Subject: Duncan: Upland Outlaws

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: 10 Apr 93 05:32:12 GMT

I went ahead and got book two of "A Handful of Men".  The question is,
was it worth getting a hardcover now, rather than wait six months for
the paperback, given that there are still two more books to come in the
tetralogy?  On balance, the answer is 'no'.  "Upland Outlaws" was
enjoyable, but it wasn't special, and could have stood to wait half a year.

Mostly, it suffers from middle-book-syndrome (or should that be "second-
quartile syndrome"?).  Book one, The Cutting Edge, sets up the problem
and introduces the main characters.  Book two, almost by definition, gets
devoted to in-between stuff:  In this case our intrepid heroes split up
and head for various corners of the map on various missions.  Presumably
book three (The Stricken Field) will follow these missions and book four
(The Living God -- which title is probably a major spoiler) will bring all
the threads together for the climax.  (There's a structural reason for
short sequences of books to be trilogies, and I suspect this one should
have been a trilogy, but for page-count or marketing decisions.  Certainly
book two ends on a very artificial cliff-hanger.)

Not much happens in "Upland Outlaws", for all that it takes 355 pages
not to happen.  Shandie, Rap, and company escape from Hub at the last
possible instant, and conclude that the only hope of defeating the Covin
(Zinixo's mind-controlled sorcery monopoly) is to find enough sorcerers
who are still uncontrolled and lying low.  Since Zinixo now controls the
Impire, the members of that company scatter to the outlying lands to find
help before Zinixo gets around to conquering them.

The parts of the first book that I enjoyed the most were the Krasnegarian
scenes, for some reason, but there are a lot fewer of them in this book.
Krasnegar is touched upon only enough to set up a situation whereby,
improbably, Inos and the two older children find themselves trapped on the 
mainland, in the middle of a war.  Well, I *wondered* how they were going
to get themselves involved.

To return to my earlier point/s, this book is enjoyable, but there's
no need to rush to get it in hardcover, if you weren't already planning to.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

  Watership Down:  
  You've read the book.  You've seen the movie.  Now eat the stew!