The Hero of Ages

After enjoying, if not loving, the first two Mistborn books, I found book three to be a dismal slog. The whole book seems to be oriented to do things I don't enjoy. While the first two books used chapter epigrams from in-universe to hint at a mystery, and to reveal characterization, the third book uses them to explain away seeming inconsistencies in the narrative and provide exposition about the mystical forces manipulating our heroes. ("Well Ruin had enough power to do x, but that might make you think he should have done y, but in fact he didn't have quite enough power to do that because of z." It made me think of this DM of the Rings strip.) The problem is that I've always been interested in the people and the politics of this series; the godlike entities have never interested me for their own sake. This volume, however, seems to think I'll find vast cosmic entities interesting just, uh, because? This might be what other people read fantasy fiction for, but I just can't get into it.

Instead of paying off character and thematic threads from the first two books, the book seems more interested in paying off mysteries of backstory that I didn't even know were mysteries! Like, one of the big reveals of this book is "where did the kandra and koloss come from." I didn't know that the kandra and koloss were supposed to come from anywhere! They're weird fantasy creatures, this is a fantasy novel, why would I think they come from anywhere any more than a dog comes from somewhere in a piece of mimetic fiction? But there's an explanation that ties it into the novel's "magic system." So many things get explained that I never wanted an explanation for. Especially reading it in conjunction with Brandon Sanderson's annotations, I started to come to the perception that this book Was Just Not Written For Me. At one he writes something like, "Many people have written me want to ask what would happen if a Mistborn burned duralumin and aluminum at the same time." This is a question it never would have occurred to me to ask in a million years. Having seen it asked, I cannot possibly imagine how it could have an interesting answer. He's writing his book for these people, not me. The book is filled with explanations of how the "magic system" coheres.

What I wanted was more character stuff, especially for Vin and Elend. There are hints of it, but really their arcs seem to have ended in book two. I can see how you could use the material here to have a final character point about "being a good leader" for Elend: he keeps wrestling with the question of what sacrifices are ethical for a leader to make. But he wrestles with it, and then that throughline just vanishes; the climax of Elend's story has nothing to do with, and it never gets paid off. Vin has even less to do, I think.

In my review of book two, I complained that Sanderson doesn't always marry the immediate things his characters are doing to the big-picture ideas running in the background. Book two pulled it off in the end, but this is even more a failing in book three. Supposedly the fate of the world is at stake, but for most of the book it feels like you're reading about someone trying to get into a cave. There technically are stakes to this, but you never feel the stakes enough to care.

It's not all bad. Two of my favorite characters from the previous two books were TenSoon and Sazed, and both of them get good payoffs here, especially Sazed. Sazed's final reveal is an effective one, because it doesn't just pay off a worldbuilding mystery, but it also pays off a characterization point that's been emphasized through all three novels. Sanderson is capable of uniting plot, character, and world satisfactorily. I was very impressed by that moment, and I wish he could have had more like it.

The conclusion of the Mistborn series was also the most slow of all of them. A satisfying ending for sure, but somewhat repetitive in the path there. ( )

Well, I'm impressed. The first two books did perhaps feel a tad more focused and engrossing than this final installment, but Sanderson's wonderful ability to have virtually any event have two or three separate layers of story purpose, gradually revealing each as the books proceed, is really shining here. Things I noticed and wondered about are explained, things I never noticed are explained, and things I thought had already been explained turn out to have additional implications. The sheer volume of intricacy in the mythology and plotting ensures that while I might predict many of his plot twists, I cannot possibly predict them all. This is important to me in fiction, as seeing things coming becomes an ever greater problem the more books I read. There are only so many ways things can go, and only so many reasons an author will bother to convey a piece of seemingly irrelevant information to you. One of Sanderson's great gifts is disguising nearly all important information for later as urgently important information right _now_, obscuring for the reader the notion that it might have other implications for the future.

Emotionally, I think the first two books grabbed me a bit more, but there is an elegance and thematic resonance to the arcs in t his book that is skillfully pulled off. I still read this book at twice the pace I read most, which to me is a huge rule of thumb for separating the books I love from the ones I merely like. I'll be checking out his centuries-later-sequel series much sooner than I'd originally planned, methinks. ( )

It's been many years since a book has made me cry. ( )

It's been many years since a book has made me cry. ( )