Review: Battleaxe by Sara Douglass

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

I didn't expect BattleAxe to hit this hard again.

This was my third or fourth time through Sara Douglass's BattleAxe. I first read it in the summer of 1995, when it came out in Australia, and while it wasn't the book that turned me on to reading, it was absolutely the book that turned me on to fantasy. I'd always been into fantasy on film, but fantasy fiction had didn't really grabbed me as much. I remember slogging through The Lord of the Rings and finding it kind of dull or at least not something that pulled me in.

And then here was this 600-plus-page book that I flew through in two weeks. I'd never read a book that big before, never mind a book that big in two weeks. I got pulled along in this really lovely way. I became deeply interested in this new world of characters, and just plain fascinated by what Sara Douglass was doing.

This is not the first time that I've mentioned Sara Douglass and her work here.  Years ag, I reviewed The Serpent Bride which is the first book in the third trilogy that she writes about this fantasy world. I've also mentioned BattleAxe as one of the books that made me a reader.

Reading it almost thirty years later, I'm struck by how much it still pulls me in. I found myself reading 50 pages at a sitting when normally, at night, I might do 20. I kept coming back to it, thinking about it, wanting to return to it. And even though I remembered the broad shape of the story (it had been twenty years since my last reread), scenes felt new again. I kept having that "I didn't remember that" experience, or "oh, I forgot that."

What stood out most this time wasn't only Axis, even though the novel is named for him as the BattleAxe. In fact, rereading it now, I realize how much of the book belongs equally to Faraday and Azhure. Maybe half of it, if not more, is theirs.

Douglass was writing epic fantasy in the early-to-mid '90s. The world she crafts is still very heteronormative. The humans are patriarchal, the Icarii are patriarchal, and it's less clear with the Avar. But there's still something different going on here. Women can be leaders. Women can be fighters. Faraday and Azhure aren't side notes to the epic; they become central to the whole thing.

Faraday interested me more this time, though I was less convinced of her transformation from naive girl at court into this mother-figure of nature, this icon of the mother goddess. Yet there's a strength in her after that shift that shows up much earlier than I remembered.

The most compelling character for me this time, though, was Belial. His support and care for Axis, his willingness to trust him and stand with him felt like one of those forms of positive masculinity that's genuinely meaningful to see on the page. Belial could so easily undermine Axis, or do him harm. Instead there's this gentle dedication between the two of them. Their friendship endures real and significant challenges, and it becomes one of the emotional cores of the book. When Axis reunites with the Icarii and discovers he has a family, that moment lands--not only because of the reunion, but because Belial is right there too; Axis's de facto family. The person who's cared for him and stayed by his side all along. If there was fan-fic for this series, those two would definitely need to be shipped.

I also appreciated Douglass's worldbuilding more this time around. She doesn't dump everything on you at once, but she doesn't withhold forever either. It's less "need to know" and more "soon you may need to know". That makes a huge difference. She gives you enough for the world to keep opening up: around Axis and Faraday, then around Azhure, the Icarii, the Avar. The book never gets lost trying to hand you every last detail. Things happen. Characters talk. The story moves.

That pacing is probably one of the strongest things about BattleAxe. The prose still feels clean and propulsive. At the end of a chapter or a section, something has actually happened: meaning has deepened, characters have moved. There's travel, but we don't need every day of the travel. We get the sense of it, the challenge of it, the key moments of it. The book has peak moments all the way through: tension, discovery, self-realization, emotional arrival. It doesn't rush, but it also doesn't stuff too much at you.

That doesn't mean everything works perfectly for me now. The story's prophecy felt a little too clean this time; not too straightforward exactly, but too efficient. It lines the world up, gets everyone on board, and slots characters into place very quickly. The viral way the prophecy spreads among the humans felt less believable to me now.  People hear it and fall into belief a bit too easily. I found myself wondering what it might've been like if only certain people held pieces of the prophecy, or if its meaning had stayed fragmented for longer. The book does some of that. Just not as much as it probably could have.

Borneheld felt a little too one-dimensional at times, too. There's some nuance there, and the book hints that he's still trying to figure things out. But because we don't really get his point of view until the final third through and by then, his disposition can feel a bit caricatured.  I think there was more to play with there.  

From a nostalgia point of view, none of that really hurts the story for me. So much of rereading BattleAxe was just being reimmersed in the tale. But I can see how someone coming to it new in a modern context might find some of it more clichéd, given how much fantasy has changed in thirty years. 

It's hard for me not to connect BattleAxe with the rest of what I was reading around that time--Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince books, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth. And for me, BattleAxe still shines above all of them. Not because it's the most amazing of those series in some grand ranking, but because it's the easiest and most enjoyable to read. It's accessible, it's compelling, and it's full of the right hallmarks of epic fantasy: worldbuilding, character development, myth, tension, emotional stakes, and that sense that the world just keeps getting bigger.

I'm still disappointed Sara Douglass never took off in the United States the way she did in Australia. Because reading her now, thirty years on, I think her work holds up beautifully. BattleAxe is still a strong book, with really good characters and really good writing. It still pulls me in.

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