The View from the Mirror (The Way Between the Worlds) - Softcover

Ian Irvine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140276823 ISBN 13: 9780140276824

Publisher: Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

There is a dark full moon on midwinter's day. The foretelling has come to pass. Rulke the Charon is unstoppable now. Karan is held captive in desolate Carcharon tower. Rulke plans to use her to find the Way between the Worlds. On the mountainside below, the allies await their fate. Karan's lover, Llian, is in chains, falsely accused of betraying her to the enemy. As the dark moon rises, Rulke begins to open the Way. If he succeeds, the world will be overwhelmed by the dread armies of the void. There is only one solution. Karan must be the sacrifice...

About this title

About the Author:

Ian Irvine, a marine scientist who has developed some of Australia's national guidelines for protection of the marine environment, has also written 27 novels. These include the internationally bestselling Three Worlds fantasy sequence (The View from the Mirror, The Well of Echoes and Song of the Tears), which has sold over a million copies, a trilogy of thrillers set in a world undergoing catastrophic climate change, Human Rites, and 12 books for younger readers, the latest being the humorous fantasy quartet, Grim and Grimmer. Ian is currently working on the third book of The Tainted Realm, Justice.

Review:

An extended fantasy sequence has always to deliver an impressive pay-off; The Way Between the Worlds is the fourth and final volume of Ian Irvine's "The View From the Mirror" and brings the quartet to a convolutedly triumphant finale. By now, Irvine has entirely involved our sympathies with the feckless, untrustworthy chronicler Llian and the heroic Karan, who loves him, and, to a lesser degree, to the profoundly morally ambiguous Magraith, whose loyalties have been so endlessly warped and abused by various key magical players in this struggle for the artefacts that will re-open the way through the dangers of the void to the home-worlds they lost. Much of the novel has always had to do with Llian's attempts to uncover precisely what occurred when the path between worlds was closed centuries earlier; Irvine plays fair, giving us some answers and making the sequence's resolution depend on those answers. For someone whose fiction plays so thoroughly with ethically grey areas, Irvine is also admirable in his preparedness to sort out endings that feel right; this is a book in which heroes and villains alike get a part of what they want, but a sort of justice as well. Irvine has brought both a lively intelligence and a keen moral sense to the heroics and spell-play of the modern fantasy novel. * Roz Kaveney *

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Australia Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140276823
• ISBN 13: 9780140276824
• Binding: Paperback