Monday, October 22, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Gate of Gods by Martha Wells




The Gate of Gods is the final book in Martha Wells' The Fall of Ile-Rien Trilogy, following "The Wizard Hunters" and "The Ships of Air."  Readers of this blog will remember how much I loved the first two books in the trilogy (and The Death of the Necromancer as well) and as such it didn't take me long to take out The Gate of Gods from the Hoopla e-library.

This trilogy, the story of Tremaine Valiarde and Ilias (and their friends) as they struggle against a devastatingly powerful mysterious enemy and against their own insecurities is wrapped up in this volume and the result is pretty damn good.  The book splits its cast into two yet again and switches between the two groups as they have their independent side plots, but it mostly works, and the characters remain absolutely superb - fun to read and easy to care about - as the plot rolls toward its conclusion.  Its probably my least favorite book of the trilogy, but that's not much of a negative.

Note:  Obviously, don't start the trilogy with this book, it's the finale and you'll find yourself either lost or just missing most of the connections that were based upon events in the prior two books. 
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Having made it to Capidara, Tremaine and her friends and family find themselves in limbo as others decide how to proceed with the war against the Gardier.  Meanwhile, Gilead is beating himself up about the possibility of the God rejecting Giliad for using magic, and the whole crew is outraged to find the murdering sorcerer Ixion allowed to roam free, allegedly to help the war effort.  And then there's Nicholas, who is going around scheming to uncertain ends.

But when Arisilde provides the group with a new magical transportation circle and the Gardier attack the house including the circle, the group is forced to split up, with Tremaine, Ilias, Gilead, Girard and some others going through the circle into the unknown and Nicholas and Florian stuck on the Ravenna.

On the Ravenna, Ixion is clearly up to no good, and only the scheming of Nicholas stands between him and utter disaster. 

But it's Tremaine, Ilias, Gilead, and the others who find themselves in the gravest danger of all - for in going through these new Circles they find themselves tracking Arisilde's final journey, where he lost his body and found himself stuck inside the Sphere.  And on this path lies potentially the secret truth behind the Gardier, who will stop at nothing to prevent them from learning it....
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It's hard to review The Gate of Gods because its very much got the same great strengths (in its characters) as the prior two books in the series.  The one thing it does differently is that, with Nicholas now fully onboard, it can manage more successfully two separate plotlines at once since Nicholas makes a far more fascinating character in dealing with conflicts than Florian - though Florian has improved and grown here too, in impressive ways (I don't want to suggest I don't like Florian, whose earnest wanting to do right makes her incredibly likable, but Nicholas' master criminal act carried a whole book for a reason).

Tremaine is terrific still for the same reasons as before - she's still battling through the remnants of her depression and self-doubt here, especially in regards to her worthiness to be together with Ilias.  How that manifests is often darkly hilarious - there's one sequence for example where she thinks to herself how she can't admit to Ilias that she loves him and that in the face of a romantic rival, it'd be easier to kill off the rival than to pledge her love to Ilias (and then this is made doubly hilarious by Gilead thinking a short bit later how that rival is going to get herself killed by Tremaine).  And she remains omni-presently capable in everything other than spitting out her growing love for Ilias.  Fortunately for her, Ilias is great in his own competence and in seeing her for who she truly is, and is the perfect match for her, even when she can't quite spit it out.  And of course the rest of the characters remain great.

This is probably my least favorite of the trilogy though honestly because the book seems to try really hard at convincing us it's going one place when it's quite clearly going another - throughout the book we gain hints about the true origins of the Gardier, and as the concluding volume in a trilogy the reader is going to expect the characters to confront that truth in a way to end the war, but the book works hard to convince you otherwise that they're simply going for a smaller payoff (mild spoiler: the payoff is indeed as large as you'd think it would be).  It all works mind you, but it's kind of annoying since I kept eyeing how much of the book was left and wondering when we'd get to the final confrontation.

Still, the book ends on a great note, which made me incredibly happy, and I loved the trilogy overall.  I was recently asked which Martha Wells series to recommend to a first time reader, and my answer was - and still is - that they're all fantastic and worthy, and this book simply backs that up.
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