Book Review – Fire Caste by Peter Fehervari

Fire Caste by Peter Fehervari – a television script-writer who has not written a book for Black Library before – is a strange, strange novel. Some things should be stated up-front.

• Fire Caste certainly isn’t much of a Tau novel, and feels misleadingly branded.
• Fire Caste isn’t much of a traditional Warhammer 40K Imperial Guard novel either, with the grotesque-to-steampunk’ish Arkhan Confederates bringing a unique flavour all of their own.
• Most closely, Fire Caste is something of a Warhammer 40K homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It similarly combines a voyage to the heart of a steaming jungle with a story revolving around corruption and redemption.

As a book, Fire Caste is spectacularly written in parts. Peter Fehervari clearly knows his way with words and creates some great characters, scenes and action-sequences.

Nevertheless, the story does feel needlessly convoluted. It drags a lot in the second act (of three), where I found myself struggling to stay interested, though it improves towards the end.

In the jungles of the Dolorosa Coil, a coalition of alien tau and human deserters have waged war upon the Imperium for countless years. Fresh Imperial Guard forces from the Arkhan Confederates are sent in to break the stalemate and annihilate the xenos. But greater forces are at work, and the Confederates soon find themselves broken and scattered. As they fight a desperate guerrilla war, their only hope may lie in the hands of a disgraced commissar, hell-bent on revenge.

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#1 – The Format

The book I had was a standard trade-paperback, which are slightly larger than the mass-paperbacks that older Black Library novels get for a re-release.

It costs £ 8.99 straight from Black Library, though it’s been marked-down a lot on Amazon & Co.

For that price, you get ~400 pages of story, plus a 2-page Dramatis Personae, an author-page, an excerpt from Shadowsun and a few ads. No colour-inlays or anything fancy (which is fine with me).

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#2 – The Story and Characters

There’re two main strands to this (highly complex) story.

One strand are the 19th Arkhan Confederates under Colonel Ensor Cutler, an Imperial Guard regiment on their first “off-homeworld” assignment throw into the meat-grinder stalemate that is the Imperium’s war with the Tau on the almost-Death World jungle-planet of Phaedra.

The Arkhan Confederates is made up of a riot of colourful and exotic units and individuals, ranging from the knightly Silverstorm Sentinel Cavalry to a (barely) sanctioned Psyker/tribal-witch and her sworn protector. They are later joined by a unit of steampunk-ish proto-power-armour warriors, a rather unique regiment of penitents and other curious characters.

Peter Fehevari clearly had fun letting his imagination run amok.

I enjoyed having someone try to take on and show-off the Imperial Guard outside the well-worn WWI/WWII/Vietnam-war clichees. Yet Peter Fehevari tried to cram too many wild ideas into this one. A little less would have been more.

The second strand is Arkan-born Commissar Iverson, who appears mainly (but not exclusively) in chapter-opening journal-entries for the first 2/3rds or so of the book.

Oddly enough, even as Iverson joins the Arkhans, Fehevari keeps up the journal-style entries. If anything  become more frequent and adds the occasional journal-entry even during action-sequences, as if the Commissar had occasionally paused in mid-fire-fight to write a note.

The story, in a nutshell, is that the IG’s command in charge of the war on Phaedra has itself switched sides. The Arkhans turn renegade and hide in the jungle, as does – eventually – the Commissar sent after them. Together they hatch a plan to bring down the traitorous IG command.

The Arkhan’s own traumatic history, the dangers of Phaedra’s jungles, betrayals and double-crossings left and right and, yes, the occasional Tau attacks further complicate things.

And than there’re ghosts. And daemons. And more double-crossings.

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#3 – The Problem – Too Many Twists and Dead-Ends

Peter Fehervari is clearly a very gifted writer.

If you would pick up Fire Caste, open a random page somewhere, and read a handful of pages, it would be easy to believe that this is one spectacular Warhammer 40K novel.

• The action is great and suitably gory
• The characters are well-developed
• The dialogues are fun and fast-paced
• Etc..

It just never really comes together as a compelling story. There is so much going on, most of it meaningless in the end, that there is no real connection to anything. Large parts of the book, especially the second act, feels like surfing TV-channel. Characters just come and go and plot twists just keep piling upon another, until they simply stop being interesting (to me at least).

One example: there is a Tau, who is seemingly betraying the Tau Empire, yet actually trying to save it (on Phaedra at least). He does so by pretending to be a Human who betrayed the Imperium for the Tau, while also playing the role of a loyal double-agent feeding to information to the Arkhans, who have themselves gone rogue to expose treason among the Imperial command.

Still with me?

Read it again.

I am not joking.

And this is a character with barely 20 or so pages of “screen-time”.

Add to that over 20 “main” characters (or characters that seem important before being written out of the story), flashbacks, several sub-plots and various other mysteries.

Eventually, I simply stopped caring about what would happen next.

I often put the book aside for a week or so, read other things, only to come back to it later.

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#4 – Verdict

As said, Fire Caste is too complicated for its own good. It feels weird to criticize a writer for having too many crazy ideas, but Fire Caste clearly could’ve been a lot better with a bit more restraint.

I had a real “low” during the middle of the book. At that time, I wouldn’t have given it even 3 stars.

Such a low rating, however, would’ve likewise done the book injustice. It is will written. The characters are great and memorable. Much of the book is a lot of fun to read.

The last, in particular, also goes for the final showdown (which, finally, also brings some Tau-technology to the action), which ended the book on a strong note.

Who would I recommend this book to? I have honestly no clue.

Still, I am happy that I stuck with it. Even though it wasn’t at all what I expected, and did have issues, it was a book that I did enjoy reading.

Z.