Book Review: A Dream of Kinship

Book Review: 'A Dream of Kinship' by Richard Cowper

3 / 5 Stars

'A Dream of Kinship' (240 pp.) was published by Pocket Books / Timescape in August, 1981. The cover artist is uncredited.

This is the second book in the so-called 'White Bird of Kinship' trilogy. The initial volume in the trilogy is 'The Road to Corlay' (1978) and the final volume, 'A Tapestry of Time', was published in 1982.

My review of 'The Road to Corlay' is available here.

'Richard Cowper' was the pen name of the UK writer John Middleton Murry, Jr. (1926 - 2002).

'Dream' opens in 3019 AD, just after the events of 'The Road to Corlay'. The Kinship, a sort of post-Christian sect heavily imbued with humanism, is under persecution by the Catholic Church and its head inquisitor, the malevolent Lord Constant. Across the archipelagos that constitute the former British Isles and northern France, the agents of Lord Constant maneuver to detect and extirpate the followers of the White Bird (the talisman of the Kinsman, and a sort of New Age analogue to the Holy Spirit).

Corlay, a city in Brittany, is under secular protection and seemingly safe from the actions of the Church. However, in the opening chapters of 'Dream' we are introduced to the Magpie, an enigmatic soldier of fortune and convert to the Kinship. The Magpie has come to Corlay filled with a sense of unease, and anxious to see to the welfare of Jane, the young widow of Thomas of Norwich, an early acolyte of the faith and the man who best knew the boy Tom of Cartmel, the John-the-Baptist analogue introduced in 'Corlay'.

Jane and her circle are reluctant to believe that the Church would dare strike at them in the safety of Corlay. But as the Magpie is about to discover, it is not just the survival of the Kinship that is a stake, but the survival of the boy, Tom, that Jane soon is to birth. For Tom is to be no ordinary child, but one gifted with strange powers, powers for good, but also for ill. And the Lord Constant fears for the change that will overtake his world if Tom is allowed to live...... 

I gave 'The Road to Corlay' a three-star Rating and I am content with bestowing the same Rating for 'A Dream of Kinship.'

The opening chapters of 'Dream' are the best, being well-crafted in terms of building suspense and pathos unfolding amid the wintry hills and desolate fields of Brittany. 

The remaining two-thirds of the novel are considerably less dramatic, as they constitute a bildungsroman centered on the youth and maturation of Jane's son Tom, and his talent for piping songs that bring a sense of the otherworldy to his listeners. Interspersed with the adventures of Tom are incidents dealing with the at-times lethal geopolitics of the Kingdoms making up what used to be the British Isles. 

Curiously, in 'Dream', author Cowper abandons the science fiction sub-plot present in 'Corlay.' I found this improved the novel, allowing Cowper to focus more fully on his pastoral, post-apocalyptic civilization, which he depicts with considerable affection. 

Summing up, those who read 'The Road to Corlay' will want to pursue this second volume in the trilogy. It's a fantasy novel with a skillful prose style on the part of author Cowper. However, 'A Dream of Kinship' does have a deliberate, character-centered pacing, and those accustomed to the broader and more exciting scale of 'epic' fantasy storytelling may find 'Dream' to be lacking in this regard.