Product Description

The god Orok gave to his five children crystals of surpassing beauty, to be embedded in The Orokon to ensure the harmony of life - until the dark god Koros stole his crystal and plunged the world into chaos and despair. In the village of Irion the crippled boy Jemany Vexing, bastard son of the beautiful but frail Lady Elabeth, lives in the dilapidated castle with his dying mother and his fanatical Aunt Umbecca. Ela, seduced, it is believed, by a common soldier, is a social outcast, while her dashing brother Tor is a traitor, wanted for crimes against the false king. Unable to walk, Jem is condemned to a wretched half-life, until he meets a mysterious dwarf . . . and with his new strength comes a new friendship, with the wild girl Catayane; their love holds the secret to incredible magical powers. As the horrors of the Bluejacket regime begin, so Jem becomes aware of his greater destiny, for his is the quest to find and reunite the five crystals of The Orokon. But he is not the only seeker: the evil sorcerer Toth-Vexrah has his own plans and will let no one stand in his way.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #590538 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

About the Author
Tom Arden is an Australian now living with his partner in Brighton. He is the author of The Orokon, the critically acclaimed five-book fantasy sequence of which THE HARLEQUIN'S DANCE is the first novel.

Customer Reviews

Mini-masterpiece?
Mini-masterpiece, so why three stars? My over-riding feeling is that somewhere within the tangled plot threads was a jem (pardon the pun)of a story. There are too many characters - most of them inconsequential - and incidents -unnecessary - crammed in, obscuring the simple mythic story. Other critics believe the author did it deliberately and I think I agree. The middle part is almost entirely waffle. This is wasted space as at the end the characters come together in a frankly unbelievable way. It is perhaps unfair singling Arden out for this. Almost all current fantasy novels fail in this respect. It's a shame because this book is different. Arden conjures wonderful names for his characters e.g. Umbecca, Waxwell, Veeldrop etc and places e.g. Orandy, Mid-Lexion etc. His depiction of time and place are beautiful. He captures and dwells on the grotesque elements brilliantly.

If he had stuck to the essential characters and plot I genuinely think this would have been a mini-masterpiece.

Brilliant
I've just finished reading through this whole series and this is certainly the most brilliant new fantasy series I've read in years. It's also one of the weirdest. It's really dark and perverse in places, pure comedy in others. Considered on its own the story sounds naff: a boy on a quest for five magic crystals (he finds one at the end of each book). But the characterisation is brilliant (particularly the villains -- Aunt Umbecca, the town bully Polty, and the mad doctor Goodman Waxwell, who wants to amputate the hero's legs), the atmosphere of rising menace is stunningly buiilt up, and after a slow start the whole thing rises to the most stunning climax. And it all just gets better in the next volumes. (The ending of the whole series is totally unexpected, by the way.) Magnificent.

Not Quite the Age of Enlightenment
A good book which i really enjoyed, the characters have a lot more depth to them than your average fantasy novel, I also like the way that evil has human causes rather than supernatural "Dark Lords", "evil sorcerers" and "monsters". I particularly like the way the mythological prologue is turned on its head and shown to be nothing more than lies invented to justify racism and fanaticism. The reason however I only give it 3 stars is because i find its 18th century setting shallow and unconvincing, apart from occasional references to muskets and tricorn hats i find nothing really 18th century about it, it could equally be set in a "Celtic", "Medieval" or even "Arabian Nights" milieu. The writer seems to have seriously underestimed the sophistication and complexity of 18th century European culture, which included places as diverse as the mercantile and imperialistic Britain of King George the III, the decadent France of Voltaire and Louis the XVth, the warlike Prussia of Frederic the great, the cultured Austria of Mozart, and the backward and despotic Russia of Catherine the Great. He has tried to compress all this diversity into one single kingdom! It does not work, how could a culture as advanced and sophisticated as this arisen in one country? i hope in the next books he works harder on the setting, in its present state it jars terribly and detracts from what would have been an excellent Novel.