The physical corruption and the gifts of Nurgle are beginning, as well – all in all, ‘The Lion’ is a nice development for Typhon following the initial impressions we got in ‘Flight of the Eisenstein’. Around the same time that Typhon shows up, we get some Iron Hand characters, but they’re of minimal interest, being fairly bland Loyalists rather than the psychotic sadomasochists the 10^th seem to always be portrayed as these days. One kind of cool thing about these guys: Midoa, the Iron Hand warrior, has extensive facial augmetics which make him speak in a “sing-song cadence”. I don’t know if Gav intended for me to hear all Midoa’s dialogue in the autotuned voice of T-Pain, but that’s what I did.

Gav is a little like Nick Kyme, in that he’s written stuff for the Heresy which I really like, and stuff I very nearly despise – and it’s difficult for me to articulate what the difference is between the two types of work. In both, you’ll find overblown battle scenes, fairly shallow characters, a healthy respect and knowledge for 40K’s ‘lore’, a willingness to disregard or revise that lore when it best serves the story, and the distinctive White Dwarf writing style. ‘The Lion’ is not a great novella, and it doesn’t leave me massively optimistic for Gav’s HH Dark Angels novel supposedly coming this year, ‘Angels of Caliban’. But it’s not terrible either. It’s exactly the standard I expect from the Black Library, and that’s a little depressing, but it’s not enough to make me give up forever. Yep, you guessed it: 6/10.

New to PurpleHeresy? Head on over to the index page to see a more chronological list of the Horus Heresy reviews on this blog.