The Redemption of Althalus, review

I love this book. When I started Weird Old Books, there were two books I knew right away that I wanted to review. This is one of them (you'll just have to wait for the other!).

I read The Redemption of Althalus the first time as a teenager. I don't remember how I found it, though I think I bought it new. I had never heard of it, but back in those days it was normal for readers to buy and read books they had never heard of. David and Leigh Eddings had several books in circulation then, and I wasn't interested in starting a long series at the time, so I got this stand-alone. As it turns out, they didn't write very many stand alone novels. I wish they had. Though I went on to read one of their series, The Elenium, it's The Redemption of Althalus that I keep coming back to.

I carried the fat, mass produced paperback with me as I moved from home to college to a different college and then to an apartment of my own. It was familiar and pleasant and a glimpse of that cover was enough to remind me of a favorite story that I could revisit for a moment just by looking. In my mid-twenties, I decided to read it again.

The second read through was just as enjoyable. What a relief! I had re-read books from my teen years before, only to be disappointed that the story did not transcend my own maturation. There is a quippiness to the dialogue in The Redemption of Althalus that I still found funny, and the overall story is charming and it still appealed to me. I had not had children of my own yet, so the idea of Dweia and Althalus "adopting" a family of misfits amused me, without really meaning a lot to me personally.

This week I re-read The Redemption of Althalus. Once again I was looking at the book through new eyes. I'm 37, a mother of two, and a little more... er... veteran in my marriage. I found that the material of the story hit me a little differently this time. I'll explain more on that below.

So what is the book about? The Redemption of Althalus is mostly a fantasy story. It has obvious ties to the epic fantasy subgenre, though it is a cleaner and shorter plot that is clearly meant to be digested in a single book, not over the course of many. David and Leigh Eddings mostly wrote multi-book fantasy epics. You might say their roots were showing here!

I would also say that The Redemption of Althalus is an adventure novel, a bit of a comedy, and a bit of a heist novel. Althalus, the titular character, is a thief, liar and occasional murderer. He's also an elaborate story-teller, vastly amusing and wildly funny. As a character he mostly gets by on his wit and charm, swindling his victims on his way out of the door. At the beginning of the book, he's just had a bad run of luck- luck being his only religious belief- and is trying to find a way to get back in luck's good graces. The run of bad luck serves as a convenient story-telling tool to tell us about our character as well as give us a general travelogue of the world.

At the end of this run of bad luck, Althalus is offered a job that he doesn't look at too closely. He's asked by a suspicious person to go to the House at the End of the World, supposedly unoccupied, to steal a book and return it to said suspicious person. Althalus, having never seen a book, but very desperate for work and funds, accepts the job.

When he arrives at the house, it is occupied. By a cat. A talking cat.

Without giving a way too many spoilers, the cat is not a cat. He spends the next 2,500 years in the house with the not-a-cat, learning to read and "use" the book, a religious text associated with one of the three gods of this world. At the end of the 2,500 years, he leaves the house with the cat, and goes on a journey to collect a group of people. Together this rag-tag group of people work together, along with a large number of military-types in kilts, defeating evil all across the map.

Let's talk for a minute about publishing trends and reader expectations. The Redemption of Althalus was first published in 2000, at the end of the Eddingses career. These were folks well into their sixties writing this story. Epic fantasies tended to be long, and the expectations around action, dialogue, and emotional details were very different than what you find today.

Pick up any novel from 2000, and you are unlikely to find any moment-by-moment scenes depicting any kind of emotional reactions. We, the readers, weren't "in the heads" of our characters. A lot of writing was still in third-person omniscient, or just third-person perspectives. We might have a few moments that gave us insight into the emotional state of a character, but we definitely weren't given information about their instant emotional reactions, where their eyes were going, how their mind or body felt in a moment, etc. That is almost a genre expectation now. The Redemption of Althalus has several characters in emotional distress, but very little of the page is taken up with describing those feelings.

Another notable difference between then and now is that a lot of epic fantasy was written almost as an interesting travelogue. Much of the story is just the characters travelling from one place to talk to or meet this person, followed by travelling to another location to confer with that person. That's definitely true of The Redemption of Althalus. There were numerous scenes that revolved around the main characters travelling to see different characters to arrange logistics. Usually this was made more interesting by snarky dialogue or odd occurrences on the trail, but the pacing is a vast departure from anything I've read written recently. It was amusing to me to note how many passages a modern editor would likely cut entirely, or at least replace with something centered more on emotional action.

Another stark difference was in the dialogue. I have found some more modern books that have quippy, back-and-forth dialogue, but I would say it is not in the main. The two main characters in The Redemption of Althalus, are a man and a woman who are clearly in love with each other. However, instead of swoony speeches, or intense declarations, we mostly see their relationship through the lens of how other characters react to them. One side character says to Althalus, "How long have you and your wife been married?" and by that the reader understands that they act like a married couple. Althalus says he loves her three whole times in the book, and the first time, he still believes she's a cat. If you've just come off of a binge of "romantasy" books, you'll likely feel like you blinked too many times, possibly missing the romance entirely in this novel. Althalus and Dweia spend more time on the page in cutesy sarcasm and flat out arguments than any declarations of love.

I find this particularly amusing because every significant character "of age" ends up married by the end of the book. It meets the requirements of a romance novel!

The epilogue of The Redemption of Althalus contains an interesting scene. I won't spoil it by saying what happens here. I will say that I can distinctly remember having a warm, fuzzy sort of emotional reaction to it when I read this book as a teenager. Now, after a steady diet of newer books, it barely makes a blip on my "romance radar." Isn't it interesting how exposure to things changes our reactions to them? If I'd stayed on a binge of reading strictly no-romance, or even only older publications, would I have felt a little swoony after that single scene? I don't know, but it further highlights the differences in books then and now.

As alluded to at the beginning of this post, I have a single complaint about this story. I'm a mother, and this read-through really hit me differently largely because of that. Throughout the book, Althalus and Dweia collect a group of young people and teach them ways to do what they already do, only better. The family dynamic is obvious, one character even calls Althalus "Daddy." Dweia, ever interested in love and childbearing, ensures that every character ends up with a happy marriage by the end of the story. I don't have a problem with any of that. My issue is this: At the end of the story, they send all of these lovingly collected characters away. They actively find new homes for even the youngest of their little family. I found that, as a real mom, bizarre. To a couple who are essentially ageless, why wouldn't they stick around to check in on their "children" after the story ends? It wasn't a book deal-breaker, but I did find it ... odd.

That brings me to the last negative about this story. The writers themselves. David and Leigh Eddings wrote most of their books between 1971 and the mid-1990s, with a few more published after that. They wrote fantasy novels that were pretty successful, there is even a "fandom" page dedicated to their fantasy worlds. No problem there, right?

In researching all of this, I discovered that David and Leigh Eddings both pled guilty to 11 counts of physical child abuse in 1970. David's first published novel, High Hunt, was published while he was in prison. He and his wife both served a year in separate prisons for the offense. This dark chapter of their life seems to have been largely unknown in the publishing world until after their deaths.

So, is The Redemption of Althalus still worth reading? Well, I think so. It has really interesting and skillful character introductions. It has excellent worldbuilding, going so far as to give a geological history of the world without bogging the reader down in boring details. There is a lot of heart and humor in the story over all. Even if you don't like snarky banter or you do like swoony romances, I think this novel is worth reading.

I would also say, in light of the "separate the artist from the art" argument, that David and Leigh Eddings have both since passed away. As I understand it, they have no children (the children in question were adopted), and the money left from their lucrative publishing career now goes toward non-profit organizations. If you choose to buy a new copy of any of their books, that money would not go toward supporting people you might not want to support. If you buy used copies, it wouldn't even go to the people who published them.

There is more that could be said on these two, not all bad (Leigh's name wasn't added to some of the books she helped write because of the publisher, as an example). I think that's enough, though, don't you?

As for the book itself, I'm still a fan. It's good writing, a fun story, and with memorable characters. While re-reading it, I didn't remember everything, but some of my favorite scenes and characters were still just as loveable. Regardless of what shadow might be on these books due to the darkness of the writers, I think we can agree that the book itself is well-written. I hope you give it a chance.

As always, I have a copy available for sale on my website. You can find the listing here.

If that sells out, you can find other copies for sale at:

Thriftbooks

Better World Books

Ebay