The Talhoffer Society is about a historical fencing tournament fought with live steel: two people enter a ring with real katana, longswords or rapiers, and only one of them walks out. This is the stuff of popcorn movies, but aside from some standard-issue Conveniently Powerful Rich People, there is surprisingly little escapism to be found here.



The book has two protagonists (although the dust jacket blurb only mentions one): Jack Fischer and Frederica Dragoste. Both are masters of their respective weapons, both live under the shadow of tragedy, both are in financial trouble. Exactly the sort of people, in other words, who might star in a story about blood sport. Yet neither are mere plot functionaries, and both have the sense to rebel against the cliche (when Jack is sent the ominous tournament invitation along with a small fortune in cash as inducement, he has the sense to pocket the cash and toss the invitation).



In this and his previous novel, Seed, Edelson shows a knack for exact characterization. If The Talhoffer Society were primarily about sword fighting this would not be important. But this is a book about how people *relate* to sword fighting. Edelson threads the needle between heavy exposition of character traits, on the one hand, and leaving the reader always scrambling to retrospectively piece together characters' motivations from their actions alone, on the other. He knows exactly who his characters are and how to let them breathe on the page.



Jack and Frederica fall in love, which is a given for any story that puts a heterosexual protagonist pair in a high-stakes situation. But Edelson takes what ought to be an obligatory plot feature to increase the novel's marketability and makes it a true cornerstone of the story, without which neither plot nor themes would hold together. From top to bottom The Talhoffer Society takes what ought to be cliche and makes it human.



Nowhere is this feat more impressive than in the novel's handling of the tournament itself. A lesser story would be filled with lengthy (and gory) descriptions of the duels. The Talhoffer Society's tournament turns out to be considerably more complex than a mere slaughterfest (precisely how is one of the central twists of the story), but even without that, Edelson has the sense to treat the tournament like the monster in a horror film. The tournament dominates the characters' psychological space because they know it is there, even when they are not in the ring. This is one of the many small human insights that elevates this story far above the bare minimum its premise requires. Edelson knows that how people react to the *possibility* of violence is far more interesting than how they react to *present* violence. The real story is not the fights, but how the people relate to the invitation to fight (there are many possibilities to explore here, which is one of the reasons Edelson is wise to give Jack and Frederica equal page time as point-of-view characters; we benefit from the multiple perspectives). They do so in ways I found surprisingly plausible. More than plausible, in fact: convincing.



The fights themselves - and there are just enough of them to cover all the bases you would expect - are equally plausible. This in itself is a major achievement, or at least a rarity. Literary sword fights generally fall into two categories: those that achieve realism by leaving out all of the details and those that linger over the details at the expense of realism. The Talhoffer Society is the only book I can think of that presents sword fights in realistic detail, which is worth the price of admission all by itself.