My life in books

Sabaa Tahir’s fantasy novel An Ember in the Ashes, set in the heart of an Empire that rules by force and fear, is a hard book to read. There’s cruelty, slavery, violence, oppression. There’s also bravery and resistance, and the unbreakable longing for freedom.

The people of the Empire are known as Martials. Theirs is a militaristic society, one that has conquered other cultures and peoples. Their youth vie to train as elite soldiers, in a brutal regimen that begins when they are children, and turns those who survive into faceless - they wear silver masks that eventually fuse to the flesh of their faces - and abusive enforcers who deliver casual violence to the subject people, enforcing a reign through terror and imprisonment.

Laia, one of the central characters in the novel, is the daughter of Scholars, one of the Empire’s subject peoples. She lives with her brother and grandparents, who have sheltered Laia and Darin since the death of their own parents in Imperial hands. One night her brother, who is, unknown to her, a member of the resistance, is betrayed by his comrades under torture. When the Empire comes for him, they kill her grandparents, set their home on fire, and take him prisoner, though he fights long enough to give Laia a chance to flee. And now she must risk her life In a bargain with the Resistance, they will save her brother, if she agrees to spy on the Commandant of Blackcliff, the training centre of the Masks.

Elias, the other focal character, is a Martial, in training to become one of the feared Masks. The son of the Academy’s Commandant, he is one if the strongest and best of the students. But Elias hates the cruelty he sees around him, and is making plans to desert - even though the penalty for desertion is death. But then he learns that he is part of a prophecy, and that, if he survives the Trials to which he has been called, he will become Emperor.

This being a relatively standard evil empire fantasy with romance elements, it is inevitable that Laia and Elias meet, and that the story unfolds as it does. There us of course an alternate love interest for both of them. For Elias it’s Helene, the only woman to have become a Mask since his mother, and one of the four Aspirants in the Trials. For Laia, it’s one of the Resistance members who is sometimes her contact when she gets out of Blackcliff and can report.

Tabir uses Laia’s mission - her position as a slave serving the Commandant - to underline the cruelty of the Empire. Laia endures torture as punishments for the smallest infractions, whippings, scarifications. The other slaves she encounters in her duties are disfigured. These scenes are difficult to read, but Tahir is honest with her story, and that means that even the heroine must be scarred by the evil that surrounds them.

While the outlines of the narrative are predictable, there is enough originality in the details to keep up one’s engagement with the story, and both Laia and Elias are complex and interesting characters. It is, of course, the first volume of what’s probably planned as a trilogy, and I expect the remaining volumes will be as entertaining as this was.