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Brass Man
by Neal Asher
(Tor UK, 485 pages, trade paperback, £12.99, April 2005. Tor UK, £17.99,
485 pages, hardback, 29 April 2005. Tor UK, 528 pages, paperback, £6.99,
February 2006.)
Review by John Toon
 Outside
the line of Polity, on a frontier world called Cull, the knight errant
Anderson and his shifty young apprentice Tergal are dragon-hunting.
Or perhaps that should be Dragon-hunting. A new arrival threatens to
overturn their world: Skellor, back from a previous novel and unimaginably
powerful, and with a certain rogue Golem in tow. But they aren't the
first monsters on Cull, and when Ian Cormac and friends arrive in pursuit,
they have to contend with Skellor, Mr Crane, the vicious native wildlife
and a large and enigmatic alien observer familiar to Asher fans.
Nasty flesh-eating monsters: check. Vivid alien world: check. Big smart-arse
AIs: check. Slam-bang action fun: check. Yes, it's another book from
Neal Asher, who has firmly established himself as a purveyor of intelligent
but uncomplicated SF adventure. Asher tends to play to the crowd, but
here more than ever as he resurrects fan favourite Mr Crane, the seven
foot tall mute schizophrenic Golem from Gridlinked. The problem
with Mr Crane and Skellor is that Asher's killed them off before, so
the denouement of Brass Man has to be equivalent to jumping up
and down on all the little pieces. Reviving them, on the other hand,
is no problem at all when you've got Jain technology floating around,
and this is something that apparently will be finally addressed in a
forthcoming novel.
The focus here is the titular Brass Man -- we find out why Mr Crane
collects things, how he was stolen and broken, and what goes on inside
his mind. That's not to say the story suffers as a result -- there is
as ever plenty going on -- but on the contrary, although this is very
much Mr Crane's book he doesn't exactly drive the plot forward, and
one suspects at times that the story wouldn't be greatly affected if
he wasn't in it. Still, I imagine most readers (myself included) are
pleased that he is.
The fun quotient overall is high. The Jack Ketch, one of the ships
following Skellor, is particularly good, an AI with a morbid interest
in antique methods of execution. Completely ignoring the descriptions
given, I like to imagine Vincent Price in the role of his avatar. The
major minor characters (so to speak) Anderson and Tergal are entertaining
too, and could comfortably carry a book of their own. Their chivalric
grappling with the sleers, Cull's giant insect predators, gives a pleasingly
hands-on demonstration of the horrors of Asher's trademark deadly fauna.
There's also intrigue to be found in Tergal's motives for tagging along
with Anderson, which change as he learns more about the knight errant's
way of life. And there's a great big "Oo-er" moment near the end when
it becomes clear that something interesting is happening to Ian Cormac.
Something that might shed light on the shadowy figure of Horace Blegg,
perhaps.
Brass Man is another solid chapter in the Ian Cormac saga, with
a big slice of crowd-pleasing on the side.
Elsewhere in infinity plus
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