Acacia – Book One: The War with the Mein is a vast, ambitious first foray into fantasy for professor and novelist David Anthony Durham. Durham’s last novel was historical fiction and this background has served the author well, enabling him to create a richly textured universe, deeply saturated with politics, history, mysticism, and an identifiable human component.
The island of Acacia is the seat of power for the Known World, ruled for generations by the Akaran dynasty. The current king, Leodan, has four children whom he loves deeply – sons Aliver and Dariel, daughters Corinn and Mena – and who have grown up in the lap of luxury, indulged but instructed in the ways of their people. What the king has kept from his children, however, is the harsh reality of the Akaran legacy; their great wealth and power has been funded by slave labor and drug trafficking. The ruling class has a business arrangement with some very nefarious people: Leodan supplies an annual quota of children, taken from all the countries under his rule, in exchange for a supply of “the mist,” a narcotic that keeps his suppressed subjects docile.
When brutal invaders from the North, led by the ruthless and charismatic Hanish Mein, attack and easily decimate the Acacians, the Akaran children’s lives are irrevocably and utterly changed. Sent by their father to the far reaches of the Known World, the children grow up, alone and with little recollection of their Acacian heritage. It is their destiny, however, to find each other again, after they have discovered their true selves, and reunite to challenge the Mein for control of the world.
Acacia is a massive book (753 pages in the mass market paperback) and there is a lot going on in it. The pace is slow at first, with nearly 200 pages passing before the action really kicks into gear. But this time is spent laying out the historical, political and religious foundations of this new fantasy world, as well as introducing the myriad characters and peoples that populate it. Because there are so many separate plot threads, Durham uses the narrative technique of focusing on a single character’s story in each chapter, much like Robert Jordan did in the latter books of the Wheel of Time series. Unlike Jordan, however, Durham is conscientious about circling back to each character: although I found it difficult to connect emotionally with the characters in the first half of the volume, by the close of Book One I felt that I knew them and had gotten good resolution to their stories.
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