The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
This book represents what high fantasy aspires to. Extremely high stakes, good versus evil, magic and adventure and even a little bit of romance pack a very long (24 hour audiobook) first book in the series. I was hesitant to start it because of its length, but the weighty tome allows a depth of character and worldbuilding that a shorter work wouldn’t have time for. And the plot? Imagine a complicated heist where no matter what the setback (army got destroyed, safehouse got compromised, main characters died) they just kept going. How can you not root for people like that?
Magic in this world is mostly allomancy. Magic users consume and then “burn” metals to gain specific powers. Most of these allomancers only can use one of the metals, but the most powerful (the mistborn) have the power to use all of them. The magic felt real and plausible. I liked that not all the “powers” felt useful, and that even people who were experts were still discovering things they didn’t know. In this world, it’s presumed that all allomancers are nobles. People are divided into nobles and peasants, or “ska.” The ska are basically treated as serfs/chattels whose lives have no value. A nobleman is allowed to sleep with any ska woman he wants, as long as he kills her afterwards so that she doesn’t have a half-breed. Naturally, our heroes, Kelsier and Vin, are both ska and mistborn.
The best thing about this novel is the characters. Kelsier is the main hero, a relentlessly optimistic, bloodthirsty, charismatic rebel who is determined to overthrow the final empire to avenge his dead wife. Vin is his apprentice, a street urchin who has been using allomancy her whole life without actually knowing what she was doing. Where Kelsier is a natural leader who always smiles, Vin is extremely distrusting and suspicious and prefers to hide in shadows. The rest of the team also have distinct personalities. If I have one complaint about the characters, it’s that they all skew male. Except for Vin and the deceased Mer, the characters are almost entirely male. For example, in one scene, allomancers are surreptitiously altering the emotions of some ska who have met. All the ska they’re trying to recruit are male, and they use serving girls in different colored dresses as a signal for which emotion to channel. It seemed unnecessarily elaborate. Why wouldn’t the serving girls themselves be people who could channel emotions? This world is as bad as Middle Earth in its absence of female characters. At least the main one was female.
I enjoyed the worldbuilding. It’s common in high fantasy to stick too closely to what I call McFantasyland, a horse-and-castle world that feels more familiar to us than our own history. This one is different. For one, ash falls from the sky like rain on a regular basis, making everything dirty and clogging the streets. For another, every night the mists come, and there are mistwraiths that live within it. I loved the mistwraiths; they felt totally sci-fi. The sun is red, plants grow brown instead of green and it’s never cold. The bad guys are bald with eye tattoos and the really bad guys have spikes sticking out of their head that somehow don’t kill them. Enough of it is explained that the reader (listener, in my case) felt like we understood how the world worked, and yet there were mysteries still unrevealed.
This novel had a very good plot. You’d think that would be a given, considering how long this book is, but G.R.R.Martin and Robert Jordan proved that you can have a doorstop of a novel in which it doesn’t feel like anything happens. The main plot is the heist: how will our crew of allomancer thieves manage to overthrow the final empire? The secondary plot is Vin’s coming into her powers, learning to trust, and falling in love. There’s conflict when Vin disguises herself as a noblewoman, because she starts to feel as though she’s in two worlds simultaneously and I was left wondering if she would wittingly or not betray her friends through sympathy and identification with the nobles. The team suffers from huge setbacks. It’s not a novel in which everything magically falls into place for them. On more than one occasion, their plans seem to have been completely destroyed and most of the team is willing to throw in the towel, only to be rallied by Kelsier’s leadership. Kelsier’s final move seems like a failure until you see how it finally plays out and realize that it was foreshadowed throughout the entire book.
I also enjoyed the moral conflict in the book. More than one of the characters are philosophers. One likes to debate morality and the other is always trying to convert people to obscure, long-dead religions. Kelsier kills a lot of people without compunction because he hates all nobles, and yet he eventually chooses to save the life of one. Vin believes that everyone will betray her, and yet she comes to trust. Even as they’re plotting to destroy the final empire and kill the lord ruler, they wonder if they are doing the right thing. Even a former leader of the ska rebellion eventually joins the most evil sect of the empire to further the rebel cause. It’s got the magic and high stakes and adventures of Star Wars, but with a much deeper core of realism and uncertainty. The next book in the series is 27 hours of listening time, but you know what? If it’s like this one, I think it’s worth the investment.
View all my reviews
