Merlin's Keep

Merlin's Keep

By Madeleine Brent

Jani, the strange and lovely heroine, has been brought up in a remote region of the Himalayas in Tibet by a runaway English soldier. Both Jani’s past and that of her soldier protector are shrouded in a mystery that grows ever deeper for Jani when the foreign demon on a black horse comes from the south to take her away to a new and frightening world—a London orphanage. Later, when she moves on and finds the Woman in Red, Jani becomes one of the family in a Hampshire household. And it is here that her past is gradually uncovered. She becomes locked in a macabre struggle, long prophesied by the High Lama of her Tibetan youth, against the strange and terrifying powers of the Silver Man.

Merlin's Keep is still in the classic Brent style, but is a little bit less...action-filled, maybe? I say this about a book in which a young girl's protector dies in snow storm like, thirty pages in, and then she has to make it through diphtheria, orphanages, sexual harassment, poisonous snakes, sinister magicians (like real magic, not David Copperfield), dangerous trips through the Himalayas, hallucinations, tibetan bandits, snow leopards, and the East End of London.  But there's a lot less activity on our heroine's part - she is basically packed up and sent from place to place by other people for the entire book.  I think the only initiative she takes on her own steam is her trip to the East End, looking for her friend.

Brent sets this somewhere in the Himalayas, and is quite a bit vaguer on location than he/she was in Stormswift.  For example, they're not supposed to be in either Nepal or Tibet, but both are close by.  Namkhara is a place, but it's in West Bengal, too far east (ironically) to make much sense in context.  And "Chak Pass" seems made up.  It does seem like we spend less time in the foreign country than we usually do in Brent's books, which is too bad, since I was excited to  re-read this one because of my time out in Nepal.  Merlin's Keep also has a big supernatural element, which is also somewhat uncommon for Brent.  

I think the lack of action is part of the reason I don't really remember this one so well, and why it's not so much a favorite.  There's a big macguffin in the way of a precious gem which they need to steal, except that they're fated to steal it anyway, so it's not that much of a heist.  Overall, like I said, just not my favorite, plus I loved how hypocritical Jani was about the Silver Man's use of her friend in his magic spells, but Jani (TWICE) has him use it for her benefit too (first to find her friend, then to heal his blindness), so I guess you don't feel that bad about it, huh? And we're just going to ignore whatever her friend was doing in Jamaica to piss off a hoodoo practitioner, I guess.  And the vet is so weird, too, proposing to Jani because well, she's there, and this other woman he liked already got married, so may as well ask around.  Hmmmm, okay, Jan.