Helbrecht: Knight of the Throne

By Marc Collins

Pulling myself away from the lies of the Alpha Legion, I finally got around to reading the latest black Templar story: the chapter I started playing the board game with twenty years ago (blimey). To move to the far future, High Marshal Helbrecht has crossed the Rubicon Primaris. How good of a story does it make though?

The plot seems a little muddy when I started reading. Guilliman orders Helbrecht to accept the Greyshields from the Indomitus crusade. Helbrecht agrees although he does not agree to everything Guilliman requests, despite his veneration for one of the god-emperor’s gene-sons. I did not like this scene as it seemed overly vague and confusing, and through the dialogue seemed to jump back and forth too erratically in terms of the character’s interests and attitudes to one another. To summarise, they discuss several matters, some Helbrecht agree to, some he does not, and it’s presented in a messy way.

This scene is to bring us up to speed with where the templars are during the latest events of 40k. During it, Helbrecht’s desire to pursue the Beast of Armageddon is brought up. It’s also repeated at the end of this book. Yet, despite all these other discussions and events, the whole plot of this book is to obtain a relic, seemingly unrelated to the Beast, but in part obeying Guilliman in helping conquer worlds as part of the Indomitus crusade. It just feels so disjointed, and that information was just being put in that’s extraneous to what’s going on here. So already, the plot of this story feels like it’s not really that important to wider events, having barely any relation to them.

Knightly Quest

Instead, this book is concerned with a pretty standard sci-fi book task: to retrieve a powerful object of significance. Helbrecht and a small number of others embark on a quest to retrieve it. It’s worth noting that almost no action happens until halfway through this book – and although it is a short book at 213 pages, I’m never a fan of when Warhammer books do this. The exposition, dialogue and characters need to be extremely interesting if the author is going to take this approach, and I am usually disappointed to find they’re not. Even with my fanboy status, I found that although it was good to learn more of Helbrecht and Grimaldus, I would have preferred more to actually happen.

The action is decent enough, but there’s not much to say about it, as you’ve seen it before if you’ve read several 40k novels already. Similarly, I found that through a couple of action-filled chapters absolutely nothing of import would happen. You could easily move to the next chapter and not have missed anything. The fights lack tension and gravitas, just like the story.

The imagery and descriptions are illuminating – I really liked the way Collins describes settings, characters and the vocabulary. It’s the best aspect of the book, incorporating the religious aspects, the bombast of Warhammer and the fury of the Templars.

Religious & righteous

In writing the character of Helbrecht, he might pose some risk. Religious righteous fanatics can easily come across unlikeable if they are too good to be true, or if they seem unfair in their perfectionism. Helbrecht matches these aspects but usually stays on the right side of the line of ‘likeable enough’. I’m not sure Collins was successful in portraying him as multi-faceted, although I can clearly see attempts were made. For example, in his interactions with Nivelo, one minute he’s a jovial friend, the next Nivelo is interrupting Helbrecht who becomes curt and strict with him. Of course moods change, and the idea was that Nivelo was interrupting Helbrecht’s religious obeisance. Grimaldus is treated more simply and to my mind, more effectively. Often stern, silent but guiding, he emulates his portrayal in Helsreach, which is a good thing.

Perhaps Warhammer does need this kind of book, that tries to examine a central figure, hero, including their warts and all. Warhammer is deep and satirical, nobody is truly entirely good, and Helbrecht is blinded by his rage, anger and even pride at times in this book, the latter being the most interesting one for me in this particular novel, since pride comes before the fall. It’s also consistent with their attitude of being holier than thou – who wouldn’t be proud if convinced you were always in the right?

This book doesn’t entirely fail, then. It is reasonable in places. But it takes too long to reach the action, for little payoff. The plot is so generic it’s hard to say much more about it. The side-characters seemed like they’d be interesting, such as Neophyte Andronicus, or the Emperor’s Champion and his background, but then nothing was done to maximise their importance or influence on events. The book instead reverts to the templars – mainly Helbrecht - smashing enemies.

The plot was the worst thing about this book. It seems hashed together without much thought or effort. And too often the book tries to emphasize the templars being holier-than-thou, giving their platitudes and delivering ultimatums to the enemy. Some of this would be expected from the black templars. But when it’s done repeatedly, over and over, at the expense of the plot, characterisation and even action, it weakens the book overall. Similarly, the plot feels tangential to the wider plot points which is just unforgivable: Guilliman’s instructions or the beast of Armageddon for example. Why should we even truly care about the relic and what’s occurring on Hevaran? This question remains after finishing the book.

Final score

I really wanted to love Helbrecht – Knight of the Throne. He’s an interesting figure, and the emphasis on his pride that kept recurring was interesting. The action scenes are serviceable, but needed more impact and tension. Characters looked set up well, with promising dynamics, but were not utilised at all. The standout of Collins’s writing was the way he describes things, which seemed consistently good throughout.

The scope of this book is my main issue. It takes a hundred pages to set up what’s happening, several chapters of the black templars declaring how righteous they are, and then a couple of chapters of action where nothing of import happens until the concluding events. This is a disappointing story that is not a patch on books like Helsreach. Unfortunately, this is one of the worst 40k books I’ve read this year.

Sons of Dorn should check out my review of the Horus Heresy book Sigismund which scored somewhat higher, as this one is only getting a 3/10.

3/10