Feast of Souls - C.S. Friedman

Have you read Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites? It's the third Discworld book. Yeah, take a little time to remember what it's like. Okay.

Now remove all humor. Make it over twice as long. Add a whole bunch of characters, but not any particular reason to care about them. That's Feast of Souls.

If you haven't read Equal Rites...

Okay, so, in Feast of Souls, the magic system is a pretty brilliant premise. Basically, everyone has a fixed amount of life-force (the book calls it "athra"... think of it as your soul) that, in a normal person, will eventually weather out and die in however long that person's natural lifespan is. To do magic, you need to call upon that life-force within yourself, but doing so means you're going to die that much sooner. A fun quote to illustrate this: "It was easy to part with a second of your life to learn a man's name; it was another thing to offer up years of your existence for a single fragment of knowledge." People who do this kind of magic are called witches, whether they are male or female.

But some people aren't willing to accept the fact that magic forces them to die early. And when they've used up their entire athra, they are somehow able to reach out and grab someone else's and use it to fuel their life and their magic. Because they no longer directly sacrifice anything to do magic, and because you can do pretty much whatever you want with magic if you're willing to spend the power, these people are very nearly immortal and all-powerful, restricted largely only by laws they've set up between themselves to prevent total chaos. These people are called Magisters, and they are all men. They theorize that a woman just can't handle the whole kill-someone-else-for-life-and-power thing, over and over and over again. (When the person a Magister is draining, called their consort, dies, the Magister has to get a new person to keep them alive. That's called Transition, and the seconds between consorts is one of the few times a Magister is actually vulnerable. I should also mention that Magisters have no idea who their consorts are--they're just random people, somewhere out in the world. They make no effort to find out.) 

But lo and behold one woman isn't satisfied with killing herself for magic, so instead of being a witch she wants to be a Magister. And she manages to do it, and... okay, so the plot similarities with Equal Rites are mostly gone after a hundred pages or so. But it's what came to mind as I started reading it.

While this is going on there's all sorts of boring political stuff, and then a whole lot of the plot leads towards the apparently separate threads meeting, and when it happens it's supremely anticlimactical, and oh yeah the whole world is in danger from some other threat but I really didn't care because the main character was busy not developing.

Other fun facts: I don't think the main character's hair was described in any way other than as a "corona" throughout the whole book. And the word "patina" was used three times in the first 52 pages, once metaphorically.

It's the first of a trilogy. I won't be getting the rest of it. I really do like this magic premise, I just wish it hadn't been wasted in a boring book.