Flight of the Night Hawks (Darkwar #1) – Raymond E Feist
HarperCollins Voyager, 2005
420 pages
RRP: AU$45 (hbk), AU$32.95 (tpbk), AU$21.95 (pbk)
ISBN: 0-00-713374-x

Reviewed by Sarah Parker

Originally, I was drawn into this novel by the two characters in the opening chapter. It’s been a while since I visited the Kelewan/Midkemia books. I still think Magician is one of the best fantasy novels ever written, a quintessential read which has all the best elements of fantasy put together in a way that kept me entranced for all 800 plus pages. Flight of the Night Hawks, however is not Magician. I found that this novel told me more about my own expectations and experiences than it did about engaging me into a story.

I enjoyed parts of this novel. I enjoyed the easy reading style and somewhat easy thinking story, but also found myself quite frustrated with jumps between characters and stories. The novel opens with two young men and their mother who have a simple and hard life, and their brush with the magicians at Stardock. I liked this part of the story, and found myself reading on in the hope that there would be more. I was particularly interested in Feist’s writing of the boys’ mother.

However, she disappears rapidly, and throughout the rest of the novel I was held in hope that Feist would get beyond the mother/whore dichotomy, and in small, small ways he did. Our female character was allowed to feel for her sons, be intelligent, and be articulate even though poverty stricken.

I’m tired of the boys’ own adventure novels. Flight of the Night Hawks is pure male fantasy wank with very little that is new or interesting. The interesting characters at the beginning get ignored for old favourites from previous books, and there is so much drawn from previous novels that I was continuously thrown out of the story line and left wondering “Why is that important to this story? What is happening with this story again? Why would I care about that?”

If you’re a big follower of the Magicians of Stardock, then you might find some value of this novel, but I found that the story was all foreshadowing for the next book. I also discovered that I no longer have the patience to care about what happens in the next book until I have the next book in my hand… and so I found this novel lost points for me for wasting yet more of my time.

So, good points were: easy reading ability, some likeable characters, and not too many pages. Bad points include cardboard cutout female characters, too many characters in the novel, more foreshadowing than storyline, and a bunch of references to other novels that quite simply bored me.