This is a tough book to sink your teeth into. It’s slow to start, and slow to catch your emotions (if it ever catches them all), but still, for the right reader this book could work very well. I always appreciate a well-executed attempt at a unique structure, and we have that here in abundance. Up front, though, the reason this is getting 3.5 stars is that though there were bits that caught my imagination in the first half of the book, it didn’t really hook me until over halfway through. At that point, I could see why he had done it this way, but it didn’t make the first half any easier to get through in the moment.
This is a high fantasy mosaic novel, told in the city of Ilmar as it is occupied by the Palleseen Sway (an empire bent on converting the entire world to its concept of “perfection”, by force if necessary). High fantasy in particular often utilizes multiple POV characters to tell stories, but this book takes it to another level, following several characters in a more glancing way, so that no particular characters has an arc, but the city as a whole does. You don’t see what is going on by reading one individual small chapter, you only see it when those small chapters coalesce into a whole, like a mosaic.
As with all the Tchaikovsky novels I’ve read, the worldbuilding is incredibly creative and imaginative, but my preferences as a reader lend towards emotional connection (negative or positive) to characters, not concepts or cities, so it really just took a very long time for me to care about anything that was going on. I was invested by the end, at which point all the little small chapters with these characters did start to make me feel invested, and I really did have a physical sense of the city.
Some of the fantasy concepts in here I’ve never seen done before, or Tchaikovsky has given others new spins. There is one section of the city where unrestful dead spirits continually steal the bodies of any who enter their territory, riding them and reenacting their revels until those bodies die and they can steal new ones. There is a parallel world accessible through a forest, guarded by strange fishlike creatures with enormous jaws, who will only let you pass with a token. And there is my favorite character, Yasnic, who is the lone worshiper and priest of a god who he basically babysits for, and who becomes a surprise mover of events due to his ability to heal (with a price). Also, the portrait that develops of this city and its unbelievably intricate webs of politics and shifting loyalties makes the resulting violence feel all the more real and consequential when it finally erupts. So many fantasy books I’ve read make revolutions or unrest into black and white them or us situations, when the reality of those kinds of things is often much, much more complicated, and this book reflects that better than maybe any other fantasy book I’ve read.
I’ve just started book two, and I’m already liking it much better than this one, either because I’m already familiar with the world and some of the characters, or because it isn’t as much of a mosaic as this one, concentrating instead on a smaller group of characters in mostly one place. If nothing else, Tchaikovsky keeps things interesting.
[3.5 stars, rounded up]
