Enemies, as is well known, are evil and deserve no consideration they may be brutally hurt or killed without consequence or concern, especially if they’re not sufficiently deferential (or if they’re not evil, but just happen to be near bad people). Of course, only friends and acquaintances get this moral subservience.

It shall be so.” and moves on to the next ethical puddle. A wise person says “It should be so,” and Rhenn’s main thoughts are “Must it be so? I guess it must. We get painfully repetitive introspection and self-examination, but the actual consideration of cause and effect, cost and benefit, get short shrift. But in Imager’s Challenge, we see only the surface.

I have some sympathy with and interest in that idea I’ve written a similar book myself. looking at the following titles) that the series is meant to show how a well-meaning young man becomes a tyrant (or at least a lord). The performative humility is especially difficult in that his actions are pretty selfish and bloodthirsty, especially on trivial matters. Yet, in this book, that humble acceptance is accompanied by casuistry that I found increasingly hard to swallow, but Rhenn apparently found to his taste. There’s not a conversation that goes by in which Rhenn doesn’t modestly accept correction from friends and acquaintances. In Recluce, I previously found it charming. It’s not as tedious as the recent Recluce books, but it’s very similar – an almost diary-like recounting of quotidian events, buffered with vague, portentous conversation.Ĭommon across many of Modesitt’s books is the desire and need of the protagonists to be schooled by wise elders who make broad statements which the protagonist then examines at length for the treasure they must contain. I was disappointed, then, to find that in this second Imager book Rhenn is a mage turned reluctant law enforcer.

I’ve found the latest Recluce books – about a mage turned reluctant law enforcer – to be a hard slog. That was before I’d delved into the latest Recluce books (many of which I also bought in one go), and found that the spell had broken. At the time, my theory was that Modesitt was consistent within a series, so if the first book was good, the rest would be as well. I liked the first book in this series, Imager, and on the strength of that, bought many of the rest in one go.

Imager le modesitt