Review: Toothless
A confession: I have a near allergy to the sword-and-sorcery branch of the fantasy genre. There’s no good reason for this, some of my favorite books are firmly ensconced in the tradition, but I never buy them and I have to be forced at sword point to read them, so I doubt I would have picked up J.P. Moore’s Toothless on my own. Not that Toothless is even properly part of the genre, but it has magic and knights which is enough to scare me off. Then a friend sent it to me as an All Hallow’s Read gift (thanks Adam!), and the gesture was so touching that I felt I had to give it a chance.
The story itself is actually a lot of fun, in a sad and gruesome sort of way. In the world of the book, the Crusades have given way to a different war - the battle with The Yew, a sort of sentient tree that commands an army of demons and the undead and is rapidly conquering the world.
With each battle, The Yew adds to his forces by reanimating dead soldiers into zombies. Some are shambling, mindless corpses, but others retain some of the intelligence and skills of their living selves, though they remember little or nothing of their former selves. The intelligent zombies, or “Sentients,” are valuable and can become trusted leaders in the army of the Yew.
The title character, Toothless, is a former member of the Knights Templar, a medieval order of church soldiers that figured big in the Crusades. By the time we meet him, Europe is all but lost, his wife and daughter are dead of a plague spread by the Yew, and he is engaged in a battle that he knows will end his life. Just a few pages into the book he is one of the undead, with only fleeting memories of his former life and a consuming hunger for killing.
To tell what happens after that would spoil the book for you, but I’d like to talk a little about my own reading of the book. In my reading, the story of Toothless (the character, not the book itself) is the story of grief. The author gives the reader brief glimpses of the happy family that Toothless lost, and these scenes are heartbreaking, especially to a soft touch like me.
The disconnect that Toothless feels from his old life, his betrayals of former ideals, his desire to simply melt into mindless death are telling metaphors for the experience of losing a loved one. And even at the end of the story when the character comes to a sort of redemption, he is still not able to completely return to being the man he was. He receives relief, but he is not restored.
That brings me to my one gripe with the book. It’s not accurate to say the hero is left unrestored, though that’s my reading and I’m sticking to it. Perhaps in an attempt to provide emotional satisfaction, Moore allows Toothless to ascend to a new plane of existence (heaven?) where his wife and child are waiting for him. To me, this felt like a cheat, but that may just be because it ran counter to what I wanted the book to mean.
Toothless is available in trade paperback, or in a free audio version at podiobooks.com.
