Note, I’ll be getting into spoiler territory eventually. I’ll give you a warning before I do, but in case you were going to start skimming: Be warned. Also, this is kind of long.
It’s been a while since I plowed through a fantasy series. There was a time when it was a huge part of my life. Even the oft-encountered disappointment didn’t slow me down. I love to read; mostly I love to read stories. But most of all I love to read long stories. Big stories. Stories that took on pivotal events, that gave me more than the mundane, daily crap I found at school or work.
Before I sat down to write this review, I thought about all of the series’ I’ve got under my belt. The good ones, those never really leave the mind. But there are dozens of other ones. Books that I powered through years ago but left a sour taste, or that unshakable feeling of disappointment. Like Stephen Lawhead’s The Song of Albion, or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword Trilogy (which were, oddly, lesser novels than their Dragonlance books), or Mickey Zucker Reichert’s Renshai Trilogy and its sequel. The interesting thing about them is, despite their flaws, despite the disappointment, there are things that stuck with me from these books. Things that were unique to them, that I never got even from more accomplished novels.
Which brings me to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn.
Mistborn: The Final Empire has a great sounding hook: What would happen if the hero of prophecy failed? What if, at the pivotal moment, the Dark Lord killed him and took power for himself? The idea of Mistborn’s first novel is an interesting amalgam. Part turning the genre over on itself with a triumphant Dark Lord, part heist novel as a group of thieves set out to steal a cache of power so important that it could lead to the overthrow of the empire – even if all they’re in it for is the profit. Cool, huh?
Though the series’ strongest novel, there’s a critical problem that haunts the rest of the series. Within the first few chapters it becomes clear that the hook – a hook that the author himself says was his starting point – is either a spoiler or a misdirection. And, for a series’ whose primary theme is trust, it’s disappointing that it betrays its readers’ trust in the first novel.
Still, Sanderson is a good writer, and having read the annotations for the books on its website, it’s clear he really thinks about what he’s doing. I’m going to get into spoilers, now, and as I do I’m going to be pretty critical of my problems with the series. But let this be known: I had a good time reading it, and I think that Sanderson has the right stuff to make some killer fantasy novels. Hell, if you liked Mistborn, then he’s writing killer fantasy novels right now. I admit that much of my disappointment in Mistborn is an entirely personal reaction to the conclusion of the series.
Now, let there be spoilers.
Mistborn begins in the city of Luthadel, the seat of The Final Empire. Yes, the empire is called the Final Empire. No, it’s not as silly as it sounds. The empire has been ruled for 1,000 years by a man who seems to be immortal and omnipotent, who took the power of the Well of Ascension and became as a god; he is, as his church proclaims, the Sliver of Infinity. In other words, this empire is the last one the world will know, for it will last forever; it is, literally, The Final Empire.
And it’s not a pleasant place to live. By day, ash is spewed into the sky endlessly by volcanoes. By night, mists that flow like water chase the superstitious into their homes. And most of the population, known as skaa, work as slaves for the Lord Ruler’s nobility. Though rebellions are attempted, how do you kill a man with seemingly endless power who can be burnt to a skeleton yet regrow skin in seconds? How do you bring down an empire with a god at its head?
To its credit, Mistborn answers these questions in the first book. The trilogy is not about killing the Lord Ruler; it’s about the power that he wielded, and the worse danger the tyrant held back. Even the seeming main character, a powerful but impulsive thief named Kelsier, doesn’t survive to see the end of the first novel. The hand off to his protege, Vin, is so smooth that I should have seen it coming earlier. We get a trilogy’s worth of plot development in the first volume, which makes for an exciting novel. Even despite the misdirection/spoiler of the hook – everyone believes the Lord Ruler is the hero of prophecy, meaning you spend all of book one wondering if they’re wrong, or if the book jacket lied to you – The Final Empire is a great read. It has its problems, mostly in a clunky, implausible opening where a bunch of thieves just kind of decide that taking on a 1,000 year empire is good business, but is very worth the time.
Things get dicier from there. Like many great fantasy series openings, the follow-through has problems. There’s a great set up, some interesting characters, but the further it goes the less tight it all feels. With Mistborn, significant pacing problems and an odd lack of scope kill the second book’s momentum and it never really recovers. And it doesn’t help that the set-up of the first book – that the hero lost – is less interesting than what initially appeared to be the case: that the hero had won, taken the power, then turned into at tyrant. As the series progresses, I got the feeling that Sanderson was actually more interested in this idea, and he does his best to split the difference with the Lord Ruler’s motivations.
The Well of Ascension takes another fantasy trope, that of the Prophecy of the Hero, and flips it on its head. The basic idea around it is great, but getting to the end requires slogging through 500 pages of indecision, inaction and inner monologues about indecision and inaction. There’s an interesting idea of nation building embedded in the book’s structure, but it never gets any momentum. Yes, the idea of how you hold together a people that are used to a God ruling them is great, but it was disappointing that the best Sanderson managed was a protracted siege of Luthadel by squabbling warlords and a game of musical chairs with the throne of the Empire. Eland, the man who tries to make the Empire into a better place, spends the entire book thinking about how he wishes he was a better leader. And Vin, his lover and protector, worries that she’s nothing more than a killer. That’s about it.
Still, the climax of the book had a great moment: Vin begins to believe she’s the true Hero of Ages, the thing the Lord Ruler failed to be. She makes her way to the Well of Ascension, the source of the Lord Ruler’s power, only to learn that the prophecy of the Hero was a lie, manipulated by a chaos god the Lord Ruler took power to try and contain. And Vin, trying to fulfill the prophecy, lets it out.
That gave me hope for The Hero of Ages. Perhaps with one book left to go, Sanderson would set a brisker pace. I hoped in vain. Instead of the heroes stuck in a single city defending against a siege, they take an army to another city and…begin a siege. Mistborn‘s problem is common in Big Stories: a lack of scope to the story’s actual events.
I think authors get wrapped up in the scope of their setting and miss the needs of the story. Yes, The Hero of Ages deals with a godlike power of chaos trying to end the world, and yes, the actions of the heroes are meant to save the world. That’s not scope, though. That’s setting. Constructing a plot that matches the scope of the setting can be difficult, and I think that Sanderson got lost trying to create understandable plot points. In The Well of Ascension, it was resolving the Siege of Luthadel. In The Hero of Ages, it was the artificial need of finding the Lord Ruler’s hidden supply caches, left to combat the chaos-god Ruin. At the start of the story, there is one left to claim, and the bulk of the book is spent with the heroes trying to get this one supply cache. By the time the plot twists come, there are only 100 pages left and the story feels too small because of it.
Scope is a tricky thing, and I’m coming to believe it has more to do with the impression of movement in the plot than with the actual size of the events. The world ending doesn’t, on its own, give a novel scope. Scope demands, I think, objectives and motivations to constantly evolve, for goals to be achieved but prove to be only a piece of the story. Keeping characters mired in indecision for 2/3 of the a novel means, essentially, that nothing happens for 2/3 of a novel, and that kills any sense of scope. When battle for the fate of the world comes, it feels out of place next to a story about a group of insecure people refusing to make a decision.
This is especially a concern in The Hero of Ages, as while the characters are doing very little, massive chunks of plot revelations are given through the quotes that precede the chapters. Things like why the world is covered in ash, where the various magic systems of the world are from and the very nature of the villain himself are all given here, and not in the body of the story. I started to wonder if Sanderson had simply held too much back for book 3 and decided to dump his world notes into the book to catch things up.
Mistborn made something clear to me, though, that I had not noticed before. Many of the fantasy series’ of the past, the ones that I liked but left me cold at the end, share an important similarity. They all end with some mixture of the end of the world and the mysterious pseudo-deaths of the main characters. I don’t mean that the main characters died. I mean they sort of died but really became gods, or returned to their world, or people thought wait, maybe they didn’t really die and will return again and the audience is left to wonder. It’s a really, really common ending in fantasy and science fiction. You can see it from The Matrix to Evangelion to every book series mentioned above. And I’m starting to think that, as a rule, this kind of ending is simply an unsatisfying cheat.
Mistborn ends with not one but two characters ascending to godhood within 50 pages of each other. It ends with the world becoming so blasted out by the battle that only two options are possible: an utter remaking or the death of mankind. And I’m completely unsure of what to make of one of its major character arcs, in which a character teaches hundreds of religions, then becomes an atheist, then becomes god.
I think the problem is that, despite Sanderson’s opinion that allowing his characters to monologue about how insecure they are is character development, in the end he cheats by not giving an actual character ending for them. It’s just really, really hard to relate to a character whose culmination is and then I remade the world in my image. I can buy into a character dying for his cause, or because he failed, or because of bad luck. But how many more character deaths can I hope to relate to if their death is not really a death and might lead to their eventual return outside of the actual story? I don’t know. Maybe I never had it in me.
And I’m tired of the ambiguity. Did the character die, or not? Did the world end? When it was reborn, do the characters remember what happened? How do they feel about it? Even with omniscience, how good of a god would even the best of humans make, anyway? If ascending to godhood is the goal of your story, set that up earlier. Don’t give me the gritty story of people trying to create a government, only to spend 100 pages at the end making everyone turn into gods. Serial Experiments: Lain is maybe the only successful version of this story, and that’s because within 2 episodes “god” is showing up telling Lain that she has the power to change the world. That is the point of the story, and the character.
I’ve gone all this time without mentioning Mistborn‘s intricate magic system, and that’s on purpose. Every reviewer has said how cool and well done Allomancy is. They’re right. It’s neat. It’s consistent. It’s well used. It’s just that a magic system can’t save a book, even if it makes the battle scenes more interesting an readable. Sanderson did a great job on it, though, so let that be noted.
Yet, despite all my complains, there’s something here. Just like The Darksword Trilogy’s totally batshit last book where the guy with the magic canceling sword has to fight tanks, I came away with something I didn’t have before. The image of the Ashmounts and the mists will stick with me. The sad sense of a world being smothered to death by ash will haunt me. The thought of a world broken by the heroes of old so that it could survive destruction will remain. And, despite the inordinate amount of time they spent whining and doing little else, many of the characters will stay by my side as well.
All that reminds me of something important that I shouldn’t forget: Sanderson made me feel like a teenager again, shut up in my bedroom with a book, ignoring the world around me. I missed that feeling.