Odin's Son
by Susan Price
This is the third volume of the sequence known variously as the Odin Trilogy (Amazon) and the Mars Trilogy (Simon & Schuster). There is apparently no hardback though there was an earlier, more expensive, paperback released in February of this year.
So far, so puzzling of the publishers, who have also chosen to put a futuristic domed city on the front cover, instead of the portraits Larry Rostant used for the earlier volumes, Odin's Voice and Odin's Queen. So fanatical collectors will have a desperately non-matching set.
Still, it's what is between the covers that counts and it is definitely not a place for a new reader to start; the action follows on directly from the end of Odin's Queen and the trilogy has a complicated plot.
A bonder (a slave in this future world) on Earth cares for the adopted child of her owners, who is actually her own son. This woman eventually becomes known as Odinstoy or Odin's Voice because she seemed to be the mouthpiece or oracle for Odin, one of the many ancient gods worshipped in that society, and wins her freedom.
Meanwhile a wealthy and beautiful teenager called Affroditey loses everything when her father commits suicide and is sent to work as a bonder for Odinstoy's original owners.That gives her access to Odinstoy's son and the two women kidnap him and take him to Mars.
In the second book, Affroditey reverts to type as a spoiled teenager and gives away Odinstoy's secrets, putting them all in danger. Odin's Queen ended with Odinstoy committing suicide to escape the force of the law but by then she is a celebrity on Mars, believed by many to be a genuine consort and spokeswoman of the god.
In the last book, Odinstoy's legacy is twofold. Her political message is that the bonding system is wrong and everyone should be free. And her personal successors are Affie, now seeing the error of her ways, the child Odinsgift and a bonder known as John whom Affie bought as an accessory during her unreconstructed period.
The action jumps across the years, covering the period from when Gift is a pretty four-year-old to his teenage in which he has become inexplicably heavyset and lumpy with an inability to handle grammar and his own priavte language.(More so than an ordinary teenager!)
By the end he is living with Affie and John, who have both found ways of surviving on Mars as free individuals. Odin's Voice is by now a tourist attraction and focus of pilgrims, her body preserved in its own shrine.
Gift's quest is to find out who his father was, which necessitates a trip back to Earth. There he finds Sherri - otherwise known as Ugly Bucket - a heavyset and lumpy female boxer to whom he is irresistibly attracted.
The secret of Odinstoy's children is one it is impossible to guess and the book races to a fantastic conclusion in which political and ethical points are deftly made. But it is strange to have a whole book dominated by someone who is no longer alive.
Susan Price is a terrific writer and "The Sterkarm Handsahke" is one of my all time favourite books. But I have not found this trilogy quite so satisfying and I have a lot of little niggles with this book: why make Odin's Tree a yew instead of the Ash of the Poetic Edda? And "icanthus leaves" [sic] is plain wrong. I don't think this wonderful author has been well served by her editor or designer and for me this has muddied some of the strong ideas she was trying to convey. I'd like to see the books re-edited and re-issued as a single bind-up one day.