Tag Archives: Stephen Lawhead

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Shadow Lamp’ and ‘The Fatal Tree,’ by Stephen Lawhead

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I must admit that Stephen Lawhead almost lost me at one point, but I carried on with the last two books of the Bright Empires pentalogy, and came out a fan again.

If you’ve followed my reviews of the previous books, The Skin Map, The Bone House, and The Spirit Well (or if you’ve read the books; some people prefer to do it that way), you know the series involves a group of people who have learned the secrets of “ley travel,” using particular geographical formations in the earth at sunrise or sunset to travel to other times, places, and dimensions. The earlier books involve a sort of race between the good guys and the villainous Lord Burleigh to locate the “Skin Map,” the tanned skin of the discoverer of the ley lines, who had their locations tattooed on his body.

My temporary problems with the story occurred in the fourth book, The Shadow Lamp. I feared, for a while, that author Lawhead had succumbed to “Game of Thrones Disease” – not in terms of perversion, I hasten to add, but just in the sense of producing a story so complex and sprawling that he loses control of it. The characters seemed to be running around chasing each other through time and space, without advancing the story line much. But in the second half of the book things sharpen up. The focus shifts when the characters become aware that thoughtless ley traveling has caused a disruption in the very fabric of the cosmos. The quest becomes one to return to timeless Spirit Well and undo a thoughtless act. That quest continues in the final book, The Fatal Tree. By the time I got into that one I was back with the story all the way, and I found the resolution entirely satisfactory, nay, moving.

Lawhead (as I read him) has been endeavoring for some time to figure out a way to write epic fantasy without big battles. The Bright Empires series is his most successful effort so far.

Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

The Bone House, by Stephen R. Lawhead

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In this second book in his Bright Empires Series, The Bone House (sequel to The Skin Map), Stephen Lawhead continues the saga of Kit Livingstone and his friends and enemies, in various places in space, time, and alternate dimensions.
Time travel stories, though not uncommon, are devilish hard to put together (as I can testify, though I make no claim to have done it as well as Lawhead). The story jumps around a number of locations and millennia, and we’re informed that some of the futures and pasts are alternate ones. It’s all rather complicated, and the large cast makes it hard to keep the characters, many of whom only appear briefly, straight. I recommend that you bookmark the Important People section, for reference.
In The Skin Map, Kit Livingstone met his great-grandfather, Cosimo, who taught him to use the mysterious “ley lines” to move around dimensional pathways. Cosimo is in competition with Archelaeus Burleigh, Earl of Sutherland, a villain and megalomaniac, in seeking the Skin Map, which the original discoverer of the ley lines, Sir Arthur Flinders-Petrie, had tattooed on his own body (so that he’d never lose it). The fact that Arthur himself is a character in the story, while his tanned skin is the “Maguffin” of the whole adventure, adds a bizarre note.
It’s all rather fun, and of great interest, if you can keep the players straight. Again in this volume, one of the most interesting characters is Kit’s old girlfriend Mina, who accidentally got stuck in 16th Century Prague, an experience which surprisingly turned her into a better and more competent person, one who’s very useful to have around.
To my surprise the most moving part of the story was a sojourn by Kit in a prehistoric cave community, where he has a genuinely transcendent spiritual experience that raises the whole level of the story.
I recommend The Bone House almost without reservation, except to say that the reader may want to wait until the whole series is available in the format he prefers, and read the whole thing at once, to help keep track of all the characters and settings.