Author: David Farland
Cover Artist: Darrell K. Sweet
Publisher: Tor
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 2007
Sons of the Oak is the fifth novel in the Runelords series. It is set in a world where attributes such as brawn, wit, stamina or metabolism can be transferred from one person to another using the ancient runelore and forcibles of rare blood metal. The person who gives such an endowment, a dedicate, loses the attribute when the receiver, known as Runelords, exhibit superhuman strength, speed, stamina etc. A warrior with a dozen endowments to his credit thus becomes practically invincible to a common man. Not until his dedicates die will a Runelord become a normal person again, making them valuable to their lord and interesting targets for assassins. The consequences of this concept are disturbing, the economics quite impossible, but this is fantasy, I thought the idea interesting at least. It strikes me as a medieval arms race.
This book is something of a new beginning, though I would not recommend starting here. In the first four books we are told about the struggles of Gaborn Val Orden, the fist Earthking in two thousand years, and his struggles against the Reavers and the powers that control them. Now, nine years on, his many endowments of metabolism have aged him and his wife Iome prematurely. They know they will not live to see their sons Falion and Jaz grow up. Before he dies Gaborn charges Sir Boreson and his wife Myrrima with the care of his two boys. Knowing them in terrible danger, Gaborn manages to send them one last warning before he dies. Run, beyond the ends of the earth is not far enough. And surely enough, as soon as the Earthking dies his enemies try to control or get rid on his nine year old heir. So begins a desperate flight to safety for Falion, Jaz and Boreson’s family.
Falion, the main character of this novel is not your typical nine year old. He is a Son of the Oak, born in a time of plenty under the Earthking’s rule, to a generation that is somehow brighter and more talented than their ancesters, Falion is wise beyond his years. He is very quick to understand the way of the world. His father sensed this in him and realized Falion had greater potential than even he had, both to do evil or good. Throughout the book Falion struggles with good and evil in the world and especially in himself. The book is more or less centred around Falion’s exploration of these themes, we learn very little of the evil that threatens him or it’s motives.
The constant stream of insights into the nature of good and evil make Falion a very unlikely nine year old. I know it fits in the story but Farland overdoes it. There is very little boyish about him. I once wrote on the first Runelords novel The Sum of All Men that the book read like it had had an endowment of metabolism as well. Farland rushed that story on at great speed. I think he rushes here again, but in another way. The world has barely had time to catch it’s breath when the next (too young) hero of the realm stands ready to battle evil. A hero that ought to be severely traumatized by what he’s seen. I was not impressed with the way Farland handled the coming of age of Falion and since there is very little else about this novel, except a rather abrupt break with most of the remaining characters from the previous four books, I am not impressed with this novel as a whole.
Farland uses this book to introduce a new hero and set the stage for an new epic struggle between good and evil. Perhaps that is to be expected in a first book of a new sequence. Unfortunately he does so with an unlikely main character, fighting an unknown evil whose motives remain unclear until the last revelation in the book. A revelation that is almost added as an afterthought. I never considered Farland’s Runelords series five star material but I enjoyed the previous four a lot more. I certainly hope the sixth volume Worldbinder, recently published in hardcover, will be more convincing.
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