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Covenants (A Borderlands Novel) by Lorna
Freeman check out website: www.penguin.com
There was, after all, no way I was going to enjoy a book with a giant talking cat. Read a little way in, though, and the fact that the cat is talking isn't really an issue. What it's saying is, after all, setting the plot in motion. This is a quiet, slow burner of a read. Its ideas all filtered by an earnestly unreliable narrator more than a little in denial of who he really is.
The main story, of course, centres around things not being as they appear to be and there's a subtle synchronicity of plot, theme and character that creeps up on you somewhere near the end. Our narrator, Rabbit, is a soldier in a quiet mountain town, having left his hippie-dropout parents behind in the Borderlands (where the cats, trees, dragons...you name it, everything talks there!). When his patrol get unreasonably lost in the mountains, Rabbit runs into Laurel, our talking mountain cat, who has come looking for him. Rabbit's hippie parents were actually dropping out from the succession to the throne as it turns out, making Rabbit rather more important than his unit - and commanding officers - originally suspected. Having said that, most of the commanding officers aren't always who they appear to be. Rabbit, not exactly being forthcoming to the reader about any of this either, the entire book becomes a gradual discovery of quite what else our narrator has neglected to mention...The most inspired aspect of this being that the Borderlands used to cover all of the currently human-owned land. There was a particularly nasty war and now there's the suggestion that the land is starting to 'reassert' itself on its current occupants. It has to be said that some of the most effective sequences involve this gradual metamorphosis of those around Rabbit into particular animals he thinks their personalities resemble. At first, it's something subtle that just he sees, but then reality starts twisting and they start changing for real. It's a highly effective twist in the tale, especially through the eyes of someone as confused as Rabbit. One where this scores freely is character, creating a small group of highly confused soldiers that garner sympathy and a lovely ear for dialogue that sounds peculiarly English, cleverly capturing barrack-talk without resorting to swearing. On one hand, it does seem to take an awfully long time to end, considering that the showdown that feels like a grand finale actually happens nearer the middle of the book. I'm not entirely convinced by the appearance of the Elves in the latter part, who are fairly bog-standard Tolkienesque characters and the end loses impact for having dragged on for so long. It's also unusual in having very few female characters and, for this genre, absolutely no attempt at any love interest of either sex. It's a little hard to predict the audience for this, given all those factors, but that doesn't make it any less of a good book. It's just strange to see something so, well, quaint and a little odd and not be able to compare it to anything. It's certainly well written, there are plenty of original ideas in here and it's an interesting way to tell a story considering the character narrating it. Certainly worth giving a chance on that basis and it's worth considering on curiosity value alone. Jennifer Howell
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OTHER REVIEWS - June 2004
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Strange
how appearances can be deceptive. At first glance (OK, it was the
phrase 'anthropomorphic characters' on the back page), this looks
not only twee but highly unoriginal. 
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