Mistborn: The Well of Ascension (2007)

Written by: Brandon Sanderson
Published by: Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1688-2
Genre:  Fantasy

Warning: This is a review of the second book in a trilogy.  Therefore, it must be said that it may contain spoilers for the first book in that trilogy.  I apologize if this is inconvenient.

George R. R. Martin ruined fantasy for me, I think.  These days, when I’m reading a book that’s so eager to win me over to whatever world of intrigue it has promised on the cover sleeve, I yearn for a gritty realism where character actions matter and political infighting presents real and prevailing danger at all times–that whatever threat that threatens the realm puts something I care about at stake.  A Song of Ice and Fire, for whatever faults it has regarding its overemphasis on descriptions of food and set pieces, at the very least feels appropriately vast.  As that series continues to grow, its vastness increases (Dorne a notable exception of course that might actually turn out promising), and it all feels very important and absorbing.  And the things that happen to the various well-developed characters feel natural and less forced, regardless of how absurd the premise feels after thinking about it for two minutes.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that it is becoming more difficult for me to buy this Hero With a Thousand Faces template.  I’m not necessarily one to embrace sophistication–I’ve tried reading In Search of Lost Time a couple times and couldn’t do it–but I’m saying that the tried and true themes of the Hero’s Journey just don’t resonate with me as much as they used to.  I question whether or not I’m qualified to write a response to this sort of thing.  I’m not much of a professional. But it’s how I feel at any rate.  So off we go.

The Well of Ascension is the second book in the Mistborn trilogy written by Brandon Sanderson.  It picks up roughly one year after the end of The Final Empire.  Elend Venture is now the monarch presiding over the Central Dominance, which consists primarily of its capital city of Luthadel.  The survivors of the Kelsier’s crew, all responsible in one way or another for overthrowing the godking known simply as the Lord Ruler, have all taken jobs that involve the court.  Elend’s focus is one that is less austere, willing the power he’s usurped to be transferred to the people and particularly the peasant population known as the skaa.  Naturally, the upperclassmen don’t like this at all and are constantly scheming to oust him from the court.  Complicating things further still is the looming threat of Elend’s father who has amassed his own army to march on the city, and still two more armies that threaten his hard-won victory as well.

The theme of this novel is one where an empire torn to pieces after its Lord Ruler’s displacement is reunited under the guise of a new peace.  It serves as a decent analysis of what happens to power when powerful people are deposed or cast aside.  It is a novel that is very eager to please: it truly wants you to feel that Luthadel is an important city and that the world would fall apart without Elend or Vin (of whom we’ll get to shortly) involved in every little political nuance, and is trying so hard to entertain.  Politics is interesting I guess, you know, when they’re done right.  My big problem rests with Luthadel being the big focus of this second, darker entry in the Hero’s Journey.  We don’t venture outside of its walls very often and ultimately don’t really have an understanding of how important this city is in spite of its convenient central location in the heart of the former Final Empire.  Why does Elend’s kingship matter?  Why is maintaining Luthadel’s position as the dominant force that drives this new empire important?  The world of Mistborn is hinted at being extremely large, suggested by the very well done lore that is the product of 1000 years of oppression by an immortal godking.  Why are we still stuck here playing this stupid game and not out adventuring so we may better understand why exactly the world needs Luthadel at all?  I’m sure it’s possible to infer a thing or two about why, but I couldn’t be bothered to.   The book asks us instead to care about the primary characters that were set up in Kelsier’s crew during the first novel and limits their abilities to do much of anything with the world at large thanks to political theater and enemies at the gates.  Yawn.

So if the politics is a total flatline (it is) then what of the characters that drive the narrative of this story?  Well…

…they’re okay, I guess.  All the characters you’ve grown to love from the first book are back.  Even Kelsier gets a starring role as ‘that guy we like to talk about because he was always smiling even when he was raging inside.’  There’s Vin, there’s Elend, there’s OreSeur, there’s… um… Ham… there’s… guy?  And guy?  And guy?  And some other guy?  There are new characters as well!  Like Zane, the angsty teenage Mistborn man that serves as an effective foil to Vin, the angsty teenage Mistborn woman.  And whats-his-face.  He’s there, too.  And everyone smiles more often than they realistically should.  You know what, whatever.  Let’s talk about Elend and Vin.

For the most part, the Mistborn series is more reliant on its action setpieces than for any deeper purpose it might try to postulate.  The character of Vin is clearly the action girl here, and also the heroine.  She is set up in the first novel as a street urchin that comes to the revelation that her magical abilities surpass many of the other Mistborn known at the time.  Streetwise, paranoid, and angsty, she stays up nearly all hours to protect the far weaker, not-Mistborn-at-all Elend because she loves him I guess.  She engages in these huge fights with tons of assassins that serve to display just how powerful she is, ostensibly to hold the audience in thrall as well because here is this creature that could do so much with her power and blah blah blah.   She feels obligated to protect everyone and that’s fine.  But there is also something Mary Sueish about her, where it seems that we are always relying on Vin and Vin only to keep Luthadel safe.  Most action scenes where anything is at stake whatsoever is ended after a time simply because Vin swoops in at the last moment to save the day.  She rarely makes any mistakes, and when she does she isn’t held accountable for them at all.  No, Vin is young and perfect.  Yawn.

Elend Venture is slightly different.  Political theatre aside, this guy actually gets something of an arc.  Whereas everyone else kind of keeps doing their thing, Elend has the biggest opportunity to grow and my argument is that Elend’s arc saves The Well of Ascension from crap-fantasy purgatory.  Here is a guy that is timid and weak, a philosopher who is fundamentally useless, and a king in name only.  But he gets more interesting as time goes by because he starts to learn what it is that makes kings great and he shirks his soft, philosophical side to become more of a hardened, altruistic king that doesn’t hide under his bed at the slightest bit of danger.  It’s fun to see him evolve into a person that doesn’t need a Mary Sue around constantly to protect him, and surely by the end of this book in particular he does become more of a man that can defend his own interests, a real king actually.  That is nice to see when everyone else is just kind of meh.  I’m more excited to see what becomes of him in the next book than I am of anything else, because suddenly this guy is important and certainly conflicted genuinely about who or what he is.

You may think by now that I don’t like the Mistborn series all that much.  The truth is that I don’t necessarily hate it.  I think it could be better.  There are really cool action set pieces and the magic is performed in an interesting way, although again the Allomancy system seems heavily inspired by video game RPG mechanics (be sure to watch your magic meter!).  It’s a crutch, though.  Action can never be resolved without involving some Allomantic trickery in this series and the softness of the writing and the disregard of feelings for these characters makes it a little more difficult to stay invested in anything that happens.  No, where Mistborn truly shines is within its mythologies, of why there are Steel Inquisitors, where the mysterious mists came from, what led the Lord Ruler to become a thing, and most interestingly this whole race of creatures that can assume the forms of other living things completely that are presumably born from the mists.  The characters we’re spending time with to uncover the nature of this strange fantasy world just aren’t up to par with the rest of the world itself and generally aren’t able to carry the series in my opinion, but at the very least it’s compelling enough to stick with it, since Sanderson dispenses the lore at regular intervals, indicating that the world is vast and storied and interesting.  It’s just too bad that we only get to see just a sliver of what makes the world of Mistborn so neat, and we get to stay locked up in a single city for the whole duration.

B-

Mistborn: The Final Empire (2006)

Written By: Brandon Sanderson
Published By: Tor Books

So there once was a time when I was young and full of energy and ambition.  I liked to write stories fairly frequently, but the stories tended to not go many places and ultimately they ended up as derivative works inspired by other works that people did a whole lot better at this whole writing thing than I could ever hope to anyway (see what I mean?).  My primary influences during this time were video games, and if you were to read these embarrassing manuscripts that I eventually stopped creating for a number of reasons, you would see just how much their presence overwhelmed my every thought.  In addition to that, I could not bear to take any project all the way to the end and oftentimes I would purposely cut my narrative short because I got bored or didn’t know how to connect things together in any meaningful way.

Mistborn: The Final Empire reads to me very much like one of those early manuscripts.  In fact, I could’ve written something just like it if only I had just persevered in my desires to become a highly successful and well-loved fantasy author.  It is a manuscript that is largely mechanical in its execution that has an interesting premise, an efficient setup, and a really good payoff, but isn’t without its flaws.

The book tells the story of an efficient-by-design group of people who have come together to overthrow an oppressive fundamental regime.  The leader of the group is a very charismatic older dude by the name of Kelsier, who of course has a rough past that underlies his entire motivation.  He is also what this mythos styles as an “Allomancer,” or a guy who can perform various super-human feats after swallowing tinctures of pure metal.  He brings in a very young (and very abused) street urchin from the lower castes of the imperial society due to her inborn abilities as an Allomancer in which is revealed that she possesses a lot of natural skill.  As the story progresses, we see plans getting planned, plans getting foiled, foils getting planned, and plans foiling plans.  Throughout all this foolery, we are treated to a needlessly cryptic backstory about what being a Mistborn means and what drives the characters and why the world is as insufferable as it is–tropes typical for this type of work.

As a fantasy adventure novel, Mistborn: The Final Empire certainly succeeds in telling a story that has its ups and downs.  Things get set up, things get paid off, things get tied together, and there is action that drives characters to respond to changes in the situation.  Sprinkled within are various commentaries about social orders, slavery, corruption in government, thievery, and so on.  For the purposes of action and or adventure, it is as adequate as they come.

Problems arise, however, in the ways Allomancy, the lynchpin in which the whole mythology revolves, is handled.  This book takes a weird approach in separating itself from the normal mechanics of swords and sorcery.  Basically, there are 8 or so different types of metal that endow Allomancers with various powers like telekinesis or improved senses.  The main difference between full-blown Allomancers and the lesser-powered “Mistings” is that Allomancers have full access to all of these metals while Mistings may only utilize one to its full potential.  In a sense, this balances the magic in ways that keep things grounded in reality and allows tension to come and go whenever required, and safely redefines the magic formula.

But when Allomancy itself comes into play, it is handled very much like a video game in that practitioners can “take stock” in abilities they have at their disposal, they can “cast” their powers much like wizards can, and have a way to kind of monitor their remaining resources in what can only be described as a Magic Meter sort of way.  When first confronted with a situation that can only be resolved using Allomancy, its use is ramrodded right into the narrative and doesn’t make any sense at all.  This execution, at first, is surprisingly dry and even pragmatic.  Characters “burn” the metal, and then they “stop burning” the metal at whatever times the plot dictates.  I guess there is something to be said about showing and not telling, but at least get some subtlety in there, novel.  Geez.

Anyway, the dry mechanics surrounding Allomancy take some getting used to, but it won’t completely keep you off guard.  The other problems that arise are within the narrative itself.  The rest of the text is also dry and pragmatic, unless there is an action scene.  Internal monologues show up within character points-of-view that are sometimes appropriate, sometimes not, and when it’s not appropriate it really sticks out.  Character motivations are quickly summarized in some italicized text just to make sure the reader is still paying attention, and many characters are also either really annoying or just flatline completely even when their successes are not guaranteed.  Kelsier, for instance, is supposed to be a really self-confident dude with a shaky past full of tragedy, betrayal, and loss.  He’s always smiling and joking around, always looking ahead to a brighter future I guess, but at the same time we are given too much information about what drives him and what motivates him through some poorly placed internal monologues that don’t leave us wondering anything.  We don’t remain intrigued in him at all, which is a tad unfortunate.

The character Vin is also very hard to stomach at first.  Much like Kelsier, we are made fully aware of her faults and her internal conflicts, often because there is no better context where these elements can better fall into place.   We’re just given them as a sort of ‘thanks’ for continuing our slog through this story and it’s something we need to know in order to connect some dots later on in a very forced manner.  And it gets irritating.  It’s not bad storytelling, but if you are looking into the Mistborn series for a sense of thrill and intrigue, you’ll be plodding along for a while before the good shit starts to happen and the headaches stop.

That being said, once you reach the top of the arc for Mistborn: The Final Empire, you will be whisked away on a rollercoaster ride that is a real thrill, and will leave you wanting more when you reach the end.  As stories go, it hits all the beats required, there aren’t much in the way of surprises, but you will be entertained and at the very least interested in seeing where this world ends up.

B

Choice Passages:

“He is a Misting, Vin thought. Kelsier and Dockson called him a ‘Smoker.’ She would probably have to figure out what that meant on her own; experience told her that a powerful man like Kelsier would withhold knowledge from her as long as he could, stringing her along with occasional tidbits. His knowledge was what bound her to him–it would be unwise to give away too much too quickly.”

“Gritting his teeth, Kelsier flared his pewter again; it was running low, he noticed. Pewter was the fastest-burning of the basic eight metals.”

“Renoux studied her, and Vin glanced away. She didn’t like it when people looked at her that way–it made her wonder how they were going to try and use her.”