The next giant novel of the year has been taking me quite a bit of time. I’ve chosen The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, to change things up a bit.
It is the first book in a long epic fantasy series. I’ve written about Sanderson’s Mistborn in the past.
I didn’t worry about spoilers in the previous posts in this series, because the first few books were “classics.” The contents of those books are part of the fabric of Western culture.
This book is still pretty new, and like most speculative fiction, the mysteries of the world are part of the fun. So I’m going to be vague sometimes. I promise not to spoil anything.
How Long is Too Long?
When I announced this series, I pointed out that the most common complaint in book reviews I made the previous year was that the book was too long. Unfortunately, I’m going to lodge the same complaint here. I see no excuse for it.
One of the features of this world is a place called the Shattered Plains.
In order for cavalry fighting to occur here, men have to move large bridges by hand across these crags in the ground for the horses to run across. The Kaladin storyline has this happen probably five or so times.
Showing this to us once was interesting. Reading five chapters where this happens is a slog.
I get it. He introduced new elements into those scenes. He developed the character. Blah, blah, blah.
These aren’t legitimate excuses.
Someone along the publication line should have said, “Those scenes get tedious to read, and they are all going to blur together in the reader’s mind a week after finishing the book anyway, so maybe you should combine them into one or two chapters.”
This would have worked wonders on the pacing. It would have meant a denser layering of new concepts, but this would be a small price to pay considering how few new concepts are introduced in these chapters.
I can’t help but feel like these sections existed merely to make the book longer so that the series as a whole could rival giants like The Wheel of Time.
Description in The Way of Kings
The description also got tedious.
I found this a strange turn from his earlier stuff. He used to give excellent, brief details that told a lot about the world and culture and characters. The Way of Kings takes the “more is more” approach. Everything gets describe to a fault.
I get this is part of the “style” of the genre.
People want to hear a million details about this fantasy world. But to me, it reads as lazy. It’s weird to call such a long book lazy, but this book came out after he got “famous.”
It feels like he stopped working hard to find the right description and instead dumped everything onto to the reader hoping one of them was the right one.
Characterization
The most interesting character for me is Shallan.
She basically infiltrates her way into an apprenticeship to a scholar. There are a lot of complexities to her, and she gets put into interesting moral dilemmas that I cared about as a reader.
She also interacts with people from different walks of life, which lends itself to a more natural exploration of the religions, cultures, and history of the world.
Unfortunately, her point of view disappears for huge chunks (I think over 300 pages at one point, a whole novel!). This makes the tedium I referred to above even worse since I knew there were interesting parts I could be reading.
I once read a review that said Sanderson’s NaNoWriMo-esque speed of writing might be good for fans that just want to know what happens next, but it is beginning to show in the sloppiness of his writing for the rest of us.
I can’t agree more.
If this were carefully cut to 600-700 pages, it would be exactly the same book, but infinitely better.
The World of the Stormlight Archive
I think that’s enough of the bad. Let’s get on to the good.
The world is detailed and has a long, complicated history. We get glimpses of this past with enough detail that I fully believe Sanderson has a good idea about what went on.
This is quite an impressive amount of depth to the world you don’t get from much epic fantasy (e.g. I’m not convinced Tolkien had pre-Third Age Middle Earth history worked out at the writing of The Lord of the Rings).
The magic system and sword/armor systems were original and neat.
Actually, most aspects of the world were interesting. I don’t blame him for wanting to drone on forever about them (please resist the urge in future books!).
I mean, who puts giant crustaceans in epic fantasy? It is nice to get away from the dragon trope.
Final Thoughts
The characters weren’t bad, but they certainly felt a little one-dimensional at times.
In a novel with this many characters, it’s good to have defining features to remind the reader who they were. When these features get repeated too much, the character becomes reduced to that feature (see my article on Character/Caricature).
I’m not saying that happened in the book, but it was borderline sometimes.
2019 Edit: I’ve read all three books in the series at this point. So, they kept me coming back. You can take the above with a grain of salt in light of this update.
Check out my other articles on giant novels:
