We all know that the races and creatures created and popularised by JRR Tolkien have, over a period of many years, dominated the landscape of epic fantasy: although they sometimes go by other names, orcs, elves, goblins, trolls and of course dwarves have been re-cycled, re-used and re-invented by numerous authors. Stan Nicholls set out to show a different side of orcs, and now Markus Heitz is doing the same with dwarves. Perhaps more than any other race, dwarves have never transcended the sidekick role assigned to them by Tolkien; they have also changed remarkably little as they have plodded from one author’s imagination to another. Even Terry Pratchett, that great debunker of fantasy stereotypes, has left their essential dwarven-ness intact, and the hairy creatures that covet gold, sing songs about gold, get drunk and have brawls are really quite close to Heitz’s dwarf creations (though perhaps Pratchett’s are a little more…. Welsh).

In The Dwarves, written in his native German and now translated for the English market, Heitz tells us the story of Tungdil, a foundling dwarf raised by humans. His master is a magus, one of the handful of sorcerors who protect the land of Girdlegard, a sort of gigantic bowl of a land, surrounded on all sides by mountains through which five passes, guarded by the five dwarven tribes, are the only ingress. Girdlegard is also home to Elves, Alfar (basically Dark Elves), gnomes, trolls, orcs, etc., with the evil races having entered though the now-abandoned Fifthling Kingdom of the Dwarves. There’s also the Perished Land to content with, a blight kept at bay by the sorcerors, on which any who die are resurrected in torment (so I suppose you could say they’re zombies, although Heitz calls them revenants).

Because this is epic fantasy, there has to be a big baddy – that’s Nod’onn, formely Nudin, a sorceror who betrays his fellows and allies with the Perished Land. In to this chaos, Tungdil is sent on an apparently easy mission – but when he comes across other dwarves, it’s time for him to reconnect with his roots and he is drawn in to a campaign for the High Kingship of the dwarves, a quest to forge a magical weapon to defeat the big baddy, lots of battles against the odds and even a love affair with a lady dwarf (credit to Heitz, most previous authors steered well away from lady dwarves, which is perhaps why they never transcended their status as a sidekick race).

There are problems, sad to say: there’s a slightly stilted, naive quality to the prose which becomes hard to ignore after a while. While there are some standout characters (the berserker dwarf Ireheart and the theatrical impressario Rodario), characterisation is generally rather insipid, and Tungdil lacks for charisma (although to be fair, so did Frodo Baggins!), and the big baddy is not all that scary. The world-building and mythology sometimes feel a bit sketchy, and reminded me of Stephen Donaldson’s rather impressionistic approach, where you don’t really have the feeling that life is going on in the rest of the world while you’re following the characters through one bit of it.

At 700-plus pages, The Dwarves is a fairly lengthy undertaking (and also the first of a projected four books, I believe). While there is a page-turning quality about it, and it is undoubtedly tightly plotted, in an era of fantasy writing that has given us George RR Martin, Steven Erikson and KJ Parker, it just feels rather less substantial and three-dimensional than I would have liked. If you’re looking for something uncomplicated for holiday reading, and you’re a fan of Robert Jordan or Raymond Feist, The Dwarves might be for you, but if you’ve sampled the best that fantasy has to offer over the last few years, you may find that this falls flat on its beard.

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