The First Wall by Gav Thorpe

Brilliantly narrated let down by story

I’ve listened to every Siege of Terra audiobook so far and they’re all very good and worth picking up, so my criticisms here should be seen in light of that.

Firstly, The First Wall is brilliantly narrated. The action scenes in particular convey a sense of pace and urgency that draws you into the moment. Voices are generally excellent, although I wish space marines had a wider range of accents than “standard British” and “cockney British”. Overall, though, another superlative narration.

The story, however, is not equal to the task. That’s not to say it’s not good, it certainly is, and there are moments of excellence. But it lacks the sense of scale that the previous book, The Lost and the Damned, conveyed so brilliantly.

Switching between the viewpoints of Dorn, Abaddon, Perturabo, Keeler, the Custodes, various human soldiers (including a too brief appearance by Katsuhiro from the last novel), traitor marines, Imperial Fists, Sigismund, Layak and others means that you never get to spend enough time with any one character to really get invested in what they’re doing.

I actually enjoyed the story of the Addaba Free Corps which others seemed to dislike, but even then I think it could have been removed in favour of returning to Katsuhiro. Zenobi was a decent character and I liked seeing the”war”from her point of view. I use air quotes here because her story is about her and her fellow soldiers getting to the battle, rather than actually taking part in the fighting. This results in lots of “When will we get there?” and “I wonder what the battle will be like” moments. This is in contrast to the story of Katsuhiro from the last novel which managed to convey the same sense of foreboding, but also threw in the chaos of experiencing battle for the first time and developed him from a terrified, ignorant draftee to a terrified, relatively experienced soldier. I would have greatly preferred to see him return. He does make an appearance, but it’s so brief that it feels disjointed.

But my greatest criticism is the treatment of the conflict between Dorn and Perturabo. It could visually be summed up as the two titans impotently shaking their fists at each other. I don’t want to spoil anything, but suffice to say that the anticipated conflict between the masters of siege warfare was disappointing in the extreme.

This review no doubt makes it seem as though I hated the book, which I didn’t. I enjoyed parts of it immensely while grinding through others. Other reviews have said that about two thirds of the story is disappointing and tough to get through and I’d agree with that. Grab it if you have to have every chapter of the Siege storyline, but you could comfortably skip this one and be none the worse for it.

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