Book review: Highest Ambitions (Sovereigns of the Storm book 1), by Malcolm J Wardlaw
I beta-read this novel earlier in the year and thought it was a good example of the genre. It is followed by book 2 ‘The Sack of Oxford’, which is its culmination and my preferred work. As I have to venture into our Oxford office sometimes and an academic family member has bashed me for years about not making it to the Oxford echelon (there’s also a slightly less intangible Cambridge mafia), I do wonder whether a feral, dystopian sacking of the place and cleansing by fire appeals to me on some secret level. Get some soot on the stones. On second thoughts, I couldn’t do it to the libraries. Okay, tidy wrist slap, I mustn’t mix the two books up and that sequel isn’t listed at the time of writing. Read this one to get to that one.
Malcolm Wardlaw is an industrious author who writes about a future dystopian Britain (without any cyber-punk) where the apparatus of quality-assured consumerism and the vain expectations of middle-class whimsy have both gone. No one cares about your rights. Kindness and the other soft edges of life have become a rare luxury behind the pall of desperation. The gentlefolk caste, which couldn’t adapt to this collapse of order, has been depopulated. There is no king, no single leader and no pro-bono organisation to save you from the two militias which underpin the leading family system.
In the detritus of a society which has suffered economic and social collapse, the best placed and most innovative family firms (think clans) have risen and retained their dominance by applying a kind of uneasy repression system. Although we again see the protected twits and fops of earlier Victoriana, the cannier members of these ruling classes do occasionally get their hands dirty, but much prefer to employ the services of capable agents to complete unpleasant tasks for them.
Nightminster is a rising star, bringing himself to their attention as a hot future player, newly minted, acquirable. It is a game, I think, but one in which the losers are rolled into roadside ditches. At first he isn’t sure which side to align with, but ultimately these key people are all stepping stones on the path of his tenacious personal ambition. Nightminster has a vision. He’s like an engineer seeing a bomb crater as a beautiful opportunity to build.
If you raise your viewpoint above the characters and the game they’re all playing, this series is the output of the author’s knowledge about how and why human power over the masses works. Those little Pavlovian and Machiavellian devices of classical conditioning that keep 99 percent of people down and stop them crossing compartments, unless by doing so it benefits someone above them. There’s always the interesting exception, isn’t there? That’s the character to follow the fortunes of. The one with a glimmer of intelligence in their eye.
The ruthless single-mindedness of the protagonist would float him to the top in any historic or fantasy landscape, from the Roman Empire to the Game of Thrones. He’s Jung’s archetype of a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, an Arminius or Odysseus who goes through an obstacle course of turmoil and keeps on going as his acquaintances fall around him. There is no super-power at work here, like being brighter or faster than any of them. It’s just the determination of a self-forged being that makes pivotal people hesitate in their presence. I think it also feels right for us mere mortals to smooth the path of someone whom our instinct tells us is on a quest — and wrong to stop them.
Anyone can replicate this persona to some extent, to be a self-educator focussed on what you want and then be automatically recognised for that quality. You don’t actually need to be a killer or to exploit others. Not in real life anyway, but I guess that’s the route out of a heavy fictional dystopia.
