The Lure of the Trilogy

[mtvessel]

Jul 2018
City of Blades / City of Miracles - Robert Jackson Bennett – Jo Fletcher Books, 2017
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One of the odder quirks of the fantasy genre is the weird prevalence of the trilogy as a literary format. Yes, Lord of the Rings started the trend, but it is clearly a single story that had to be divided into three for publishing reasons. And Tolkien's tale was based on some thirty years of world-building, so it earned its length (indeed, one of the most impressive features of LOTR as a narrative is just how lightly the lore is worn - it's there and it's important, but for the most part does not get in the way of the action).

Later fantasy writers have much less excuse for inflicting trilogies on their readers. Given the pressure on authors to produce, I would guess that the world-building for the average fantasy trilogy takes a year or two at most, which is not enough to sustain, say, 1500 pages of narrative without some longueurs. Hence the phenomenon of the mid-trilogy volume blues, in which authors struggle to pad out their stories to meet the requirements of their publishers and their readers. While it is always interesting to see the tactics that they employ, often one cannot help wondering whether the story would have been better told if the author had stopped after one volume.

This is particularly the case when the incipit for the fantasy world is a single good idea, as it is here. City of Stairs has perhaps the most literally post-apocalyptic setting one can imagine, in which the gods and their magic were destroyed in an epic battle, leaving a landscape of incomplete miracles inhabited by a human culture consisting of a thoroughly atheist ruling class and their resentful underlings. Bennett told the obvious tale to tell in such a setting, using an entertaining triumvirate of a mild-mannered bureaucrat (Shara Komayd), a tough general (Turyin Mulaghesh), and a not-so-barbarian assistant-cum-enforcer (Sigrud Harkvaldsson). The story had a spectacular climax and ended more-or-less satisfactorily. But the gods of fantasy publishing demanded a trilogy, and Bennett evidently felt obliged to comply. So what to do, without repeating himself?

City of Blades provides one answer - tell a story in the same setting but through the eyes of a different protagonist, in this case Turyin Mulaghesh. This is worth doing because she was somewhat one-dimensional in the first book and here there is an opportunity to dig into the accumulated guilt of her military past that is her most interesting characteristic. It helps that the setting is similarly haunted - Voortyashtan, the former capital of Voortya, the divinity of war and death, which is now a ruined sunken city that is blocking the mouth of the main river to Bulikov. A Dreyling company headed by Signe Harkvaldsson, Sigrud's daughter, is in the process of dredging it, in the teeth of opposition from the faction-ridden locals. Mulaghesh, who is still trying to retire, gets sent by Shara to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Sumitra Choudry, a scientist who had been studying some strange crystals found in a nearby thanadeskite mine that could be a new source of clean energy. But Mulaghesh soon discovers that not all is as it seems. Sumitra's room has mad scrawls on the walls. Isolated villagers in the surrounding countryside are dying in bizarre ritualistic killings. And there is a closed-off area in the harbour that Signe and her team are refusing to let anyone into. Could something divine be going on?

Well, guess. As the foregoing precis suggests, the setup is much the same as in City of Stairs, with quite senior people investigating apparently minor events for no good reason. As a result, the book takes a very long time to get going, with Mulaghesh pottering about the mines and surrounding areas seemingly on a whim. Things only look up when Sigrud arrives, after which the action becomes much more compelling. Mulaghesh's backstory is folded into the main plot (with nice use of show, not tell - other authors take note), resulting in a climax which I for one found quite moving and powerful.

As a sequel, it is more than adequate, but the way in which Jackson fails to develop the magical rules of his world is disappointing. He sets up a mystery - how can Voortya-like miracles be happening when the Kaj very definitely killed her 70 years ago, and it is well-established that when a divinity dies, their power goes with them? Unfortunately this is the same mystery as in City of Stairs and it only has two basic answers. Bennett is a better writer than to tread the same old ground so we get the one he didn't use previously, but it is less satisfying.

The same, sadly, is true for City of Miracles, which uses Sigrud as its viewpoint character. I am not going to say much about this, mainly because I remember virtually nothing about it except for the events in its opening and closing pages. To be fair, Bennett avoids repeating the formula yet again and instead develops the theme of moving on from the past. However I found it uncompelling. Part of the difficulty is Bennett's decision to pad out his trilogy by choosing different viewpoint characters. Much of the success of City of Stairs was due to the interactions between Shara, Sigrud and Turyin, but this is much reduced in the sequels (indeed, they are never physically in the same room together). Sigrud was always the least interesting of the three main characters to me, and without the goading of the other two we are left with his estranged wife and children backstory which is just as conventional as it sounds. Again, as a story it is competent, but artistically, Bennett would have been better advised to resist the lure of the trilogy and have stopped while his ideas and characters were still new and fresh.