Saint Dorian and the Witch by Michael Raship

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Saint Dorian and the Witch is a splendid piece of fantasy, a personal journey and a love story set in a world torn apart by quarreling gods and religious fanaticism.

Bartholomew is a young monk, living in a monastery on the outer edge of an Empire that seems to take a great deal of inspiration from the landscapes and cultures of South Asia. The Empire is a very orderly place, ruled by an emperor and subordinate local kings, all supported by the powerful monastic order in which Bartholomew has been raised. Everyone reveres the great god Ael, the Lord of Destiny who maintains the rigid order of the world. Sometimes Ael sends a special servant, a “saint,” into the world to carry out some holy mission. The history of the Empire is full of tales of these saints, their special powers, and their epic struggles against chaos.

Bartholomew is a young man, but he has a special talent: he is a Librarian, someone who can not only read all of the sacred texts, but who can recite them from memory. Unfortunately, the more he studies the sacred texts, the less he believes in them, and the more he feels that there is something missing in the world under Ael’s dominion.

One day Bartholomew begins to dream of a new saint, one not yet recognized by the Empire and the monastic order. This new saint seems to promise the serenity that Bartholomew’s status as a monk and Librarian can no longer provide. Caught up in his new devotion, he leaves his monastery on a quest to join Saint Dorian in the heartland of the Empire. Along the way he meets Ruth, a young witch with her own special talent for spell-casting and magic.

What follows is a gorgeous tale woven around multiple themes: quests for spiritual fulfillment, the perils of religious fanaticism, the clash between order and chaos, the value of love and compassion, and the abiding power of stories. I found myself constantly surprised by the tale, constantly turning the page to see what might happen next.

Mechanically, the novel is very well put together. The prose style is impeccably clean, with a minimum of distractions and no copy-editing errors that I could catch. One thing that may throw some readers is that, for all the excellence of the world-building, the story is largely driven by the logic of myth. Things happen in the story because they’re dramatically appropriate, not always because they make coldly rational sense . . . but then, that appears to be part of the point.

I loved Saint Dorian and the Witch, quite a bit more than I expected when I began it. I came to the end of this book wishing for more. Very strongly recommended.