The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a single-player RPG [translation: role-playing game] created by Bethesda Game Studios for Windows PCs, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Hugely successful and the recipient of numerous gaming awards [does Patrick Moore in his guise as the GamesMaster still award golden joysticks?], Oblivion revolves around players’ attempts to thwart a diabolical cult who plan to open the gates to the hellish world of Oblivion and so release doom and destruction into the mortal world.

The game begins with the player’s character imprisoned in The Imperial City. The Emperor Uriel Septim VII is fleeing from assassins and, in a rather bizarre twist of fate, his escape route goes through the player’s cell and so provides a neat opportunity for escape.  It transpires that the player must now assist the Emperor by taking the Amulet of Kings to Septim’s illegitimate son Martin so that he might use it to light the Dragonfires that protect Imperial City. Long story short and many, many hours of game play later, the player assists Martin as he merges himself with an ancient Dragon and battles to save the city, apparently sacrificing himself in the process. Peace is at last restored to the world but no Emperor sits on the throne…

The Infernal City by Greg Keyes is the first of two novels to be based on the Elder Scrolls series and continues the story on from the events of Oblivion. Four decades after the events of the game, the continent of Tamriel is threatened by an ancient and all-consuming evil: Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow, a shadow that, wherever it falls, causes people die only for them to rise again as part of an undead horde. Inside Umbriel’s shadow a great adventure begins as a group of unlikely heroes meet. Emperor Titus Mede now sits on the throne of Tamriel and his son Prince Attrebus harbours a deep secret. Young Attrebus meets a seventeen-year-old girl named Annaig and, together with a daring spy and a powerful mage obsessed with a desire for revenge, they set out on a quest to save their land.

First things first, anyone without a good knowledge and appreciate of the Elder Scrolls series will most likely be hopelessly lost with, and rather disinterested in, The Infernal City. If the plot of the book sounds appealing, it does tend to follow the traditional and hugely popular fantasy model of remarkable adventures set in a pseudo-European medieval magical realm after all, then there is no need to devote days and weeks of your life to playing through all of the games, but a bit of internet research into the world and stories of the Elder Scrolls certainly wouldn’t go amiss. While The Infernal City was always going to predominantly appeal to fans of the games, fans of fantasy in general may come to appreciate it after understanding and absorbing the mythology behind the series.

The Infernal City provides an interesting insight into the events that have transpired in Tamriel in the forty years since the Oblivion Crisis, the creation of Umbriel itself being a particularly interesting element. Along with his trademark expertise at dialogue, Greg Keyes also employs some good characterisation as he breathes life into the motley crew of heroes, heroes of his own creation rather than spawn of the games. The interesting elements are, however, heavily outweighed by the flaws in The Infernal City. First, it would have been good to have been provided with a more detailed description of the threat that Umbriel posed and of the impact that it had on the people and places below. Second and more importantly, it was just a bit too obvious that there was a second book coming and The Infernal City ended up feeling like half of a story rather than a complete tale in its own right. It’s a fairly slim volume at 298 pages so, since there was negligible resolution for the characters, it could perhaps have been more successful if joined with the second novel and released as a single, complete novel. As it stands, the ending is hugely unsatisfactory and just served to further emphasise the limited appeal of the book. While fanboys may well be keen to peruse bite-sized snippets from the Elder Scrolls universe, average fantasy readers will probably not.

All in all, The Infernal City is probably a book best left in the hands of devoted fans of the Elder Scrolls series.

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