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| Just enough so that the cover art isn't wholly misleading. |
If you are like me, you'll keep reading just to find out more about the world. McKinley blends familiar aspects of our own history with fantasy tropes, subverting both in the process and crafting a world both accessible and regularly surprising. Unfortunately, if you are like me, you will also look up at some point and realize that three quarters of the book have gone by with barely anything happening in the story. It all feels like set up with no pay-off; like the first third of a bunch of stories, bundled together and stretched out into a full novel. Each story has its climax, of course, but some of them feel forced, like they were tacked on simply because the book was ending. Two of the climaxes are simply twists that set up further conflict for the next book, and two of them involve previously established characters that have made the switch to cartoonishly evil villains simply to provoke a violent confrontation. Moreover, even though the book is pretty long, it feels like every story gets shortchanged, with the narrative dipping in just enough to show how things have progressed before jetting off to another corner of the world.
Story problems aside, I'll be grabbing the next book in the series - The City of Ice - when it comes out late 2016 or early 2017. But would I recommend it? If you like worldbuilding, give it a read, but if you're expecting a gripping story, it's probably safe to pass this one up.
The more in-depth and spoilerific review is below, so if you want to read it and hate spoilers, go no further.
The World
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| The map - © 2015 Solaris Books, Photographed by me and used here for illustrative purposes under fair use |
While I am fairly pleased with the map, I would have liked to see some political boundaries on there, and some more physical features of the land - we are told of huge mountain ranges but they don't show up on the map. Also, we are flooded with M-words: from the ancient Morfaan empire to the Old Maceriyans who followed them, not to be confused with the later Maceriyan Empire or their rivals, the Mohaci Empire. On the modern map, we have Maceriya, Macer Lesser, Musra, Marceny, Mohaci, and Maroven, plus the citadel of Mogawn and the city of Mohacs-Gravo. It can be a little overwhelming. I have a feeling McKinley (another M!) was using at least some of those Ms to show the legacy of the Maceriyans (particularly in Macer lesser, Marceny, and Musra), but that isn't necessary. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, they didn't call France, Spain, and Italy Roam, Rum, and Remia. When building your own world, I would suggest keeping alliteration to a minimum.
Let's look beyond the map to the substance of the world. Ruthnia is a changing land: new industries are supplanting old ones, railroads are cutting across the landscape, tenements and factory towns are eating up rural villages. This is a world caught in the grips of a fantasy Industrial Revolution, and McKinley does an excellent job showcasing that. But it is not just our historical Industrial Revolution copied and pasted into a fantasy world. The engines of industry are powered by glimmer, a magical ore that reacts violently with iron and must be tempered with silver for a long-lasting and powerful reaction. One of the point-of-view characters in an engineer and inventor, so we the reader get an in-depth look at the design and function of glimmer engines, which the author clearly put a lot of thought into. Another sign of the changing magical times are the fey creatures known as the Tyn, who once populated the wild places of the world but are now iron-bound servants and industrial workers. Even the old gods are gone, cast out 200 years prior by a powerful mage. Only a few of the gods remain, including Eliturion, god of stories and drunkenness, an jovial giant who spends his days sitting behind a glass case in a museum and his evenings entertaining the patrons at a local pub. Eliturion - who I can only imagine looking like a 15-foot-tall Pat Rothfuss - is rather prominently featured in the first few chapters of the book, only to disappear entirely from the story as it progresses. In The Iron Ship, magic had been tamed by industry and science, and the world is still in the process of dealing with this transition. It makes for a fascinating backdrop for a story.
The Story/Stories
As I said before, story is this novel's weak point, which is a shame, because it's a novel. There are roughly seven plotlines throughout the book, and those are generally told from the same POV characters, but occasionally there are one-off POV characters whose presence throw monkey wrenches into the gears of the story. Sometimes the narrative even switches POV mid-chapter, which is jarring.
The problem begins at the beginning, where McKinley struggles with how to open the story. First, we have a prologue from the POV of a character we never see again, set in a place we never see again, doing something that has no payoff in this book. I assume it sets up something for the rest of the series (?) but it didn't really add anything to this book. I mean, it drew me in, but it drew me in to a different story than this book was telling. Then we have two chapters from the point of view of Aarin Kressind (more on him later). You might assume that because he gets the first two chapters, he is the main character, or at least central to the plot. Sadly, of the six Kressind siblings, Aarin is the one we spend the second least amount of time with. After Aarin we have a chapter from the point of view of Mansanio, manservant of Countess Lucinia of Mogawn, an eccentric genius who shirks the roles that society tries to force on her for her gender and her class. Mansanio is creepily infatuated with the countess, but she is more interested in astronomy. This chapter provides a great introduction to the world's odd astronomy, but sadly Countess Lucinia is only a secondary character, and Mansanio will not show up again until the end, when he transforms into a cartoonishly evil villain. Finally, in chapter four, the god Eliturion steps in and tries to get the actual story started. Well actually, Eliturion spends this chapter pontificating on the nature of stories and how to begin them, something the author thought about but clearly didn't apply to this book. In the next chapter, the drunken god begins to tell the story of the Kressind siblings. This would have been a cool framing device for the book, but it sadly only lasts for this one chapter. But at least the actual plot has started, right?
Since most of the plotlines in this book are only loosely related, I'm going to run through them one-by-one here.
1. Trassan Kressind and The Iron Ship
Trassan is a genius inventor who has developed an engine powered by the decay of silver-iodide-coated iron and glimmer - basically this world's equivalent of a nuclear reactor. He wants to use it to power the world's first ocean-going iron ship, also of his own design. Trassan is basically a one-man industrial revolution to the point that it strains credulity. Under the tutelage of the legendary inventor Arkadian Vand, he hopes to sail the iron ship to the South Pole and lead an archaeological expedition to an un-looted ancient Morfaan city so he can loot all the valuable technologies found therein. Plus they have to race against a rival inventor/archaeologist who's after the same city. That sounds like a pretty cool thing to read about, but you won't get to in this book.
There is some tension between Vand and Trassan because Vand is always stealing the credit for Trassan's accomplishments, but Trassan totally wants to bone Vand's daughter. Some of that tension is immediately resolved because as soon as we are introduced to the secret forbidden love between Trassan and Vand's daughter, we find out that Vand already knows and he's totally okay with it. BUT the tension goes up when Vand gives Trassan a tiny little tyn (one of those fey creatures) who is there to spy on Trassan and report back to Vand, making sure no hanky panky goes on between the two lovers. And then that tension goes nowhere because we never hear of the tyn reporting anything to Vand. Plus the Tyn lives in Trassan's office, so he could just be boning Vand's daughter anywhere that's not his office. There was so much potential here, but it was all wasted.
Back to the ship! There are two major hurdles Trassan has to clear before his ship can sail. The first is getting a permit to sail through the waters ruled by the Drowned King. Whoa, that sounds cool! I want to know more about him! TOO BAD. So how does he get the permit? Well, he tries to get his brother Garten to fast track it. Garten, naval bureaucrat and least-heard-from Kressind sibling, says he can't but it's inevitable that they'll get the permit eventually because it's in the kingdom's best interests. Okay, I guess there's no tension there. The second hurdle is the problem of funding. Vand's coffers have run dry, so Trassan needs to get everything ready for a big demonstration before potential investors. His and Vand's reputations and fortunes are resting on this. So when the important guests come along and Trassan boasts about all his inventions, jealous Vand intentionally causes a major accident, sabotaging his own pet project and causing it to lose investors and gain nothing but bad press. What a source of tension between Trassan and Vand! ...that will not be explored further in this book.
Trassan gets his sister Katriona to produce new superior engines for him in her ironworks. To raise funding, he visits his cousin Ilona, who totally wants to bone him for some reason. She convinces her rich father to fund the ship on the condition that she gets to sail with them. Trassan agrees, the ship gets funded, the necessary permits come through, and the ship sets sail! Without Ilona, because Trassan is a dick. They sail through the Drowned King's territory, but the Drowned King doesn't recognize their permits so he fights them, but they defeat him and sail away. The climax seems to come out of nowhere because, although they've talked up the importance of the sailing permit, they have never up to this point explained exactly who the Drowned King is, what kind of threat he poses, or how he interacts with permits.
2. Katriona and the Ironworks
Katriona Kressind is a genius, but she's also a woman and society frowns on her using her mind. She gets married to a man who loves her but whom she does not love. He is not particularly interested in the family ironworks, so she takes over. She discovers that the cousin who was put in charge of accounting was actually embezzling, so she exposes him. Then Trassan comes to her to build the new engines he needs. Only the tyn workers in her employ can perform the necessary magics, and they refuse to unless Katriona gives them better living conditions. She agrees to do that, though we never see her promise enacted.
The disgraced embezzling cousin goes to the rival inventor/archaeologist and offers to take down Katriona's ironworks from within, thus sabotaging the iron ship. Being disgraced for his embezzlement has turned him into a cartoonishly evil villain, so he undergoes permanent magical facial reconstructive surgery to make him into an ugly dude to better infiltrate the factory. The next we hear from either him or Katriona, he has managed to stir up the workers to a riot. The army is called in and all the workers are massacred, including the cartoonishly evil embezzling cousin, who survives just long enough for his permanent (?) face-change to wear off so he can gloat to Katriona. But I guess it didn't really amount to anything, because the iron ship launched on time without a hitch.
This storyline could have been so much more interesting. We've got a genius woman struggling to claim her rightful place in a sexist world as she takes over the running of her new family's industry, a devoted husband who she doesn't yet love, the discovery of an embezzler in the company who she has to single-handedly expose, tension between human and tyn workers and the struggle for workers' rights and better living conditions. These are the ingredients for a great story, but they are left undeveloped as the author chases down all the other plotlines in the book. But if you think this plotline is underdeveloped, wait until you see:
3. Aarin and the Dead
Aarin Kressind is a guider of the dead. He isn't a priest, but he's basically a priest. He performs 'ghosting' rituals for dead people so that their spirits can pass on to the next life instead of coming back as ghosts. Also, he can do necromancy, which I guess is forbidden or something. His story starts off with him performing a summoning of a spirit to ask why 'ghosting' is getting harder now. Apparently, the spirits of the dead are getting harder to send off. The spirit he summons doesn't give a clear answer. So he goes to see his old mentor. He admits that he has been performing forbidden necromancy, and his mentor is like, "eh, no big deal." Then he asks his mentor why ghosting is getting harder, but his mentor doesn't give a clear answer. Instead he sends Aarin to the Final Isle, a holy site of the God of the Dead. Aarin hitches a ride to the Final Isle on the iron ship, and helps a little bit in the fight against the Drowned King. The book ends with him arriving at the Final Isle.
That's it. He starts the book with a question and spends the entire book not getting it answered.
4. Guis and the Darkling
Guis Kressind is the most interesting character in the book, born with natural magical talents, but cursed with a debilitating mental disorder that plagues him with foul visions of violence. His magical energies, disturbed by his unstable thoughts, manifest as a dark twin of himself that he calls the Darkling. He spends most of the book struggling to control his emotions and suppress the Darkling. With the encouragement of Countess Lucinia of Mogawn, he learns he can call forth the Darkling intentionally, but he is not yet powerful enough to control it. Then, at the end of the book, jealous Mansanio becomes cartoonishly evil and provokes the appearance of the Darkling. The Darkling takes over Guis. Thus, the most interesting character in the book, given nothing to do and having no impact on the plot, serves only to provide a twist ending that sets up conflict for the next book.
5. Rel and the Gates of the World
Rel Kressind is a soldier who gets sent to the farthest corner of the realm to guard the Gates of the World. This distant, undermanned military unit composed mainly of outcasts is tasked with patrolling the edge of the desert of black sand and checking on the network of mysterious obelisks that mark the desert's border and protect it from incursions from the threats beyond. But it's nothing like The Night's Watch, shut up, I've never heard of that. Rel spends some time existing up there, then one of the obelisks breaks and they have to fight a shapeshifter. Right after that, a raiding party of giant four-armed Modalmen (another M word!) attacks a nearby mining camp. Rel and his underdeveloped buddies go on patrol into the dangerous desert and discover a whole army of Modalmen - and they have a dragon! Dun dun DUN! That's the end.
I assume the Gates of the World are important because the cover of the book says "The Gates of the World Book One". But Rel is off on the exact opposite side of the map from where everything else is happening, which makes his story seem very unimportant. The threat he is guarding against is unclear because we don't encounter it until the very end of the book, and it is never really explained what Modalmen are, how the mysterious obelisks protect against them. or what the hell is going on at all. Contrast this with Jon Snow's story in A Game of Thrones: the threat of the Others beyond the wall was established in the novel's prologue, and the fact that no one south of the Wall takes that threat seriously is established right after that, when Ned Stark executes a deserter from the Night's Watch who is blubbering 'nonsense' about White Walkers. We also get to know Jon's companions a lot better than we get to know Rel's. All in all, maybe this material should have been saved for a later book?
6. Tuvacs and the Uneventful Mining Operation Where Everybody Dies
Tuvacs (not Tuvok) is a street thief whose sentence is purchased by an entrepreneur who wants him as a translator for his venture up to the mining operation on the black sands. He befriends a talking dog, gets a girl pregnant, and defends himself from the unwanted drunken advances of his employer. But you don't need to know any of that, because literally nothing of note happens until the very end of the book when the Modalmen attack and kill everyone and Tuvacs flees into the desert. This storyline could and should have been left on the editing room floor.
7. Lucinia and the Mystery of the Twin
Countess Lucinia of Morgawn wants to know how the Twin, that mysterious dark planet, is related to a 4,000 year cycle responsible for the downfall of the once mighty civilizations like the Morfaan and the Maceriyans. And boy, that 4,000 year mark is coming up fast! Sadly, Lucinia learns nothing this book.
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Wow, I did not make that book sound good. I enjoyed reading it, I really did, but in hindsight it seems like the story was far too underdeveloped and desperately in need of an editor. I could go on in detail for much longer, but I think I'll spare you that. Go forth and read, dear readers! Some books have great worldbuilding but lack story, others lack worldbuilding but have a great story. Great books have both, but you probably know about all of those so I don't need to review them here.
-your M-phobic d20 despot
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