Tuesday, July 17, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett




  The Second in Robert Jackson Bennett's "The Divine Cities" trilogy, City of Blades follows up on its predecessor (City of Stairs) by moving to another formerly "Divine" city a few years later and shifting the main protagonist to an ancillary character from the first book: General Turyin Mulaghesh (pictured on the author's blog here).  Once again, we find our protagonist investigating a mystery that suggests the seemingly dead Gods might not be so dead after all, but this time instead of a guile heroine, we follow a woman with PTSD way out of her depth as she tries to make up for her dark past.

  The result is a good book, but easily the weakest of the trilogy.  Mulaghesh is an excellent character, but isn't quite as good at carrying the book as Shara (who merely cameos here) did in Book 1, and several side characters are simply more interesting.  The book does contain the most interesting ending of the trilogy, but overall lacks the impact of its predecessor or successor.

More after the Jump:

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
A few years after becoming a hero at the Battle of Bulikov (City of Stairs), General Turyin Mulaghesh, has retired from public life to a beach island, to the befuddlement of many.  But then a messenger comes from Prime Minister Shara Komayd....with a request for Turyin to perform one last mission:  go to Voortyashtan, the City of the Deceased God Voortya, and under a covert story examine the strange situation there.  That Situation?  First, the discovery of a metal ore that seems to have inexplicable properties that allow it to be a supereffective conductor of electricity...which suggests some Divine influence...and Second, the disappearance of a Saypuri agent investigating the metal's potential divine properties

But when Mulaghesh gets to Voortyashtan, she soon finds that the individuals in the City are very familiar to her...and bring up elements of her tragic past.  For the General in charge of the Military Base is her old commander General Lalith Biswal, with whom she allegedly committed war crimes when she was a teenager.  And the agent who is her primary contact is the daughter of Shara's former secretary/bodyguard, who wants to progress the world through improved technology and wants nothing to do with her father's past.  And worse....the situation on the ground between the locals and the Saypur military is a boiler-pot, threatening to explode at any point....and that's before the threatened intervention of the divine comes into play?

Shara got Mulaghesh to agree to the mission by asking her to "Make it Matter."  But can someone with her own demons truly do anything of the sort?  Or will the absolute worst reoccur and overwhelm not just her...but the entire Continent?
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Turyin Mulaghesh is a very different protagonist than the prior book's heroine, Shara Komayd.  Whereas Shara was a guile hero through and through - a spy who used knowledge and trickery to get her way - Turyin is a former soldier with massive PTSD for some heinous acts she committed at the beginning of her career.  She's tactically smart and as unbiased as someone from her position in life can be toward her opponents, but she's basically forced into an intelligence gathering and mystery solving role by default, and it is very much against her nature.  It's an interesting twist, and it for the most part works.  Turyin's tragic past also works very well - and calls to mind many real world parallel atrocities - and the reaction of her former commanding officer, Biswal to it, is just as fascinating and understandable....if maybe a bit predictable.  And the book's conflict is resolved in an incredibly clever way which really surprised me.

I also liked some of the secondary characters - badass Sigurd returns and is great as usual, but his daughter Signe is a major character and is a really fun complementary character - unlike her father (who she dislikes), she's an innovator and inventor and creator of a major corporation who believes technology will be the way to guide the future, not battle.  This is in essence a major theme of this book, as one of the historical characters repeatedly invoked had the same concept, which led to Saypur's prosperity with the gods destroyed...and it's a theme that works.

Still, the worldbuilding is a bit less impressive this time than in City of Stairs.  Some of the wonder of the Divine is a bit lost after going through that book, even if Voortyashtan is very very different from Bulikov and the Divine involved is very different, the sense of wonder of the prior book is kind of lost.  The book also continues the worldbuilding with passages from histories and other characters that spoil some events to come, which is again a bit annoying as the reader is obviously more used to expecting it. 

And I have to say that I was been a bit confused by the technology level shown by the countries in this world - naturally the tech levels won't match up with ours since Divine works replaced much of modern technology for a while meaning certain tech wasn't quite developed in line with works in our world - but it's still sometimes all over the place like the world can't quite figure out which tech should exist (we're in like early 20th century with rifles, and yet later era with other technology and electricity...it's weird).

In any event, whereas City of Stairs was a masterpiece, City of Blades is merely very good.  So, I don't mean to be too negative - it's still a very good book well worth your time.
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