Bardic Voices - Series and Parallels

A long story is something that I always crave— it doesn't matter if it comes from books, films, TV shows, or a drunk friend who can endure talking for several hours. Over the years, I've followed many long stories— The Vampire Chronicles, The Sword of Truth (books, not The Legend of the Seeker TV show!), The Lord of the Rings (films), StarWars, Harry Potter (books and films), Rome (TV), et cetera— and I've sort of developed my own taste when it comes to these things. One thing that I don't mind about serials is when parts become too dependent on other parts. Another thing that I also don't mind is when parts are too independent of each other. But what I don't like is being left with too many lose ends after going through the entire series.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I read Mercedes Lackey's Bardic Voices series. It's a four-book series that starts with the story of a struggling, young musician who marries a master bard— leader of a group of freelance Gypsy-musicians who are being marginalised by the Bardic Guild— and ends with the story of a constable and a judiciar— a woman priest-mage, who is incidentally the master bard's cousin— who seem to be falling in love with each other as they try to catch a serial killer. Between the two are the stories of a young Gypsy couple who helped to bring down the rule of an abusive bishop; and of another Gypsy lady who falls in love with a bird-man as they help the High King set his priorities straight.

At face value, Bardic Voices is a very colourful long story that deals with boy-girl relationships, fighting against discrimination, looking after one's community or extended family, and beastiality (you read that right!). The entire series is easy-reading, you can probably breeze through all four books in one weekend. It also has those moments that will make you LOL, IRL. Having said that, I'm not really happy with it.

For one thing, and this is a nitpick, the world where all this takes place is called "Alanda". Alanda, for crying out loud! Now that that's out of the way...

In Alanda, there are elves. And while I like Lackey's elves and how they interact with humans, I am left with the feeling that their appearance in the series is a mere convenience. Now, I know that Lackey's written lots-and-lots of novels and short stories and that maybe a number of them are devoted to her elves. But their appearance in this particular series is either a gaping hole itself or a drain plug for plot holes that may have been resolved more gracefully.

But speaking of plumbing, the series is like a collection of small pipes some of which happen to come together at some point while others just lead away from it all. There's nothing wrong with that unless you're a person who thinks a main line is important because if you look in this mess of pipes, I doubt you'll find one. So in the end, the series appears to be a chronologically arranged anthology of biographies of people who happen to know each other; not as something that has a beginning, a middle, and a definite ending.

Spoiler: Oh yeah. That bird-main who falls in love with the Gypsy lady? He has a pecker.