Anselm Audley - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Publishers Weekly declared,

"Expectant readers will find a competent, appealing but rather standard sword-and-super-science tale... Audley successfully suggests a complex society through a bewildering mass of historical and political details, but he's less adept at showing how the society actually functions. In particular, it's hard to imagine how hand weapons have developed only as far as swords and crossbows while high-tech submarines launch "flame lances" and torpedoes at each other. He's also better, so far, at presenting characters frozen in uncertain pondering than he is at describing direct action. Still, the size and scope of this novel demonstrate Audley's energy and ambition."

Library Journal added, "The author's skill at portraying young people caught up in world-shaking events should appeal to YA readers as well as general fantasy fans." John Toon wrote of the trilogy, "All in all, Aquasilva is a promising start from Audley, and bodes well for his authorial future, but there's still plenty of work to be done if he's to rise among the ranks of the fantasy greats." Kirkus Reviews concluded that Heresy is "an impressively fluent, highly charged debut where everything happens at breakneck speed."

SF Site was fairly impressed, too, saying,

"For those who, after reading Dune, had a desire for more politics, scheming, and backstabbing, Heresy might be just the book that you are looking for. In addition to the already mentioned religious conflicts, there is the more traditional scheming done by the Tanethann Great Houses in pursuit of riches and of the Domain in its quest for more power. The web of politics is very well done, especially when different plots all start to come around one focal point... Overall the story is well put together and effectively told, although there is one element of the story that seems a little bit unsatisfactory. The are a couple of points in the story where a character has a complete about-face of their personality, without any warning signals or reasons given thereafter. While I am sure that Audley may explain what has happened in later books, the sudden and drastic changes seem somewhat awkward."

Reviewer (and Hitchhiker's Guide actor) Michael Cule took a dissenting view, finding Heresy unoriginal and suffering "from a lack of attention to the finer points":

"Well, it is apparently written up from somebody's school D&D campaign... And we have the magic divided up, for no clearly explained reason, into elements (the usual Earth, Air, and so on, plus a couple of extra ones). We have it clearly color-coded and several of the characters, too (assassins in black, flame priests in red). We have the great, big, evil religion that's the main villain with no clear explanation of what the tenets of the faith are, nor how it differs from the faith of the heretics who are the good guys. You would think that a novel with this title would give a damn about the nature of the gods and belief. But no, the religious war is just a big plot device without anything to back it up, just there to provide something for the wicked characters to gloat about.
In fact, we have half of the list of fantasy clichés from Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide To Fantasyland regurgitated unselfconsciously from the general well of lazy genre writing."