Bloodstone

Bloodstone is the third and final volume of David Gemmell's Jon Shannow trilogy, and it brings the saga of the Jerusalem Man to a close with all of Gemmell's customary style and grace. I have said of both earlier books that I consider them among Gemmell's finest work, and I will say it again here; many readers reckon Bloodstone the best of the three, and on a good day I am inclined to agree. As the final part of a trilogy it is impossible to discuss without some spoilers for what has gone before, so if you have not yet read Wolf in Shadow and The Last Guardian, go and do that first. You will not regret it.

The book makes a daring leap. It is set some twenty years after the events of The Last Guardian, and the world has changed utterly. The Jerusalem Man himself has long since vanished and is now revered as a saint, the founding figure of a powerful new religious order that controls the land; to speak ill of his memory is counted as heresy. But the order that bears his name has curdled into tyranny. It is ruled by a figure known only as the Deacon, who came through the gateways of time, and his Jerusalem Riders enforce his will with terrible cruelty, spreading bigotry and hatred, massacring Unbelievers and Mutants in the name of God and peace. Gemmell is doing something pointed and uncomfortable here, examining how a good man's legacy can be twisted into something monstrous, how righteousness curdles into persecution, and it gives the book a real thematic bite.

Then the church at Pilgrim's Valley is burned and its congregation slaughtered, and a lone rider appears to hunt down those responsible. Wounded, his memory shattered, he combats evil the only way he has ever known, head-on and with both guns blazing, and word spreads like wildfire across the broken land: the Jerusalem Man has returned. I will not spell out the connections Gemmell draws between Shannow, the Deacon and the legend that has grown up around the Jerusalem Man, because untangling them is one of the book's deep pleasures, but they are handled with a cleverness and an emotional honesty that took me by surprise.

And behind the human conflict lurks something far darker. Beyond the Deacon and his crusade waits a genuinely terrifying antagonist: Sarento, the living embodiment of a great stone of power, the Bloodstone of the title, a god-like being who feeds on the lifeblood of innocents and on the very souls of worlds, and who means to come through the gateways and bring about the end of everything. It is a fittingly apocalyptic threat for the close of the series, and the final confrontation delivers a twist I genuinely did not see coming.

What I love about Bloodstone is that it is, at heart, the story of a broken man in a broken world, and Gemmell never loses sight of that humanity even as the stakes swell to the cosmic. The trilogy's recurring faces return, Beth McAdam and others among them, alongside compelling newcomers, and Gemmell once again goes looking for the greatness in ordinary, flawed people, which has always been the true subject of his work. There is action and adventure in abundance, the western and the gospel and the science-fiction strands braided together as only Gemmell could manage, but it is the characters who linger.

First published in 1994, Bloodstone is a fitting and genuinely moving send-off for one of fantasy's great tortured heroes. Jon Shannow is a fantastic character, and this is, once more, Gemmell at the very height of his powers. A magnificent conclusion to a trilogy I adore, and further proof, if any were needed, that the Jon Shannow books deserve to be spoken of among the best work this much-missed author ever produced.