The Way Between The Worlds

An extended fantasy sequence has always to deliver an impressive pay-off; The Way Between the Worlds is the fourth and final volume of Ian Irvine's "The View From the Mirror" and brings the quartet to a convolutedly triumphant finale. By now, Irvine has entirely involved our sympathies with the feckless, untrustworthy chronicler Llian and the heroic Karan, who loves him, and, to a lesser degree, to the profoundly morally ambiguous Magraith, whose loyalties have been so endlessly warped and abused by various key magical players in this struggle for the artefacts that will re-open the way through the dangers of the void to the home-worlds they lost. Much of the novel has always had to do with Llian's attempts to uncover precisely what occurred when the path between worlds was closed centuries earlier; Irvine plays fair, giving us some answers and making the sequence's resolution depend on those answers. For someone whose fiction plays so thoroughly with ethically grey areas, Irvine is also admirable in his preparedness to sort out endings that feel right; this is a book in which heroes and villains alike get a part of what they want, but a sort of justice as well. Irvine has brought both a lively intelligence and a keen moral sense to the heroics and spell-play of the modern fantasy novel.