The Last Guardian

The Last Guardian is the second volume in David Gemmell's Jon Shannow trilogy, picking up the story of the Jerusalem Man, and it is a worthy and ambitious successor to the magnificent Wolf in Shadow. If you have not read the first book, begin there; while Gemmell takes care to make this accessible, the emotional weight of it depends on the journey Shannow has already taken. For those of us who followed him through the first novel, this is a rich and rewarding continuation.

The book takes place roughly two years after the events of Wolf in Shadow. The threat of the Hellborn has passed, all but two of the mysterious Guardians are dead, and the largest source of Sipstrassi has been destroyed, making the stones of power far rarer and harder to come by. We find Jon Shannow near death on a mountainside as the story opens, middle-aged now and conscious of his own slowing, still hunting brigands for coin from town to town, still pursuing his quest for the lost Jerusalem, and still regarded by many as more than half mad for it.

Gemmell does something genuinely bold with the structure here. The novel unfolds across two timelines: Shannow's own post-apocalyptic present, several hundred years after the Fall, and the world of ancient Atlantis, eight thousand years earlier. The connecting thread is one of Gemmell's most inventive uses of the Sipstrassi yet, for here the stones become a means of travelling between times and worlds. A gateway in time has been opened between drowned Atlantis and Shannow's broken present, and through it comes a terrible danger. Opposing Shannow and his companions is King Pendarric, a ruler who has come to regard himself as a god, wielding the corrupted Sipstrassi Bloodstones. Shannow, alongside old friends and new allies, including the formidable Beth McAdam and the Atlantean prophet Nu-Khasisatra, must find a way to stop the devastating forces Pendarric unleashes, all while a new community struggles to establish itself in Shannow's own time.

What I admire most about The Last Guardian is how it expands the canvas without losing the intimate, character-driven heart that made the first book so special. The Atlantis material could easily have felt like a distraction, but Gemmell weaves the two threads together with real skill, and the time-gate conceit lets him deepen the mythology of the Sipstrassi in fascinating ways. The book is fast-paced and action-packed, as you would expect, with battles and blood and death aplenty, but it is also shot through with love, faith and hard-won hope, the full mixture of emotions that marks Gemmell at his best. Shannow himself remains a compelling study, the ageing warrior confronting his own mortality and still trying, against all the evidence of his violent life, to be a good man.

It is worth recording a lovely piece of literary history attached to this book. In the foreword, Gemmell mentioned that while most reviews of Wolf in Shadow had been very good or merely indifferent, one critic had thoroughly disliked it, objecting in particular to the idea of anyone looking up to a man like Jon Shannow. Rather than bristle, Gemmell responded creatively: he introduced into the later novels a character, Josiah Broome, named for that reviewer, a man who regards all use of force as an evil in itself, precisely so that he could set Shannow's readiness to fight evil head-on against Broome's pacifism and let the reader weigh the two. It is a generous, characteristically thoughtful touch, and it tells you a great deal about the moral seriousness Gemmell brought to what some dismiss as mere adventure fiction.

First published in November 1989, The Last Guardian is a splendid middle volume, broader in scope than its predecessor and every bit as heartfelt. Highly recommended, and essential reading on the way to the trilogy's conclusion.