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The Standing Dead: Book Two of the Stone Dance
of the Chameleon Trilogy
by Ricardo Pinto
(Bantam, £6.99, 730 pages, paperback, first published 2002, this edition
published 1 May 2003.)
In Book One of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, The Chosen,
the youthful Lord  Carnelian
Suth travelled with his father, a self-willed exile, from the outermost
fringes of the Commonwealth of the Three Lands, to its innermost sanctum,
the hidden paradise of Osrakum, where the God-Emperor dwelt in ritual
seclusion.
Though by birth a highly-ranked member of the ruling caste of the Commonwealth,
the aloof, arrogant, deliberately malicious Masters, Carnelian's unorthodox
upbringing far from the torturous power politics and subtle conspiracies
of the God-Emperor's court had given him a capacity for compassion and
sympathy that his peers all totally lack.
Through Carnelian, an 'Innocent Abroad,' the readers got a ringside
seat, observing the grotesque, even breathtaking cruelty with which
the Masters rule their Commonwealth. Clearer-eyed than his peers, Carnelian
perceived, and abhorred, their ethical and racial fascism. Brilliant,
conscienceless, amoral, the Masters had perfected every dominant ploy
of psychology, of economics, of military subjugation, to tighten their
grip upon a world. Moreover, for many of them, the mutilations and gruesome
executions they meted out were not only a naturally ordained part of
the world, but a pleasure to be dwelt upon.
The cruel complexity of this novel, coupled with an extraordinary,
lushly baroque inventiveness, gave Pinto's story a rich, original tone
that really made it stand out from the pack of 'big empire/court politics'
books that the genre has thrown up in recent years.
In Osrakum, naive, impulsive and slightly foolish, Carnelian had the
mixed fortune to meet, all unknowingly, the God-Emperor Elect, Osidian
Nephron, whose lover he became, and at the end of the book, the two
youths were kidnapped and hustled off towards a quick and cruel fate.
At the beginning of Book Two the quick, cruel fate turns out to be
not so quick after all (though it's plenty cruel) and the duo find themselves
not so much jumping as being unceremoniously flung from frying pan to
fire and back again. For Carnelian, who lacks a Master's natural arrogance,
this is bad enough. For Osidian, who was one step short of apotheosis
as the living God of the Masters and Emperor of the Commonwealth, it
is unbearable torture.
By hook or by crook, however, the pair survive, and to Carnie's eventual
delight fall in with a band of Plainsmen from the Earthsky, similar
to the servants and companions who brought him up on his father's distant
island, and who taught him to feel for others.
From Osrakum they travel, not exactly willingly, by devious and arduous
means, to the Earthsky, a vast plain below the cosmopolitan Guarded
Land, where the Plainsmen live semi-nomadic lives, hunting the great
Dinosaurian herds and worshipping their sacred trees and ancestor houses.
Whereas Carnelian might be content to live this life, assuming he could
finally win the trust of the Plainsmen who (very wisely) loathe the
Masters and all their works, Osidian is anything but content. Cheated
of his birthright, arrogant beyond reason, cruelly intelligent, Osidian
becomes first an irritant in the lives of the Plainsmen, then a radical
threat as he begins to twist their culture to his own ends, plotting
almost madly to regain his rightful place...
The crux of the book is the way in which Carnelian is caught between
his feelings for his lover, and his empathy for the Plainsmen. He understands
the loathsome reality of what the Masters are, seeing further proof
of it in the Earthsky, where he witnesses the ritual humiliation and
exploitation of the Plainsmen, and struggles to bring Plainsmen and
Osidian into some kind of accord, feeling for both parties equally.
But does Carnie's compassion make him strong? Alas no, it makes him
weak. It is just one more lever by which he can be manipulated. Perpetually
striving to do well by those he comes to love, he succeeds only in failing
them again and again.
And this, unfortunately, constitutes the major flaw in the book. Carnelian
has been forced into a very subordinate mode here. In the first volume
of the series he was the naive traveller in a strange world, agape at
the oddities and wonders he stumbled across. Perched upon his shoulder
the reader shared that sense of wonder, escalating complexity, brilliantly
elaborated settings... Moreover, though Carnelian was unsophisticated,
he wasn't helpless. In the second book however, though in some ways
he is more active, he has become a puppet, endlessly manipulated, and
perpetually failing to attain his goals, an experience most readers
won't relish sharing.
Then too The Standing Dead is a slower read than The Chosen,
and a bit uneven in pace and tone. Occasionally one feels that Pinto
is taking easy shortcuts with his characters' emotions, flatly declaring
them in a 'just so' fashion.
The rivetting, baroque fascination of The Chosen is missing
here, though there's plenty of invention, and some memorable characters.
Nonetheless, regardless of its shortcomings, this remains an original
and compelling fantasy, complex and intriguing. Worth reading, if more
of an effort than the first volume.
Review by Simeon Shoul.
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