Robert Jackson Bennett: The Divine Cities
Jun. 13th, 2018 03:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaI enjoyed the first volume of Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy so much that I had to immediately read the next two volumes, to see where he was going with this fascinating and quite original fantasy world.
The City of Blades, the second novel in the Divine Cities series, takes up some years after the events of City of Stairs. Shaya Komayd is now the prime minister of Saypur, and is barely holding onto power as she tries to enact policies that will bring the Continent into the modern age - and improve life for its people.
The main character of this novel, General Turyin Mulagesh (retired) was governor of Bulikov during Shaya’s time there. And Shaya has used every trick she can think of to bring Mulagesh out of retirement to handle a delicate and dangerous operation. In the region of Voortyashtan, firmer home of the Divine of war and death - and the one most responsible for the cruel behaviour of Continentals toward their colonial subjects - a deposit of a strange metal has been discovered. Not only is it a superconductor of electricity - a new technology among the Saypuri - but it seems to actually generate a stronger current as it conducts. The key question is, is this an unusual, but natural substance, or is it a miraculous one, suggesting that some Divine creature remains active on the Continent.
Something is going on in Voortyashtan, to be sure - the last operative sent to investigate the possible miraculous nature of the strange metal seems to have gone mad, and then disappeared.
What Mukagash finds when she arrives at the military governor’s seat, Fort Thinadeshi in Voortyashtan is a bleak, relatively undeveloped region full of unrest. Voorrya was a deity deply involved with her people - her death wrought perhaps the worst devastation of any of the regions of the Continent on its inhabitants, and recovery has been even slower than in other areas. There are internal struggles between the people who live in the lowland river valleys and those living in the highlands. There is resentment against the Saypuri officials and military forces trying to establish order. There have been violent, possibly ritualistic atrocities committed in the countryside, indications that someone is trying to revive some of the miracles of the dead wargod Voortya. And then there are the Dreylings, a northern people, trading partners of the Saypuri, who are in Voortyashtan to rebuild the great harbour, so that trade and industry can enter and revitalise the region - but that may not be all they are working on. All in all, it’s a volatile mix.
As in Bennett’s first novel in the series, The City of Blades presents us with a number of solid, well-developed characters, many of them women. There’s Mulaghesh herself, a somewhat bitter old soldier who just, at her core, wants to do something that really matters, that adds to the store of good in the world. there’s Voortyashtan’s Saypuri military governor, General Lalith Biswal, with whom Mukaghesh once served, and with whom she shares a horrific memory of a campaign gone so badly wrong that no one in Saypur wants to acknowledge it really happened. And there’s the Dreyling Signe, who is both a source of information and a person of interest and concern in the confusion and unrest that surrounds Mukaghesh’s mission - a brilliant technologist and engineer, who grew up as a poor refugee in Vortyashtan, and is the estranged daughter of Sigurd from the previous novel. And midway through the novel, Sigurd himself appears, now a Chancellor of the United Dreyling States, and acknowledged as the surviving heir of the assassinated Dreyling King, though he has taken no crown and was instrumental in the establishment of a democratic government in his homeland.
In this novel, Bennett engages in a complex discussion about the meanings and purposes of war, of violence. When is killing justified? How does killing, even to save one’s own life, change the killer? What is just in war? How does one decide, and how does one live with the consequences of that decision? Is life a good in its own right, or is it simply the state if moving toward death? Why do we worship war, venerate the killer, remember the violent dead?
Each of the main characters carries memories of committing violence, and their reactions, how the deaths on their hands, are varied. And they come together, through their violent pasts, to play their parts in the mystery of the possible rebirth of a god of war and death, and the legend of a final war that dwarfs all other wars, in a land that respects the act of killing, that venerates the weapons of destruction and memorialises acts of war. It’s a powerful piece of writing, with a powerful and very timely message.
Which leads us to the last installment of the Divine Cities trilogy, City of Miracles. At the end of City of Blades, The only main characters still standing are Turyin Mulaghesh and Sigurd je Harkvaldsson, and both are deeply scarred. Mulaghesh is soon to be drawn into the world of Sapuri politics by Saypuri Prime Minister Shaya Komayd. And Sigurd has seen his daughter killed by Saypuri soldiers, and become a hunted man, wanted for murder. Not even the influence of Shaya and Mulaghesh can clear him this time.
City of Miracles begins 13 years later with the shocking assassination of Shaya Komayd, no longer in politics. And Sigurd comes out of exile to perform one last service for his old comrade, employer, ally, and friend.
But what he discovers when he tracks down the assassin is much, much larger than the death of one woman, no matter how important and loved she was. The gods are dead, or departed from the world, but some of their children, the Blessed, remain. One such child was captured many years ago, set apart, tortured, by those who sought to make if him a weapon. But the events of the years that have followed freed him, and he want revenge, and to be so powerful that he can never be hurt again. And he has learned that killing the other Blessed can make him stronger, perhaps even change him into a God.
What Sigurd discovers is that Shaya spent her final years trying to oppose him, trying to locate and hide the children of the Divine from their brother and would-be devourer. And that Tatyana, Shaya’s own adopted daughter, may be one of the Blessed. With Shaya dead, it falls to Sigurd to protect Shaya’s daughter Tatyana, and the other Divine children Shaya tried to save. And stop the child of darkness from becoming the last and only god.
Sigurd has allies - some old, some new. Turyin Mulaghesh is no longer in her prime, but she is the Minority leader in the Saypuri government, and has some power and influence. And Sigurd discovers the woman who has been Shaya’s ally in her attempts to find and save the Blessed children, and is now Tatyana’s guardian - Ivanya Restroyka, the former fiancee of, and now very wealthy heir to, Shaya’s long-dead lover Vo Votrov. And there is Malwina, a young Blessed girl who worked with Shaya, and who has the gift of manipulating time.
The City of Miracles draws together the various themes that have resonated through the series - questions about faith, loss, grief, revenge, violence, and trauma, and how we as human beings react to them, are shaped by them, and recapitulate them. We have seen so many examples of one trauma begetting behaviours that creates more - from the violent response if a colonised nation taking revenge, to the madness of so many individuals, human and divine, in the face of loss and pain. The tortured become torturers, the colonised become colonisers, the bereft become those who bereave others, again and again, and in the course if this, create yet more pain and violence continuing down through generations. And yet.... the miracle is that there is a way to end the cycle. To let go of the pain. And when that happens, so many things are possible.
A profoundly meaningful conclusion to a powerful work of imagination.
The City of Blades, the second novel in the Divine Cities series, takes up some years after the events of City of Stairs. Shaya Komayd is now the prime minister of Saypur, and is barely holding onto power as she tries to enact policies that will bring the Continent into the modern age - and improve life for its people.
The main character of this novel, General Turyin Mulagesh (retired) was governor of Bulikov during Shaya’s time there. And Shaya has used every trick she can think of to bring Mulagesh out of retirement to handle a delicate and dangerous operation. In the region of Voortyashtan, firmer home of the Divine of war and death - and the one most responsible for the cruel behaviour of Continentals toward their colonial subjects - a deposit of a strange metal has been discovered. Not only is it a superconductor of electricity - a new technology among the Saypuri - but it seems to actually generate a stronger current as it conducts. The key question is, is this an unusual, but natural substance, or is it a miraculous one, suggesting that some Divine creature remains active on the Continent.
Something is going on in Voortyashtan, to be sure - the last operative sent to investigate the possible miraculous nature of the strange metal seems to have gone mad, and then disappeared.
What Mukagash finds when she arrives at the military governor’s seat, Fort Thinadeshi in Voortyashtan is a bleak, relatively undeveloped region full of unrest. Voorrya was a deity deply involved with her people - her death wrought perhaps the worst devastation of any of the regions of the Continent on its inhabitants, and recovery has been even slower than in other areas. There are internal struggles between the people who live in the lowland river valleys and those living in the highlands. There is resentment against the Saypuri officials and military forces trying to establish order. There have been violent, possibly ritualistic atrocities committed in the countryside, indications that someone is trying to revive some of the miracles of the dead wargod Voortya. And then there are the Dreylings, a northern people, trading partners of the Saypuri, who are in Voortyashtan to rebuild the great harbour, so that trade and industry can enter and revitalise the region - but that may not be all they are working on. All in all, it’s a volatile mix.
As in Bennett’s first novel in the series, The City of Blades presents us with a number of solid, well-developed characters, many of them women. There’s Mulaghesh herself, a somewhat bitter old soldier who just, at her core, wants to do something that really matters, that adds to the store of good in the world. there’s Voortyashtan’s Saypuri military governor, General Lalith Biswal, with whom Mukaghesh once served, and with whom she shares a horrific memory of a campaign gone so badly wrong that no one in Saypur wants to acknowledge it really happened. And there’s the Dreyling Signe, who is both a source of information and a person of interest and concern in the confusion and unrest that surrounds Mukaghesh’s mission - a brilliant technologist and engineer, who grew up as a poor refugee in Vortyashtan, and is the estranged daughter of Sigurd from the previous novel. And midway through the novel, Sigurd himself appears, now a Chancellor of the United Dreyling States, and acknowledged as the surviving heir of the assassinated Dreyling King, though he has taken no crown and was instrumental in the establishment of a democratic government in his homeland.
In this novel, Bennett engages in a complex discussion about the meanings and purposes of war, of violence. When is killing justified? How does killing, even to save one’s own life, change the killer? What is just in war? How does one decide, and how does one live with the consequences of that decision? Is life a good in its own right, or is it simply the state if moving toward death? Why do we worship war, venerate the killer, remember the violent dead?
Each of the main characters carries memories of committing violence, and their reactions, how the deaths on their hands, are varied. And they come together, through their violent pasts, to play their parts in the mystery of the possible rebirth of a god of war and death, and the legend of a final war that dwarfs all other wars, in a land that respects the act of killing, that venerates the weapons of destruction and memorialises acts of war. It’s a powerful piece of writing, with a powerful and very timely message.
Which leads us to the last installment of the Divine Cities trilogy, City of Miracles. At the end of City of Blades, The only main characters still standing are Turyin Mulaghesh and Sigurd je Harkvaldsson, and both are deeply scarred. Mulaghesh is soon to be drawn into the world of Sapuri politics by Saypuri Prime Minister Shaya Komayd. And Sigurd has seen his daughter killed by Saypuri soldiers, and become a hunted man, wanted for murder. Not even the influence of Shaya and Mulaghesh can clear him this time.
City of Miracles begins 13 years later with the shocking assassination of Shaya Komayd, no longer in politics. And Sigurd comes out of exile to perform one last service for his old comrade, employer, ally, and friend.
But what he discovers when he tracks down the assassin is much, much larger than the death of one woman, no matter how important and loved she was. The gods are dead, or departed from the world, but some of their children, the Blessed, remain. One such child was captured many years ago, set apart, tortured, by those who sought to make if him a weapon. But the events of the years that have followed freed him, and he want revenge, and to be so powerful that he can never be hurt again. And he has learned that killing the other Blessed can make him stronger, perhaps even change him into a God.
What Sigurd discovers is that Shaya spent her final years trying to oppose him, trying to locate and hide the children of the Divine from their brother and would-be devourer. And that Tatyana, Shaya’s own adopted daughter, may be one of the Blessed. With Shaya dead, it falls to Sigurd to protect Shaya’s daughter Tatyana, and the other Divine children Shaya tried to save. And stop the child of darkness from becoming the last and only god.
Sigurd has allies - some old, some new. Turyin Mulaghesh is no longer in her prime, but she is the Minority leader in the Saypuri government, and has some power and influence. And Sigurd discovers the woman who has been Shaya’s ally in her attempts to find and save the Blessed children, and is now Tatyana’s guardian - Ivanya Restroyka, the former fiancee of, and now very wealthy heir to, Shaya’s long-dead lover Vo Votrov. And there is Malwina, a young Blessed girl who worked with Shaya, and who has the gift of manipulating time.
The City of Miracles draws together the various themes that have resonated through the series - questions about faith, loss, grief, revenge, violence, and trauma, and how we as human beings react to them, are shaped by them, and recapitulate them. We have seen so many examples of one trauma begetting behaviours that creates more - from the violent response if a colonised nation taking revenge, to the madness of so many individuals, human and divine, in the face of loss and pain. The tortured become torturers, the colonised become colonisers, the bereft become those who bereave others, again and again, and in the course if this, create yet more pain and violence continuing down through generations. And yet.... the miracle is that there is a way to end the cycle. To let go of the pain. And when that happens, so many things are possible.
A profoundly meaningful conclusion to a powerful work of imagination.