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Hi there,
Keeping on with my quest of reading the Horus Heresy series, I've eventually managed to acquire and read Tallarn. In my opinion, it's a terrible book, baldy written (the absolute worse being the "Golden Fleet") and that doesn't bring anything and maybe even diminishes Perturabo and the Iron Warrior (but I'm used to it with French...). It had been a quite a long time since I encountered a "bad" HH book !
However, that's not the point. At the end of the book we learn that the Iron Warrior came to Tallarn . That's quite understandable after what just happened in Angel Exterminatus. However, it's not the case,
In a way, that's, again, quite understandable and suits the character of the IVth, as Perturabo shows several times during the series by refusing to serve Chaos or to be corrupted or criticizing his brothers for becoming deamon princes.
But then, why would he look for this artefact ? Wasn't he aware of what it was ? It's never clearly said, as he himself never
And would he have agreed with then it doesn't make sense with the other books.
Is it just a failure by the authors to keep Perturabo consistent ?

You are correct that part of the problem is French. The man is incredibly biased towards his favorites and puts down anything else to build them up. Couple that with an inability to make clever plots leaves you with villains that must be incredibly stupid so that the heroes can win. The Crimsonn Fist remains one of the ugliest book where somehow a 3-1 ambush leads to a a near Iron Warriors route and the rest of his Iron Warrior takes are nearly as bad.

Compared the McNeil’s work with the IW and its night and day.The running theme of Iron Warriors bad across French’s work is almost comical. But this is the guy that decided that the Imperial Fists could easily out maneuver an alpha legion insurgency too. Cant save the story from a fanboy

Tallarn is also very constricted by the narrative. The orgional battle was really only important in framing that Tallarn is a desert world and that it’s the set up for the conflict closer to the present. The old heresy lore was much shorter and suddenly we have fit in a set up for the narrative into the wider story. Tallarn was always going to be odd with those constraints but French as the lead meant that it would’ve painful too.




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Perturabo ultimately never got to be consistent because he had too many authors. He often came in the fit the need of the plot rather than to be his own character. Angel Exterminatus and Hammer of Olympia may be the best case for what he’s suppose to be like. Everything else was just him fitting the current story needs.

Tallarn as a whole is just a bad set of stories.

Perturabo is good in the Siege books probably because they actually had meetings about how the mini-series would go.
Everything he does makes sense and his actions fit with the way his story has been told in broad strokes over the course of the Heresy series.