Interview with Matt Barron
Prentice Ash returns! In 2018, I interviewed Matt Barron after reading his self-published debut. He has since found a home for Prentice Ash and has republished it with Blade of Truth Publishing, and written some sequels. He’s here to answer the same questions—but perhaps with a different perspective.
Q: So tell us about Prentice Ash. What's the story about?
A: Prentice is a former knight convicted for heresy against the Church, who has been transported to the frontier to be worked to death as a kind of slave labourer. That's how the Grand Kingdom builds itself, with exploited labour. In war, convicts are used as a kind of "cannon fodder", thrown at the enemy to tie them down while the knights wait for the perfect chance to charge in and win the day. The life of a convict is nasty, brutish and typically short.
But no life in this society is free and easy. The Grand Kingdom is a strongly stratified society ruled by a hereditary nobility. Everyone's social rank is important, from the lowest to the highest. Everyone's watching everyone else for how to behave, making sure lessers respect their betters, trying to rise in privilege while fearing a possible fall in status.
The story begins when the Grand Kingdom is invaded by an unknown enemy from beyond the western frontier, an area that should be uninhabited. Prentice and his friends are swept up in the fighting, including my other main character, the Duchess Amelia. Young and recently widowed, she finds herself the ruler of the frontier province, the Western Reach. Her problems trying to defend her lands and people are compounded by the fact that she was not born a noble. She married into her title because of her family's money, paying the Duke's enormous debts. Despite this calculated start, she and her husband fell in love nonetheless, but no one believes that. Even her own nobles see her as an upstart who bought her title; now the money's all gone to pay the past debts and there's a new war on her province's doorstep.
Amelia is young, but she's not stupid. Honourable and loyal, she understands her responsibility to her late husband's people, who are now her people, and she knows that disunity and petty ambition inside her realm will be fatal. From different directions, Amelia and Prentice both comprehend the horrors that the Grand Kingdom's strict social structures inflict on its peoples. This helps them bond and assist each other to overcome the invasion from the west and the treacheries that threaten to collapse the Grand Kingdom from within.
I don't want to give away much more than that, but there's conspiracies, competing factions, religious visions, ferocious monsters and dark sorceries in the mix as well. Readers should expect sword & sorcery more than high fantasy -more Aragorn, not so much Gandalf.
Q: Of all the stories you might have written, you chose to write this one. Why?
Robert Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian once said that he didn't make the character up, rather Conan stalked out of the wilds of his imagination and demanded to have his exploits chronicled. I feel like that sometimes. I write the story because, at one level, it's the story that demands to be written.
But there are clear inspirations for me as well. One is my love of history. I'm especially fascinated by the period of change that advances in warfare brought to Europe from say 1300 to 1800. At the start of that period warfare is the province of rich nobles, with peasants scrabbling to survive on the fringes. By the end, new weapons, equipment and tactics have so totally changed everything that the noble warrior is gone and in his place is a professional whose social status is almost the exact opposite of a noble knight. Yet there's still a romance and heroism surrounding such people - and the changes didn't happen smoothly. That's one of the things I love to explore in Rage of Lions - the human drama that happens in the process of change that warfare and technology force on society.
The other major inspiration for me is the need to incorporate my faith into my favourite genre. For a long time, pagan influences have held sway over the genre and that's fine. But Christians have a respectable tradition of fantasy writing, going back to Lewis and Tolkien and back much further than that. The problem for me is that too much Christian writing today either wants "smuggle" the gospel in, so subtly that it might as well not be there, or else it wants to bring the story to a grinding halt so that it can beat the reader over the head with an altar call. There's got to be a way to thread the needle and give folks a great story that shows a living gospel, with all the human failings that inevitably come with that, without watering down the truth. I think that's my highest aim. To present a story that isn't a fairy tale, but also shows the Lord I love without shame or fear.
Q: What is your favorite part of the story?
I like a lot of it, which makes sense I suppose, but my true favourite is when a character is facing a coming battle and has a religious vision. The supernatural being he meets with is giving him counsel and he takes it in a very cynical way, trying to use the harshness of mundane reality to keep religious significance at bay; and he gets a rebuke, not by saying that the divine is greater than the mundane, but by explaining that there is no separation between the two in the plans of God. The conversation goes something like this:
"You're saying that I'm not chosen. I'm not special. And I could die today."
"No. I'm saying you are chosen. You are special. And you absolutely could die today! Do not fear; do what is right to do now, and trust God to take care of the future."
Q: Are there any influences that shaped your story (other books, ideas, interests, etc.)?
I have a ton of influences - obviously I've already mentioned some. I love fantasy and the authors of so many different traditions, from the allegorists like Lewis and Tolkien, to the great pulp writers like Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I entered the fantasy genre through the New Wave writers of the 1960's like Michael Moorcock and Ursula Le Guin and still fondly remember that era.
There's my study of history as well. I've studied Far East Asian history and European, as well as a smattering of African and North American. There are so many influences to draw from there.
By far though, Prentice Ash and the Rage of Lions series owe a debt of inspiration to two main works, Frank Herbert's Dune and George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. Both are masterworks where the setting is a fully formed character in the story in its own right. And both borrow so well from history. Dune is informed by the discovery of crude oil in the Saudi Peninsula and its impact on Saudi culture. Song of Ice and Fire is a fantasy retelling of the English War of the Roses (Stark and Lannister for York and Lancaster).
My story is based on the Thirty Years War, where the internal pressure of the Reformation, coupled with the external pressure of the Ottoman threat from the east, threw central Europe into flux at a time when the arrival of gunpowder was beginning to drive the knight from the battlefield. So, hopefully, if I've done my job as an author right, that will all be there in the setting and story for the reader to unpack as much or as little as they like, while the main plot carries them along with drama, action and intrigue.
You know, just a simple thing to aim for.
Q: If there were one thing you'd want the reader to take away from Prentice Ash, what would it be?
Courage and heroism. I love courage and heroism; these aren't the highest virtues or anything so profound, but in this age we live in, where people are encouraged to be selfish and amoral as a kind of emotional self-defence, I love to see true courage displayed. Both Duchess Amelia and Prentice have moments when they must be courageous or else lose everything they have worked for, and not all these moments come with glorious victory. Sometimes they have to do the right thing quietly, miserably, where no one else can see and praise them. Just like in life.
My other great hope is to take the reader away into a new world that resonates and feels familiar for all its differences. And to give an exciting story that captures the imagination. That is my responsibility to my readers and I'm always writing with that intent in mind.
Q: Where does the story go from here?
Well, I don't want to give away too much, but books 2, 3 and 4 are all already written and will be released quarterly throughout 2022. So, if you buy book 1, Prentice Ash, and like it, there's a whole lot more coming. Pre-orders for Book 2, Rats of Dweltford, are already up on Amazon. I hope folks will find it a great adventure to take throughout the year. And I'm about to start writing book 5, and I've got a fair idea of what's going into book 6 as well. After that, I may need a break. I've got plans for a steampunk series and a sword and planet style sci-fi series, so we'll have to see what happens.
My dream and prayer for the Rage of Lions series is to provide the world with the Christian Game of Thrones; all the action, drama and intrigue, plus faith, and no gratuitous sex and nudity.
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Prentice Ash is available from Amazon. You can also view a recording of the launch livestream on Facebook.
Thanks, Matt! I’m sure we all look forward to rest of the series!