Original Fiction Reviews #1 – Elantris · 7:30pm Jul 12th, 2016
While on the plane to BronyCon, I ended up finally getting around to reading my first non-Wheel of Time Brandon Sanderson novel. Elantris was the first novel he wrote, and isn’t part of a series, so I figured I’d start with that.
It may not have been the best choice.
Elantris
by Brandon Sanderson
Fantasy, Fantasy Politics
200,000 wordsElantris was the capital of Arelon: gigantic, beautiful, literally radiant, filled with benevolent beings who used their powerful magical abilities for the benefit of all. Yet each of these demigods was once an ordinary person until touched by the mysterious transforming power of the Shaod. Ten years ago, without warning, the magic failed. Elantrians became wizened, leper-like, powerless creatures, and Elantris itself dark, filthy, and crumbling.
Arelon's new capital, Kae, crouches in the shadow of Elantris. Princess Sarene of Teod arrives for a marriage of state with Crown Prince Raoden, hoping -- based on their correspondence -- to also find love. She finds instead that Raoden has died and she is considered his widow. Both Teod and Arelon are under threat as the last remaining holdouts against the imperial ambitions of the ruthless religious fanatics of Fjordell. So Sarene decides to use her new status to counter the machinations of Hrathen, a Fjordell high priest who has come to Kae to convert Arelon and claim it for his emperor and his god.
But neither Sarene nor Hrathen suspect the truth about Prince Raoden. Stricken by the same curse that ruined Elantris, Raoden was secretly exiled by his father to the dark city. His struggle to help the wretches trapped there begins a series of events that will bring hope to Arelon, and perhaps reveal the secret of Elantris itself.
A rare epic fantasy that doesn't recycle the classics and that is a complete and satisfying story in one volume, Elantris is fleet and fun, full of surprises and characters to care about. It's also the wonderful debut of a welcome new star in the constellation of fantasy.
Why I read it: I’ve read a few of his blog posts and was curious what his book was like.
Review
While Tor calls it an “epic fantasy”, it really isn’t, something Sanderson himself agrees with – the book doesn’t involve an epic quest, really, and has a pretty limited scope. Almost the entire book takes place in Kae and Elantris, with only a tiny bit of Teod seen at the end of the book.
At its core, the story is ultimately about the machinations of the theocratic Fjordell Empire in Arleon, and the conflict between the religious beliefs of Arleon and Theod and those of the Fjordell Empire, as well as the political infighting within Kae and Elantris.
Ultimately, this book is about politics, or more precisely, political maneuvering between various factions. Hrathen, Raoden, and Sarene spend the book building and maintaining their own political factions and playing them against each other. It is about religious conflict between two different interpretations of the same religion, and about separate religious hierarchies. And it is a political conflict about who will rule in Arlene, and what will happen to the blighted Elantrians.
The book has a cyclic structure; the first chapter is from Raoden’s point of view, the second from Sarene’s, and the third from Hrathen’s. This repeats throughout the book, from start to finish, though the structure does break down somewhat halfway through the book – while in the first half, the chapters are very distinctively separated out by point of view, we start seeing multiple points of view in the same chapters in later chapters.
This brings up one of the first weaknesses of the story – while this cyclic structure works well, when it starts bringing in multiple points of view in the same chapter, stuff starts getting a bit muddled. Several point of view switches felt pretty pointless, and the final few chapters also end up bringing in a bunch of new point of view characters – some of whom have been major characters throughout the book, while others are minor characters who end up being focused on because the author really, really wanted to show some scenes, but none of the protagonists were there or in any condition to report on them. This is kind of awkward, as we have little investment in some of these characters, and they simply lack distinctive voices in some cases.
A larger problem is that two of the three point of view characters – and the two most central heroes of the story, Raoden and Sarene – are boring and frankly kind of generic. Raoden is the standard issue hero of the people, crown prince who stands up to his father, builds his own political network, is beloved by the people, ect. He loves politics and political machinations, which is really his only interesting character trait. Otherwise, he’s very bland, and while it is nice to see the primary male protagonist not be a warrior type (and indeed, all three of the main characters avoid violence as much as possible, though they do know how to fight, and dislike the idea of assassinating their opponents, as they are civilized people who dislike war) he just never connected with me as a character. He cared about people, but I never cared about him, and his speech patterns were indistinct.
The same was true of Sarene – she’s a tomboy princess who is intensely interested in politics and political machinations, and she married herself off to Raoden in order to improve relations between the countries and because he was a nice guy who seemed like he didn’t look down on strong women. Arlene treated women as inferior, and a major subplot for Sarene is to teach the women to fence. She’s assertive, takes over Raoden’s old political network after he “dies” (i.e. gets thrown into Elantris after his transformation – she doesn’t meet him until over halfway through the book), and spends most of the book opposing Hrathen’s plots. Unfortunately, much like Raoden, she didn’t feel like a very distinctive person – she felt sort of like a generic fantasy tomboy princess, and while the book had an interesting (and surprisingly realistic in some ways) take on what being a feminist in a world like hers meant, she herself felt pretty generic and, again, lacked distinctive speech patterns outside of when she was deliberately “acting”.
Indeed, most characters lacked distinctive speech patterns. Galladon, Raoden’s strongest supporter, has very distinctive speech patterns and is very recognizable, and I got a voice in my head for him very early in the book. Hrathen is less so, but still distinctive, as is his own sidekick/antagonist Dilaf. But many of the characters’ voices blurred and blended together for me, and I never got a voice for Sarene or Raoden.
Hrathen is the most interesting character in the book – he’s a deeply conflicted religious character who has come to evangelize to Arlene on behalf of the fantasy Pope of his religion. He previously overthrew the government of the neighboring Dulladen Republic, inciting a bloody revolution that resulted in the death of almost the entire aristocracy of the Republic. He has come to Arlene not only to save its soul, but to save its people – he is deeply troubled by what happened in Dulladen, and while he believes it was good that the country converted and became part of the theocracy, he does not like how it happened one bit, and spends the entire book both trying to convert the Arlenes, trying to save them from being invaded by their neighbors via their conversion, and trying to prevent his own supporters in Arlene from killing people here. He is opposed in much of this by Dilaf, his assistant, who is a religious fanatic one step below him in the church hierarchy. Dilaf is obviously crazy, and is a fervent believer not only in his religion, but in the idea that the Elantrians are cursed by God and need to be destroyed. Hrathen is also opposed in his maneuvering by Sarene, who is his primary political opponent throughout the book.
He occupies an interesting space – for most of the book, he is portrayed as the antagonist of both Sarene and Raoden, but he is not an evil man. Indeed, in some ways, he’s one of the best people in the book – he shows more moral fiber than his opposition because, unlike his opponents, his own supporters are often evil and he is forced to keep them from doing bad things. This ironically casts him in a more heroic role than Sarene and Raoden, as everything in the end kind of works out easily for them, while Hrathen spends the entire book struggling with pretty much everyone, including his own religious organization.
This made him the most interesting character in the book by far, and by the end of it, it is pretty clear that he, too, is a protagonist, even if it is less than obvious at first.
This leads into the second problem with the book – its plot. The book is 200,000+ words long, but it feels surprisingly insubstantial for its length. While in principle, a great deal happens, in practice, not all that much does actually happen, and while it is much longer than the first book of The Wheel of Time, The Eye of the World, it actually feels shorter somehow – and like a less textured world is filled in.
The book constantly tries to be mysterious about stuff, but often to the detriment of the plot. Sarene and Raoden end up carrying the Idiot Ball for a good chunk of the book, which leads to a great deal of frustration as the characters blunder around in an unentertaining way. For instance, about a third of the way into the book, Raoden finds a way to escape from Elantris. Instead of going to his former allies for aid – aid they would give him – he instead conceals himself from them, even when, later on, they come into the city. A huge amount of the plot in the middle of the book stems from Raoden concealing himself from Sarene and his old friends, and there’s just no reason for him to do this – if he had presented himself to them, a huge subsection of the plot could have been avoided, but the book wouldn’t have really lost anything. Sarene’s attraction to Raoden is obvious but frankly kind of flimsy, and a lot of the bonding between the two characters actually happens off-screen between chapters when they spend time studying Elantrian magic together.
The background of one character – Galladon – is revealed partway through and actually has some impact, but when Dilaf’s true nature is revealed at the end, it doesn’t feel like it was set up well enough. Likewise, Hrathen doesn’t reveal enough about the monastaries which end up playing a major role in the end of the book. A lot of things are only revealed after they become pertinent, making them feel like they were arbitrarily inserted rather than an organic part of the world-building.
The world-building itself isn’t great. Several countries come up, but we’re left with little real understanding of most of them, and a lot of information about Fjordjell and the religious organization there is kept secret from the reader for much of the book. A lot of the names in the book are strange and alien, and when I first started reading the book, it was extremely thick with unfamiliar names of people and places – not only unfamiliar in the sense of me not knowing them, but in sounding foreign. While sounding foreign is not necessarily bad, because all the names sounded foreign, and all in an indistinct way, there was little differentiation between them. Only the Not-Asia/India place felt like it had a very distinctive naming scheme; the rest felt like a fantasy muddle, and it made it hard to keep people and places distinct in my mind early on in the work. This was kind of off-putting, though eventually I got over it.
However, other weaknesses in the world-building ended up lingering.
One major weakness in this lies in the religious conflict which underlies much of the book. The book makes much of the conflict between the two (really three) different interpretations of the main religion, but we ultimately learn very little about the religion. Some of the differences – particularly the hierarchical ones – are made clear early on, but understanding a lot of the differences in philosophy or even what role the religion plays in society is kept pretty vague. This is bizarre given that a major reason for Arlene and Teod to resist is religious in nature, but we don’t really understand the stakes of said religious differences, as a lot of it really seems to be basically “we don’t want their priests to be in charge”. But what all of that means is really unclear, as is why it is the way it is. A third religion is mentioned and comes up as a fairly major plot point, but we’re left with little understanding of it as well beyond it being a sort of generic bad pagan cult that engages in human sacrifice.
Even the Elantrian magic – whose rediscovery makes up a major part of the plot – feels kind of meh. The magic is activated by drawn runes, which conflicts a bit with the non-visual medium of the book, and its final solution relies on visuals – meaning, in other words, that the protagonist’s struggle with the work is something we basically have to take his word for, and is left inaccessible to the audience. It also relies on a map at the very start of the book which the reader never has any other reason to consult as it never ends up mattering, given the fact that all of the plot happens on a single spot on the map.
By the end, the plot of the book has been finished, but the ending ends up feeling very unresolved. A mysterious character (with more distinctive characterization than most of the characters who showed up throughout the book!) shows up in the epilogue and hints at great things to come, the conflict between the countries is ultimately unresolved, the secrets of the magic underlying the setting are largely unrevealed (with no fewer than TWO new, distinct forms of magic appearing in the very end of the book with little to no foreshadowing of their existence), and ultimately most of the most interesting characters end up dying – often in very pointless ways that don’t feel like they do much to further the plot, and one of them because they pick up the Idiot Ball and do something which makes basically no sense and immediately sets them up to die in the next scene. There’s an obvious sequel hook at the end, but there’s no sequel to this book, and frankly, I don’t know if I’d want to read it, as the characters who were most interesting mostly wouldn’t appear in it.
All in all, I was left dissatisfied by this novel. Two of the primary protagonists were bland, the plot felt like it was simultaneously unnecessarily long and somehow much shorter than its word count would suggest, the world-building felt inadequate, and I just didn’t end up caring enough about most of the characters in the book. While the idea of a fantasy politics book was interesting, I don’t feel like this really executed on the premise in a terribly interesting way.
This was Sanderson’s first book, and it shows.
Recommendation: Not Recommended
In other news, several people worked to help me edit my next story last night, so I’m going to work on that this afternoon and evening and try and get it ready for tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who volunteered. 
I'm aiming to get a second pony story ready to be edited by this weekend, and am going to also probably poke around and try and get another original fiction story done and submitted somewhere this week.
Yeah, Sanderson loves him some world-building. He definitely improves in his later work.
I would definitely recommend Warbreaker as a better entry point to Sanderson's work. It's kind of like Elantris but better. It's also stand-alone, also mostly takes place in a single city, and also switches between three major plot lines that are mostly political in nature.
It's just better at being all of those things than Elantris was, and with a more interesting magic system to work from.
I agree with everything you said about this book. If you're willing to give Sanderson another shot, I'd suggest reading Warbreaker. If you don't like that book, you're probably just not going to like Sanderson in general. Elantris though, it's really just not as good as the others.
Have to disagree with you big time TD. I think you might have been tired when reading it because Raoden is very different from your average "generic fantasy prince." I don't think I've ever seen a fantasy protagonist who lets themselves be so bitter so frequently. He's a much better "fantasy prince" because he rises above this bitterness and the (very warranted) feelings of betrayal to become a leader for the other Elantrians, all while fighting against time and the "sickness" that plagues them all, while always keeping the rest of his people in mind.
A lot of the things you seemed to take exception with were also because of some of those character flaws. He doesn't trust Sarene and the others seemingly wanting to help, because he has no reason to believe they're being genuine. It's literally a unique situation that never happened to Elantrians before, why would it start now?
I do agree with your interpretation of Hrathen. I actually think, in a way, Hrathen was supposed to be the book's hero. Raoden and Saren are both protagonists of course, and a lot of stuff they do is also for the people, but much of it is self-serving as well. Hrathen is not only thinking about his people, he's thinking about a completely separate and largely antagonistic country's people, and everything he does is at a cost to himself.
Truly, based on the ending, I think Hrathen was intended to be the hero of the story. Sarene says it herself.
I'm not going to get into a whole list of everything I agree or disagree with, it's your review and I'm not just going to attack it, but suffice to say I vehemently disagree with your "Not Recommended."
It's not Sanderson's best work, by a long shot, but as with most Sanderson books it gives us a unique look at a fantasy socio-political structure, a unique form of magic, and a unique set of characters (although we apparently disagree on that part).
If they want to start reading Sanderson, I always recommend people start with Mistborn. It's a better introduction to Sanderon's Cosmere, and is just a straight up better, more cohesive story.
Elantris always comes right after though.
Yeah, Elantris was not his strongest book. But still, I kind of liked it.
Though others recommended reading other longer books, Warbreaker and Mistborn series, I would advise reading The Emperor's Soul instead. It is well written, has some great world-building and, above all, it is much, much shorter.
It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to recall my opinion of the book being that it had a lot of clever ideas but a severe lack of focus. It probably didn't help that I read it after I read the Mistborn books.
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But he's only been in there for like, 1-2 months at that point. He was friends with a number of Sarene's friends and trusted them with his plots against the king; trusting them with him being an Elantrian seems much smaller than that by comparison. It seems internally inconsistent.
I didn't find him to be very bitter at all. He pretty much did the best with what he had, and he was mostly worried about whether or not he would be strong enough to succeed before he succumbed to the physical pain of his transformation. He was more self-effacing than anything, and didn't seem to really hold grudges.
Yeah, starting on Elantris probably wasn't the best idea. It shows off Sanderson's worst (bland characters, oblique plots) without capitalizing on his strengths (strong world-building, interesting magic systems). Honestly, even Mistborn struggles from largely the same issues as Elantris (and also has several flaws as his first series, which he later acknowledged).
I'd highly recommend his Stormlight Archive, though; they're the books he's put the most effort into, and it shows. Sure, his characters are never perfectly written, but by that point he's improved a lot, and his plot/world building are gorgeous. It's honestly one of my favorite fantasy series.
Hell is wrong with you, son? Mistborn. Mistborn.
That's too bad. I found myself really enjoying Elantris when I first read it, and have since devoured Sanderson's other works. I think if I had to recommend just one of his stories, it'd be The Emperor's Soul, which was a Hugo winner and benefits from being fairly short.
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This. I mean, I like Elantris in the end, but gosh, Mistborn is so much, much, much better. Kelsier & Vin, while a bit trope-ey at the start, are way stronger characters.
The thing about Elantris that really ruins it for me is the ending. After all, almost nothing that happens in the story has any real relevance to what actually ends up saving the day. It stretches believability that nobody would figure that out in the many years since the fall of Elantris, and it invalidates all the efforts of the other characters.
But really, go read The Emperor's Soul. It is a much better, functionally a stand-alone novel, and one of the best short stories I have read in years.
Also, the rest of his novels are much better, even if his character work isn't all that good – other than the marvel that is Wayne in the western Mistborn stories.
Would you consider doing a Terry Pratchett book for your next original fiction review?
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Possibly! Depends on what I end up finishing reading next. I'm going to be reading bookplayer's Pierside when I get it in the mail, but I just checked out Snuff from the library yesterday, so really, it is mostly a question of whether I end up getting Pierside before I finish Snuff.
I read Mistborn first and still like it much better. But I think Elantris was where I got my love for political fantasy and rotating POVs. Huh.
Chiming in (if a bit late), but Sanderson is an ... interesting author. Dude's like the nicest guy in publishing, and I really like his writing lectures that are posted on YouTube.
This said, the guy's got his flaws. I think he gets a little too proud and crunchy of his magic systems. The other interesting bit is that Sanderson is perfectly at home with grim violence, but he gets a little squeamish when it comes to sexuality or other 'adult' material in his books. I'm not saying I want to see him write porn or anything, but the guy's pretty much got the romantic sensibilities of a teenager.
But yeah. The first Mistborn book is solid, and the second is decent (the third was kinda eeeeeh). I enjoyed the first book of the sequel series to that, as well.
But whatever you do, avoid his YA stuff. I tried reading Steelheart on a whim, and that book just turned out terrible.