Monday, January 27, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The House of Sundering Flames by Aliette de Bodard




The House of Sundering Flames is the third book in Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, which began with The House of Shattered Wings and continued with The House of Binding Thorns (reviewed here).  The series is set in a fascinating world - an early 1900s fantasy version of Paris recovering from devastation caused by a war between "Houses" ruled and powered by Fallen Angels (known just as "Fallen") and those able to manipulate their power.  But the Fallen are not the only beings in this world, nor even the only beings of power - Vietnamese Dragons mainain their own kingdom in the Senne, and elsewhere, beings related to other divinities also exist.  And just as important to the series are the lives of the Houseless, the ordinary humans without the protection of Fallen masters, and the peoples whose cultures the Houses run ramshod over.

As you can imagine, themes of power, of family and protection, and colonization/imperialism are strong undercurrents of this series, to sometimes mixed results: The House of Shattering Wings kind of disappointed me, whereas The House of Binding Thorns was pretty close to a masterpiece in the end.  Both of those novels were focused upon a single House of Fallen in sort of self-contained stories, even if characters and some themes recurred from book 1 to book 2.

But the House of Sundering Flames changes that up, with the story following more directly from the prior novels and taking the themes underlying the prior works and pushing them to the forefront.  Oh there are new characters and parts of the setting introduced, but this is truly the ending to the trilogy, tying up the threads and themes left behind.  And it is utterly fantastic.



----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
The Balance of Power in Paris is on a knife's edge.
In House Hawthorn, the Dragon prince Thuan's ascension to co-leader of the house (and husband of) with Asmodeus is causing internal dissent a time the House is at its weakest.

In the Annamite (Viet) quarter of Paris, where the houseless struggle to survive on their own, several beings try to find a way forward.  For one, there's Phillippe, the exiled Immortal,  trying to teach the now human Isabelle how to use Khi magic, in guilt over his resurrection costing her her immortality. For another, there's the human Annamite woman Aurore, searching for a way to obtain power to protect her lover and daughter.

And elsewhere in Paris, Emmanuelle, the Fallen lover of Selene - the ruler of House Silverspires - is sent with the dangerous Morningstar as an envoy to the powerful...but bigoted House Harrier.....when House Harrier explodes in flames, taking with it Emmanuelle's memory and the fragile peace that had emerged in Paris afer the war.

Now, as flames threaten to consume all of Paris, its inhabitants - whether Fallen or Immortal, Dragon or Human, House-Bound or Houseless - will be forced to deal with the questions of power, of family, and of justice and who should have each....or find themselves all incinerated in the fires.....
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As with the other books in the series, The House of Sundering Flames tells the story from a variety of perspectives, with the POV alternating from section to section.  In this case, our POV characters are mainly Thuan (returning from book 2), Emmanuelle (from book 1), Phillippe (from both books), and Aurore (a brand new character) - although the book may feature a segment here and there from the point of view of someone else for a short bit.  Unlike the other books in the series, the story isn't focused around a single House (for Book 1 that was Silverspires, for Book 2 that was Hawthorn & the Dragon Kingdom).  Instead, the book focuses upon the actions of all the Houses on the whole of Paris, and on the Houseless who are forced to bear the brunt under their reign.

The result is an incredible ride of a plot that focuses hard on the issues of power and who gets to use it and for what purposes, and the impact it has on those without such power - the colonized and the conquered.  It's also a story about the obligations that having power imposes upon someone, and of the utter importance of not forgetting those obligations.  The relevance of these themes to our world today are pretty damn clear, and this book is a masterpiece at working with them.

The key to that are the various character arcs - as with the prior two books, the story essentially features a number of plots going on simultaneously that are not all clearly heading towards the same ends - but all of which harp on these themes.  So you have new character Aurore, a Annamite human woman who was brutally cast out of a House and now seeks power to ensure those she loves are never so harmed again, but in the process finds out what power does to people who wield it.   You have Phillippe, desperately trying to shield Isabelle from returning to her Fallen powers for fear of what she might do with them.  You have Thuan, trying to establish his position inside a House known for wielding its power strictly and cruelly while protecting those who came with him from outside.  And you have Emmanuelle, who feels a duty to use her House status and her Fallen powers to help the helpless, but finds herself lost and scrambling to survive.

Even the story's antagonists, to the extent that anyone can be called "antagonists", fit this theme: you have a being of great power tortured by the Houses for his power who seeks vengeance upon everyone now that he's free - whether that be those who actually harmed him or those who didn't raise a hand to help.  A being who when threatened with destruction seeks to consume those who were under its protection in order to survive.  A Fallen who sees those without power - humans mainly - as mere tools.  And of course, A being who does feel obligations toward those he considers his friends, and wants to help them, but has no compunction about throwing around the use of force.

I'm being incredibly vague because I don't want to spoil anything here, but it all adds up to the same themes, so that even when the storylines of each of these characters are seemingly going completely different directions (Aurore and Thuan's storylines do this the most), they never feel out of place in the book.  And I suppose somewhere in this review I should point out that all of these characters are fantastic in general, and the relationships between them are done wonderfully (especially a few pairings of friends and partners).  It all winds up adding up to an ending that is immensely satisfying - both in how it closes this story and in how it closes the whole trilogy, though if we're lucky Bodard isn't totally finished with stories in this world.

I've come to love all the characters and aspects of this world, particularly in de Bodard's occasional released short stories in it.  But what she does with this novel is above and beyond even those prior stories, which is just incredible for a book of full novel length.  Immensely recommended.
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