Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆
“Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
There can’t be many fantasy novels based on the events of World War II. But here we are, and Kuang has done an amazing job of taking historical events and weaving them into a saga of gods, magical powers and monsters, that works very well, even if you have no clue about the background.
At the beginning, Rin is a young orphan girl in a remote village in the South of the empire. Abused ceaselessly by her foster parents, they’re about to sell her into marriage. Her only hope of escape is to pass the exam which grants admission to the military academy of Sinegard. Even though she succeeds, she remains an outcast there, except to the equally derided Master Jiang, professor of lore. He helps her tap into powers largely forgotten by the Empire, but warns that if she doesn’t control them, they will control her. Her studies are brought to a sudden end when the Federation invades, laying siege to Sinegard. With the city about to fall, desperate measures have to be taken. But some doors, once opened, are an awful lot harder to close.
“This is what you have to tell yourself,” Qara said fiercely. “You have to believe that it was necessary. That it stopped something worse. And even if it wasn’t, it’s the lie we’ll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward.”
The above quote is a good depiction of the dilemma at the core of the book. Is it permissible to do evil deeds to stop evil deeds? But that’s just part of the moral quagmire in which Rin finds herself, where a desire to protect her country merges with a quest for vengeance – both personal, and for previous genocide. There’s no denying the abilities into which she can tap are increasingly powerful, bordering on the divine. But she’s no “Mary Sue”: the cost mounts alongside them, to the point where her humanity is in danger of being entirely scorched away when she uses them.
And even if it doesn’t, the drugs necessary – both to reach the Pantheon where the gods reside, and to numb the pain of life following her awakening – won’t necessarily help Rin retain her sanity. There’s a gigantic stone prison, inside which are entombed, in a state of living hell, the thousands of previous shamans, who were driven completely insane by what they unleashed inside themselves, and had to be contained or they could destroy the world. The dangers here are very real, and only escalate the further Rin develops.
“I will die on my feet,” she said. “I will die with flames in my hand and fury in my heart. I will die fighting for the legacy of my people, rather than on Shiro’s operating table, drugged and wasted. I will not die a coward.”
Kuang has constructed a great heroine in Rin. From the very beginning, she is driven to escape a situation many would accept as hopeless, and demonstrates enormous resilience, and an utter commitment to do whatever she feels is necessary. She succeeds, not through some innate ability (hello, Harry Potter), but by working her butt off. Yet it’s that same willingness which ends up taking her, both physically and mentally, to some appalling places and experiences. The descriptions of Federation atrocities are all, apparently, backed by historical fact, matching what the Japanese did during the occupation of China in the thirties and forties. Most notably, the sacking of one city is based on the Rape of Nanking, and even a hardened soul like myself had his stomach flip on occasion. Kuang doesn’t pull her punches. There also seems to be a scientist based on the infamous Unit 731, who carried out human “experiments” on the locals.
But it’s all severe unpleasantess which is very necessary to the plot. Because it’s the only way through which Rin can justify her own reactions, and the extreme measures which she unleashes, along with the rest of the Cike [the Imperial shaman troop to which she is conscripted, and who are used to take on the Federation by unconventional means] There’s certainly no shortage of awesome-if-horrific set pieces, such as the Cike’s luring in and destruction of an enemy fleet. I’d love to see Peter Jackson or Guillermo Del Toro take on a cinematic adaptation, though the entire $200 million budget would probably end up going on digital flames…
“She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.”
The general tone is one of increasing darkness, and by the end, I was as much scared of Rin as in awe of her or concerned for her fate. About the only weakness I can think of, is that she’s rather distant and unlikable. Not exactly fun to be around, shall we say, and given some of her later acts, the term “heroine” seems dubious at best. But she’s going to need to be an ultimate, supernatural bad-ass in future volumes – not least to deal with a potentially equally-lethal shaman, who escaped from the stone prison, partly through Rin’s actions. There’s also the little matter of the Empress, who may not be the honourable subject of veneration she initially appeared to be.
It all sets up very nicely, without needing to create an artificial cliff-hander. As time permits, I definitely look forward to reading the next installment, The Dragon Republic.
Author: R.F. Kuang
Publisher: Harper Voyager, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Poppy War series.