Jade War

"I chose Jade War because that’s what I read most recently, but I think it’s probably worth just talking about the whole series, which is three books. I’ve got Jade Legacy on my desk to read next. It starts with Jade City, which totally hooked me in when I was in a bit of a slump with genre reading – which obviously happens when you read nothing but genre stuff for a long time. I was utterly enthralled by it. Jade City is in a fantastical version of Hong Kong, or maybe Singapore – an island East Asian nation called Kekon. It’s about gangsters: it’s a crime family drama. The gangsters take their power from jade. Jade stone has magical properties in this world, and they fashion it into jewellery: necklaces and bangles and earrings. The higher you ascend within the crime family, the more jade you get. If you kill someone, you get their jade by right. It’s a very strict moral code amongst the clans; even within the rival gang families, you’re entitled to the jade of your vanquished opponent, and then you get stronger. It’s a bit like in Game of Thrones – where the Starks are the good guys, the Lannisters are the bad guys, but that becomes a bit more murky and grey as time goes on, as these things always do. You start off following the Kauls, and the head of the family called Kaul Lan. He’s a level-headed, honourable guy in his forties. He’s getting a bit sick and tired of the clan fighting. His head of operations is out on the street, cracking skulls; he’s a hot head and a liability. His sister is the brains of the operation, and together they manage the family. What Fonda does brilliantly is make you care about them. This is what all good fiction does. If you think of all the books that you’ve enjoyed, I guarantee they’ll have one thing in common: the author will spend time, often quite a lot of time, in a relatively conflict-free opening quarter of the novel, building up the characters and their relationships. Game of Thrones did this really, really well. In the first TV season of Game of Thrones , nothing really happens in the first four episodes. But you spend time with the Starks and you spend time with the Lannisters, and you get introduced to the characters in the world. And so by the time something happens, that first duel between Ned Stark and Jaime Lannister in King’s Landing, it feels very impactful and very stressful to watch. In Jade City , we’re so invested in the characters, you can almost just read happily about the status quo. If nothing happened, that’d be a very pleasant reading experience. So when the fights start to kick off and people start to die and the clans and the crime families go to war with one another, it actually becomes a very stressful reading experience! It’s so utterly compelling though, you have to find out what happens, and she does it so skilfully. I just couldn’t put it down. It was such a unique setting as well. When people think of fantasy, they sometimes think of knights on horseback and dragons. It isn’t that at all. There’s a massive breadth. Modern fantasy is a different animal to the fantasy of fifty or sixty years ago."