Wednesday, November 29, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty





  The City of Brass is the first in a new Epic Fantasy trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty (The Daevabad Trilogy) based upon an Islamic mythology-based world.  Nearly all of our main characters are Djinn, and the story also features Ifrit, Peri, and Marid in various roles - not to mention the book's name comes from one of the stories in Arabian Nights.  While this is the author's debut novel, it doesn't feel like it - this is a pretty expansive piece of worldbuilding and character work, with the latter being particularly excellent.

  That said, The City of Brass is the type of trilogy-opener that does not really attempt to resolve many, if any, of the plot threads it raises throughout the book, preferring to end in a cliffhanger that presumably will set off some of the rest of the trilogy.  So if you're looking for a book that will be satisfying on its own, this book is not for you.  This is also a fantasy world filled with grey - while one of our protagonists may be the closest thing possible to an actual good guy, his attitude isn't treated well by the narrative and the sides in conflict in this story are not all good or all evil.  This is a story where prejudice, racism, religious-extremism and violent resistance are major forces and there are no easy answers.

More after the jump, but a quick warning before I go further, I read this book as an audiobook, which means that my spellings of character and place names is very likely going to be off.  It should be noted that while the audiobook is long (19 hours is long even for a 500 page book), it's very well narrated, and so I do recommend the audiobook format if you're looking for one.


------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------
In 18th century Cairo, Nahri is a seemingly ordinary woman, who struggles to survive on the streets without any family - mainly through cons she uses to steal from the Rich and privileged.  However there are a few strange things about her: she can speak/understand any language (including one that no one else can identify), and she can seemingly diagnose people's illnesses/maladies with a look....and she seems to heal supernaturally fast from any injury.  But when she finds herself hunted by the legendary Ifrit and accidentally summons a Djinn warrior, she learns that she may be the last surviving member of a legendary Djinn family of healers/leaders, the Nahids, who used to rule the Djinn city of Daevabad.  That warrior, the Daeva known as Dara, informs her that she must be taken to Daevabad in order to be safe from the beings that hunt her - not just the Ifrit, but seemingly other mythological creatures and other Djinn as well.  And while Nahri isn't enthused by the idea at first, she finds herself falling for Dara and is curious about this strange new world.

But Daevabad is not a stable city, but a powder keg of competing forces that could explode at any moment.  The City is ruled now by the Al-Qahtani family, whose tribe conquered the Daevas and defeated Nahri's ancestors, supposedly in order to protect the Shafit - Djinn who are at least part-human - from the Daevas who consider them blasphemous.  But the Al-Qahtanis have seemed to sour on the cause of the Shafit, and in Daevabad they are treated as second-class citizens, subject to the whims of pureblood Djinn.  The second son of the King, Alizayd, is a religious man who has believed as a result that all Djinn, pureblood AND Shafit, should be treated equally and who has spent some of his funds supporting an underground Shafit organization.  But the conquered Daeva tribe still is bitter about Al-Qahtani rule and still hates and fears the Shafit, and any word of Alizayd's support for them could start a riot....or worse.

Nahri's arrival into Daevabad will change the balance of power, and forces on all sides will rush to claim her for their own devices.  Can She and Alizayd, whose ancestors were dire enemies, somehow navigate these politics to survive and possibly stabilize the City?  Their survival in this environment may be impossible, especially because unseen conspirators are finalizing their plots to take back what they feel is theirs....
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The City of Brass succeeds in large part due to its characters being fantastic all-around.  The story bounces back and forth from the viewpoints of Nahri and Ali (although sometimes we will have multiple Nahri or Ali chapters in a row) and each serves as an excellent third person point of view of the story.  Nahri is just an all-around delight, a young woman who is thrown into a totally strange world, but who is also determined to not just be led around by others but to try and make her own decisions about her own life.  She's charming and witty, and in a dark story she's just plain fun to be with.

Ali on the other hand is kind of a stick in the mud - while he's a great warrior, he's also devoutly religious (to the form of the Islamic faith that exists in Daevabad) with a clear sense of right and wrong (as opposed to Nahri, who's more of a pragmatist in such matters) and is often painfully naive.  And yet, while his naivete is often painful early on, he grew on me so much that I couldn't help but really enjoy his viewpoint chapters.  His naivete is often used, like Nahri's pure lack of knowledge of the Djinn world, in order to allow for other characters to explain aspects of the situation to the reader, but this somehow still works and his naivete is written in such a way that it is actually believable. He's not a delightful protagonist like Nahri - the amount of times I wanted to scream at him for not getting what was going on and doing the smart thing might be in the double digits - but he's still very likable.

Still, what makes this feel not like a debut novel is that it's not just the two major characters that are really well done, but many of the side characters as well.  Ali's brother Muntadhir, the Amir (Crown Prince), at first seems like the typical lazy royal drunkard category that some real life royalty and fictional royalty fit into, but he is revealed to have far more depth than that and a deep love for Ali.  Jamshid, Muntadhir's best friend (and maybe more) and member of the royal guard (and son of the Daeva Grand Wzir), is quite possibly my favorite character in the book, a young man who has a good heart and doesn't want to hold on to the bitter rivalries of the past, despite how those rivalries affect everyone else in the City.  Even the ruling king Ghassan shows depth, as an incredibly pragmatic ruler but one who clearly has loves he doesn't dare show to the world.

Then there's Dara, the Afshin warrior who Nahri summons to start the story and whom she comes to love.  Honestly, he's probably the major character who works the least - especially at the end, when his powers become a mysterious plot device - but even then, his emotions and actions are mostly believable and understandable, even if they're often reprehensible.  A lesser book might have him become simply the mentor the main character falls in love and runs away with, but he's far more complex than that.

As for the plot itself, aside from the characters, it is mainly pretty interesting, though this is very much a setup novel for the rest of the trilogy and is thus thankfully carried by the great characters.  There are a lot of balls that the plot juggles - a potential revolt of the Shafit against pureblooded Djinn in the City, a potential revolt by the Daeva clan against Ali's ruling family, the interference of outside magical creatures such as the Peri, Marid, and Ifrit, and the reappearance of long-thought-dead enemies....none of these ideas are wrapped up in the slightest in this story, despite being planted very early on.  The ending isn't unsatisfying mind you for the opening book in a trilogy, as it (for now, anyway) ends a few character arcs that are the focus of this book, but well, the ending is game-of-thrones-esque in the cliffhangers it leaves for all of the characters (I'd be unsurprised if this wound up being a longer than 3 book series, ala Game of Thrones, given how many balls the author is juggling honestly).  But again, the characters here are so great and such a joy to read about, that the ending didn't disappoint me, but just left me wanting to know what comes next.

This isn't a perfect novel mind you.  The pacing often feels a bit off, especially early on - after the first few chapters with Nahri, we alternate for a while with Ali and Nahri chapters....except Nahris is on a dangerous journey fleeing magical creatures of many varieties to get to Daevabad while Ali is simply getting involved with the politics of Daevabad.  It's not that the politics aren't interesting....but it was hard not to be far more enraptured in Nahri's plot early on, which made shifting to the other plot after a Nahri cliffhanger kind of irritating.  It also takes incredibly long for the main characters to finally wind up in the same location - which is obviously going to happen from the start (this happens around 50-60% of the way through the book).  I liked the characters enough that I didn't mind the slow start, but I could see this bothering some people.  The book's momentum becomes a lot stronger once the two characters are in the same location, but it takes a while to get there.

And while Nahri is witty and the dialogue (both internal and external) in this book is EXCELLENT (since I didn't mention that above), this is as I explained above not exactly a light book, with the ending falling in the Game-of-Thrones-esque land of "Everything's Gone to Shit" for our loved characters.  Again, this is a world of gray, where the most morally good characters are basically screwed over from the beginning and our three most unambiguously good guys (Ali, Nahri, and Jamshed) each have their own faults and suffer for when they try to take moral stands.

Still, for a trilogy opener, this is excellent, and well worth reading.  If you're looking for a new epic fantasy series to start, and want something different from the typical European-Middle-Ages-based fare, the City of Brass is HIGHLY recommended.


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