48. Lord of A Shattered Land by Howard Andrew Jones
A very entertaining sword-and-sorcery novel inspired by the ancient Mediterranean
Howard Andrew Jones, Lord of A Shattered Land. New York: Baen Books. 2023.
Lord of A Shattered Land harks back to an older style of fantasy without reviving the racism and sexism of yesteryear. It's a fix-up novel, comprising several previous published stories fitted into a wider narrative and expanded. It reminds me of David Drake's "Lord of the Isles" series, in that it's clearly in dialogue with the storytelling tradition of Robert E. Howard while lacking Howard's conviction in the virile power of barbarism (and its inevitable triumph over civilisation).
Hanuvar is one of the last survivors of destroyed Volanus, and once its greatest general. When the Dervan empire came to conquer, they killed his people and tore down his city, leading perhaps a thousand survivors away in chains. Hanuvar, too, survived against his every expectation, washed up on a foreign shore. He knows the fate of his people. He means to find the survivors -- find his adult daughter -- set them free, and lead them to safety. Every one of them, if he can. All he has is his own skill and wits. The Dervans have the mightiest empire in the world.
This is a fantasy novel, so of course Hanuvar has far more success than he has any right to.
The Dervan empire is explicitly based on Rome, down to the language, though it draws from a grab-bag of periods in Roman history, not limiting itself to either Republic or Empire. Volanus, on the other hand, is inspired by Carthage but draws very little from the historical Punic-speaking cities of north Africa: Volanus is (or was) a less oppressive society than their contemporaries, having gender equality and not keeping slaves. It makes it easier to sympathise with Hanuvar and the survivors of the Dervan genocide: Volanus's culture is more "modern" and less inclined to genocidal conquest. (In a story where they are as bad as each other, sympathy might be harder to come by.)
For most of the novel, each new chapter is a new story relating one of Hanuvar's adventures on his way to find and rescue some of his people. They follow one another chronologically and, put together, form a coherent overall narrative and character arc for Hanuvar, but they are distinctly episodes with their own individual narrative arcs rather than being a seamless whole. It takes a while to get used to it. Many of these episodes remind the astute reader of Robert E. Howard (or Xena: Warrior Princess: put your mythology and folklore and weird anthropology in a blender and let it whirr).
Hanuvar is a very competent character. I enjoy competence. I enjoy adventure. I enjoyed Lord of a Shattered Land (I enjoyed it a lot), even though I'm occasionally baffled by some of its choices. They remain entertaining choices.