Ecko Burning

More Ecko Bound

Ecko Burning
by Danie Ware
Titan Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781781169087

Warning: Slight spoiler for the previous book
 in order to talk about this one on a surer footing.

Okay, here we go.

Ecko Burning is the second of Danie Ware’s trilogy which started with Ecko Rising, reviewed here. I liked that first novel quite a lot and, as it turns out, I like this follow up just as much but it’s not a case of “all more of the same” this time around, I’m happy to confirm.

There are two things about the title character which I find interesting. One is that he’s not really the central character of the books. I think I said that in my last review and Ecko Burning reconfirms that attitude that these books are very much an ensemble piece as far as the cast of characters in these novels go. He might well be a very important guy in the overall scheme of things but I still haven’t figured that out yet. Like the first novel, Ware does the job of locking in the mystery of the two worlds depicted in the Ecko books (at least two, but we still haven’t got to the point in these stories where my natural suspicions are allayed on world counts either) and makes sure that she still doesn’t spill any beans as far as the end game goes... certainly not in this novel, at any rate.

The other thing about Ecko which is kind of interesting is that, central character or not, although he may still be the most important character in, what will soon be, the trilogy... he never seems to change or learn too much about his situation. He’s dogged by his own ego (which may or may not be a correct response, actually, time will tell) and he’s always certain that the future version of London that we know him from (kind of) is the correct template for reality and he’s playing somebody else’s game. He wants his ‘level ups’, to quote him in the gamers jargon that the writer uses so fondly at certain points. This doesn’t always help him and nor does it help his companions much either, when certain events unfold.

After the cliffhanger of the last novel, which had my favourite teleporting pub smashing through the barriers between worlds and leaving the mythical land of the majority of the book, quite literally penetrating Luger’s offices in the cyberpunk vision of future London... we are left out on a limb for a while about that particular puzzle piece of the story and the start of this one sees us back to a new adventure in the world where Ecko is currently trapped. It’s a world where two important things are happening simultaneously, which may or may not be part of the same plot. One is a big ‘political coup’ which throws the streets of the world into chaos as martial law and wholesale slaughter at the hands of a take over bid on the state are used to wield power. The other thing is perhaps best described as a plague of decay, overrunning both the people of the land and, as importantly, their crops etc. The fact that this is an almost viral infection, which transforms anything it touches, is not lost on me as I believe the author’s gaming sensibilities that I mentioned in the last review means she’s not unaware of computer games and the lethal path cut by a computer virus. Which is an interesting thing to consider actually because I think I came to a realisation about one of the writer’s current pet obsessions while I was reading this one... asides from all the gaming stuff that is.

When you have a successful artist in whatever medium, be it film, painting, writing, photography etc, you can often spot that artist’s signature in their work... one or more of those tell-tale contextual or stylistic flourishes which are common links between a number of their pieces. The majority of the early work of David Cronenberg is best described as having an emphasis on body horror, for instance, and I think Ware has a similar obsession to him actually. Or not so much body horror but with the transformation of one state of being into something else. All through these two novels we have people being transformed. In this one we have people going out of their mind or decaying as a result of whatever viral phenomenon is plaguing this land, we have one of the heroines who was accelerated/aged beyond her years in the last book, we have a heroic champion who finds himself quite drastically altered into something terrifying by the end of the novel and, of course we have Ecko. Both he and, in this book, another character from the last novel, have undergone some severe upgrades to their basic human template and are, themselves, both transformed men. It seems to me that this is very much a theme of Ware’s work at the moment.

Evolution, malignant or natural, aside... people who loved the first novel will find a lot that’s familiar  intermingled with the new flavours. The postmodernistic cross cultural references are still very much in abundance, especially through the first half of the book. Fun references like “Not the zombies I was looking for...”, “Lugan stood in the front garden of a quasi-medieval pub that had just beamed-the-fuck-down-Scotty in the middle of his chop shop” and “The bloke was a fucking loony - but he had more guts than Mr. Creosote” are planted at key times when Ware needs a moment to increase empathy in her readers by grounding her fantasy with allusions to phenomena in our own world. I found it particularly startling to find a Joseph Heller reference in the middle of a heroic fantasy setting, I have to say, but it all works pretty well.

Our scribe on Ecko’s journey does return to the cliffhanger ending of the last novel at some point in the proceedings and starts to set up a convoluted narrative in “future London” which, whenever she briefly returns to it, gives us little half glimpses of what may or may not be going on but without giving us a definitive answer on the seemingly flexible fabric of not just one, but two worlds. At first I was sure she was just going to return to London at the end of the book with a reiteration of that incident but she doesn’t ignore all that stuff and what goes on in London has consequences for those inhabitants ‘cross platform’... so to speak. I’d possibly be giving stuff away to speak more of such things (and probably get it all wrong anyhow) but, as usual, the techniques Ware uses to weave her story are quite masterful and I’m sure I couldn’t even begin to comment on the world of subtleties found in her writing.

That being said... a couple of things really stayed with me from this book.

One thing she does which is very nice is to continue to shout out details of a fight sequence when two or more protagonists are engaged in their own sections of a fight, so they can be cross referenced in the minds eye while reading... thus allowing you to keep track of where everybody is in relation to each other and where they are in the timeframe of a battle. However, an additional thing she’s done here... something I’ve seen done many times in the movies but don’t quite remember reading it in a book before (although that’s probably a case of bad “remembery” on my part)... is to have the confidence in her audience to be able to cut out a battle scene altogether. About 140 pages in, by way of example, there’s a fight involving a character called Rhan. Ware’s built both the stakes and the drama up at the beginning of the opening of the fight to the point where we can guess the outcome... we know that the Rhan character is a very powerful warrior so, rather than take us through the entire fight, Ware just skips to the end and describes the aftermath of the character contemplating victory. Neat idea and it doesn’t get bogged down in an action piece which might have been nice to read but would have ultimately, maybe, slowed down the narrative pace at this point. There’s obviously a reason for doing this but, whatever that reason is, the writer’s solution is a pretty good one and doesn’t insult the intelligence of her army of readers either... so that’s all good.

There’s another point which was cool because I was fooled completely for a few pages into thinking Echo had finally woken up to whatever his real reality is... which may or may not be the reality he is living in the book. As it turns out there’s something else going on here, not just for him but for a few of the characters, but the writer did some effective wool pulling in this sequence... so that made me smile.

I also got myself a little bit more educated this time around with my Ecko experience. Noticing what I thought was a peculiar quirk of the writer’s possible tendency to anthropomorphism in referring to all towns and villages as feminine, as in the line early in the novel “Celebration danced drunken through her zig zag streets.” made me check out if this was a Danie-ism or an actual correct term for such things. Turns out this is a known way of referring to cities etc and dates back to the gender of the term in latin so... how did I go through my life not knowing that one?

And that’s more or less all I’ve got to say about this one. It’s not a good jumping on book if you were thinking of skipping the first (and why would you?). So go back and read that one before gulping this one down. If you are already a fan of Ecko Rising then I’m pretty sure you’ll have a blast with this second one too. Ware is a writer who knows how to pace drama and string out the suspense to the maximum. Also, if you’ve not read any of her books before, you should probably not get too attached to some of the characters you meet in your journey through the pages. She’s not in the habit of giving all her characters happy endings and often you’ll lose a regular character or two, sometimes before you even know it. There's a really poignant bit towards the end of Ecko Burning where, after a terrifying beast is killed in battle, you realise the beast was not what you thought it was and that someone very interesting had just become a mere statistic in battle, his death unheralded. So there’s that... it made me think of a non-character called Glyph in Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballad Of Halo Jones... and that’s certainly not a bad thing.

So there you go. Another excellent adventure in an uncertain realm with uncertain characters, some of whom have a decidedly shaky grip on their moral compass. Now I just have to wait until the third and possibly concluding book of the trilogy gets published... sometime soon I hope. I need some closure... and I’m not at all certain that the kind of closure I want will be readily forthcoming for Ecko and his crew without a hard won fight. Something to look forward to, then.

Danie Ware's website can be found here... http://danieware.com/

Ecko Rising

Road To More Ecko

Ecko Rising

by Danie Ware

Titan Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-0857687623

This hardly ever happens to me.

Like... ever.

I had just finished a day out with a friend in London and was riding the tube back, homeward bound, to make my next connection at Finsbury Park. It must have been about 6pm and my nose was stuck in a book, surfacing every couple of minutes to check the station name as the tube pulled in at each and every stop. Or so I thought. 

All well and good but, as I looked up for the gazillionth time, I realised I was at Manor House. “What the-?” I’d overshot my station by one stop because I’d been distracted by what was turning out to be a pretty good book.

This would have consequences. 

The downside was, of course, that when I finally got to Seven Sisters to get the overground train, I’d missed it by a minute and I had 29 more to wait on the platform until the next one came along. On the other hand... this also meant I’d have another 29 uninterrupted minutes of the book in question... Ecko Rising... so that was all cool then. 

But, like I said... that hardly ever happens. Sure, I sleep past a stop on the bus some evenings (I’m getting old, methinks) but, mostly, I never let something distract me to the point that I miss a vital connection on the tube. So this is how I knew I was reading a good book, you see?

Readers of this blog will know that I still read the occasional novel which could credibly be termed science fiction or fantasy... but it’s mostly limited to the latest Wild Cards novel or something with Doc Savage in it. In a former lifetime, however, I was into fantasy and sci-fi a lot more than I am now and so I knew I could probably hack something like Danie Ware’s debut novel okay... which looked to be a curious blend of English cyberpunk mixing it up with heroic fantasy. But that’s not the full reason I decided to read this devilish, journey delaying tome.

I’m on Twitter, you see. 

Most of my friends and acquaintances don’t understand the appeal of this particular social media thingummy jig and, truth be told, I never understood it either until I joined up specifically to try and promote this web page. But I got a whole lot more out of it when I started chatting to people and, in some ways, it’s like a voyeuristic form of reality TV for folks like me who wouldn’t touch reality shows with a rusty barge pole. One of the people I followed was Danie Ware and, I think, she’d just commenced writing her first Ecko when I started reading her tweets in my stream. I was fascinated with her raw and edgy way of battling through life, one cynicism at a time but, what really made me sit up and take notice was her analogy for the process of writing. “Back to the wordface” she would always tweet and I used to think, yeah, sometimes getting those words right can be at least as exhausting as climbing a mountain. I knew exactly what she meant and I’m not even a proper writer (although I think I’ve written enough reviews on here over the last few years to fill a few books, by the looks of it).

I also knew I was eventually going to have to read at least one of her Ecko books because, like I said, I was one of many who were the tweet witnesses of its long and joyous birthing. She seemed like a nice gal so... maybe I should give the book a go. It might be cool.

And, yeah, I have to say right up front here, the book is, indeed... decidedly cool and, possibly, entering into the realms of “groovy.”

Ecko Rising is, as I mentioned earlier, a book which very much strides two worlds (at least two) - one of which is a futuristic London where the enhanced title character Ecko, for all intents and purposes a cybernetically modified killing machine with a smug attitude, is doing some kind of wetwork and demolition job for a private company. “There's a Fifth 'orseman an’ his names Apathy.” says Luger, Ecko’s current boss, and it sums up nicely a world which is sleeping its way into oblivion with a broad analogy which really isn’t a million miles away from where we are at now in society... soberingly. 

However, when a job goes wrong, Ecko finds himself transported into a Dungeons & Dragons style realm where he has to leave behind his expectations of the way his environment behaves and try to find his purpose in a world of prophecy, myth, centaurs, failed cyberpunk experiments, stone magic and, my favourite thing about this novel, a teleporting pub which materialises in a different town every morning. 

There’s lots to recommend about this novel and, also, a lot for the writer to get through in terms of setting up a basic but credible world view not just once, but twice... one for London of the future and one for the fantasy land. One of the things she does neatly, however, is pre-empt any guesswork as to what is actually going on by putting all your assumptions about it in the forefront of the thoughts of Ecko, who is not so much the main protagonist as he is one of many strong and fascinating characters sprinkled throughout the book. He is flawed and arrogant and, therefore, as real as any character you see created in fiction.. so he does stand out a bit more when he’s on but, truly, the many passages when he’s not around have so many cool characters you would be happy to hang out with in, say, a teleporting pub, that you don’t always miss him when he’s gone. 

He also has a nice line of postmodernistic, eclectic pop-culture references which are peppered liberally throughout the novel and it seems very clear to me that Danie Ware has a full-on, take no prisoners, gamer’s mentality mixed in with a good appreciation of all things sci-fi and fantasy and it makes for some lovely nods to various genre classics that will have fans of such things (who are probably the core target audience of books like this) lapping it up and in her pocket from the word go. “A connecticut yankee in King Arthur’s Arms” for example or “The Magic Faraway Pub” and... “Ain’t exactly Minas fucking Tirith, is it?”. Neat little throwaway lines like this give something for the fanbase to look out for but, perhaps more importantly, they anchor the character of Ecko by giving him cultural references to a reality which the reader understands historically but which most of the characters in this book don’t comprehend in the slightest... and this is a great way of aligning Ecko with the reader and getting you on his side, of course. There are even references to things like Star Trek and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion (a personal favourite) in here... and probably loads more that, as a not quite hard core fantasy fan, I was undoubtedly missing.

I say it’s obvious (and she’ll probably tell me I’m wrong now) that Danie Ware is a gamer from her writing and she seems to playfully embrace all the different forms of such in her yarn-spinning vocabulary - video games, role playing games, Steve Jackson style “turn to page x” adventure books etc - within the worlds she is, quite convincingly, charting in this novel. She also makes use of some of the structure of those kinds of entertainments to play with the reader as to just what the heck is going on at certain points in the novel. There’s a certain amount of mystery with the difference between interpenetrating realities, or possibly unrealities, as they bleed and rub against each other within the book and the ending really hammers home the point that, whatever you or, indeed, the title character thought was going on... well it may not quite be that simple. Think again, dear reader. I appreciated this because, if you’ve read my reviews of movies and books on here before, you know that I usually figure out the ending within the first ten minutes or so. Not so here. She’s on the ball about how to best mislead you on and that’s really cool.

There’s a couple of other things I thought were pretty good about this novel. One is that, when you get to a group battle scene which is then cross cut between three or more sets of protagonists/antagonists, she smartly uses an incident or, more specifically, a detail about an incident, to anchor you into the chronology of the fighting... no matter which set of protagonists you are following from section to section. So, for instance, a horse or similar creature may let out a scream specific to one particular incident and then, when you are following a different set of characters, there’ll be mention of that same scream coming from behind them, or whatever, and that will give you a reference to get everything that everyone is doing straight in your head as you read. I have to say, I’ve not consciously noticed this technique in novels before and it’s something I thought was a really great idea. 

The other thing I noticed, and this is one of my pet hates with a lot of writers, is that the Danie Ware’s writing style, while clearly distinguishable in every character (as it should be and you kinda expect the fingerprints to show) is not infecting the characters to the point where they all sound like each other. I really hate when you enter the world of a book and the characters, all from different walks of life, all sound exactly the same... and almost every writer I’ve ever read makes this mistake of extending their personal style to the point that their characters become just cyphers. What doubly impressed me about this one is that Danie Ware has reeled in that tendency quite a bit. Some of the characters will always inevitably share a common style of thought and dialogue (just as friends and lovers seem to catch each other's speech and thought patterns off each other in real life) but here you have characters who are different enough from each other that they are allowed to become more flesh and blood to you by that differentiation. Now, you may argue that’s because Ware is dealing with characters that come from vastly different milieus and that it’s a natural, serendipitous symptom of that... but I don’t think so. I think there’s some very smart writing going on in this book and, when she’s done with Ecko for a while, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more greatness from her in novels to come.

So there you go. Pretty easy review to decode, I think. If you’re into fantasy, science fiction or game playing (and probably all three), then Ecko Rising is a good, healthy climb up the ‘wordface’. If you’re not into any of those three things... well it’s also not a bad jumping on point for fantasy and sci-fi in general, either. The characters are great, the ideas interesting and you’ll definitely be having some people in these pages you’ll be rooting for. Also, I mentioned it has a teleporting pub, right?

So my main advice would be... yeah. Give Ecko Rising a try. 

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve already bought the second volume of the trilogy, Ecko Burning, and have it lined up for my summer holiday reading. So, I guess, like Webster’s dictionary... I’m more-Ecko bound!

Danie Ware's website can be found here... http://danieware.com/