A satisfying denouement to a tetralogy teetering on the edge
of drowning in grimdark savagery
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| The reviewer isn't kidding about 'all manner of betrayals'! Gwynne, John. Wrath. Orbit, 2016. |
You can buy this book here.
A fundamental principle of fantasy (all?) literature is that
a sufficiently melodramatic, cathartic victory/ending can only be achieved through
the sacrifice of (usually) second-tier characters. These are the ones you can
remember, whose names and backstories are vivid in your minds, but whose
survival isn’t absolutely essential to the everything-and-everyone-tied-together
happy ending the book or series has been moving towards since page one. A
series like Harry Potter, hurtling towards happiness, could never dare off one
of the three principals, forcing Rowling to select her final victims from the
B-list: Snape, one of the Weasley twins, etc. Killing anyone more central to
the narrative would jeopardize the catharsis. And I don’t mean to single out
Rowling/Harry Potter: this is a near-universal feature of fantasy literature. A
few B-listers have to die nobly so that the A-listers can live happily ever
after.
Enter John Gwynne, who has taken this principle and
grimdarked it. The essential calculus hasn’t changed—the principals will still
survive and earn their happy ending—but the sheer quantity of second-tier
characters required to throw themselves into harm’s way boggles the mind.
Readers of the first three books of this tetralogy will be quite familiar with
Gwynne’s penchant for throwing beloved but still slightly peripheral characters
into the meat grinder, but he has savagely upped the ante here. I thought at
one point of the memorable exchange from Casablanca:
“What is [this book] like?” – “Oh, just like [the other three], only more so.” Remember
Rowling’s judicious choice of a single quasi-central figure, one of the Weasley
twins, as scapegoat? Gwynne puts almost the
entire cast of B-listers on the sacrificial altar. I haven’t spoiled the
story if I say: expect the very-most central characters to survive (obviously—no
writer dare do otherwise) and practically no one else!
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| Multiply this scene of grief at a dead B-lister by a billion, and you will understand Wrath |
This savagery may or may not register in the reader’s mind
as a bad thing (it struck me as gratuitously excessive, but others might
respond more favorably). But one feature of Gwynne’s approach does seem
unambiguously problematic: his apparently quite dark view of mercy. Several
times in the series, but especially in this fourth and final volume, “bad guys”
spared by well-meaning heroes take their unexpected reprieve to (often
literally) stab those same heroes in the back at the first opportunity. It’s as
though Gwynne believes a) bad guys are incapable of change, or even of
admitting their guilt, and (perhaps as a result) b) mercy is always a terrible
mistake.
Take Nathair, who has sensed the error of his ways. Gwynne
seems to be building to a tearful confession, leaving open the possibility of a
way back to the light even for a treacherous viper like Nathair, only to slam
that door shut and have the king double down on his evil deeds. Truly we are
living in the age of the double-down! But the worst example of the heavy cost
of mercy must be Rafe, who once again seemed potentially redeemable (indeed,
quite a close approximation of the Harry-Draco dynamic is at play with
Corban-Rafe), only to amass quite a body-count after the good guys (foolishly,
it would seem) let him go. Naturally, some of the evildoers in the world, if
granted a new lease on life, will misuse their second chance, to be sure, but
since Gwynne’s only positive examples of the potential of bad guys to change
were Veradis (the honorable if naïve warrior) and Alcyon (the honorable giant
forced into evil due to magic and the fact his wife and son were held hostage),
neither of whom, of course, is actually bad at all, his message is clear: genuine
bad guys can’t learn from their mistakes, and will betray their merciful
benefactors 100% of the time.
Ironically, this dark-as-grimdark-can-be attrition of
B-listers and total denunciation of the idea, for bad guys, of moral
rehabilitation after doing something terrible has restored my idealistic faith
in humanity. I’m left strangely optimistic, muttering “Surely we humans can’t
be that bad?”
The Math
Objective Assessment: 7/10
Bonuses: +1 for keeping victory for Corban at all almost
inconceivable until the very last minute, +1 for managing a fairly emotionally
satisfying denouement
Penalties: -1 for the somewhat gratuitous/monotonous near-total
annihilation of the second-tier characters, -1 for reinforcing the pessimistic
idea that those who have once done wrong have essentially no chance of reform
(and instead will stab a bunch of beloved B-listers in the back)
Nerd coefficient: 7/10 “An enjoyable experience, but not
without its flaws”
Read more on our nerdy scoring system here.
This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, still an unabashed
optimist despite a steady diet of the most savage grimdark out there, and
reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since 2013.
