Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Elantris was Brandon Sanderson’s debut novel. It sets the tone that the rest of his works follow but shows a rougher hand at characterization and storytelling. Elantris takes the concept of zombies and translates it to a high fantasy setting and tells a story about living with an imperfect situation and attempting to make the best of it. The characters are wooden and two-dimensional and not in a satisfyingly heroic or archetypal way, they lack hooks to motivate them outside of the immediate puzzles they are faced with and the narrative suffers from the theme of working inside your situation as the characters are caught up and tumbled about by the plot without having much by way of personal goals other than surviving. All in all it is a carefully constructed puzzle but a dissatisfying story.
It is told from three different viewpoints and centers around Elantris, a city once ruled by powerful magicians blessed by a random occurrence that transformed some of the inhabitants of the country into deified wonder-workers. But ten years ago something changed and now those chosen by Elantris are cursed to an undead state where they cannot heal from any injuries but also do not die. Raoden, the prince of the kingdom that rose to fill the power vacuum after Elantris’s fall is suddenly affected by the curse and thrown into the quarantined city where he has to figure out how to survive. Meanwhile Sarene, the daughter of a distant king sent to marry Raoden to cement an alliance in the face of a threatening religious totalitarian neighbor, finds her husband ‘dead’ before she arrives but stays to try to make the alliance work. And Hrathen the warrior priest from the neighboring empire sent to convert the people to avoid the need for a bloody invasion. The story alternates between these three different viewpoints as the story builds towards the big reveal The alternating structure is interesting and carried out with workmanlike craft; it’s not particularly finessed, but it gets the job done.
Raoden is a generic good-guy scholastic prince with a goal to improve the lives of the people and is magically endowed with the will and motivation to be the only person in the 10 years since the fall of Elantris to attempt to make sense of the situation or to try making a livable situation in the city of Elantris. His character arc isn’t one of growth or change, but of knowledge. He doesn’t have to change, just to learn the truth. But his interactions with Galladon make him generally enjoyable.
Sarene is an awkward collection of supposed competences and conflicts: we are told she is too strong, too willful and too politically skilled to by an attractive mate in her home country, but what we are shown is a socially awkward and forceful woman who plays games trying to keep from giving the people around her what they ask of her. Her feminism is awkward and unsubtle, like much about her, including her supposed skill in politics. Worse, she never shows any signs of change or growth throughout.
Hrathen is possibly the most interesting character with his staunch religious zeal and unwavering commitment to converting the people of the country to avoid a bloody invasion even as he is faced with a situation that is more complicated than he expects and is shown truths that shake his reasoned approach to religion, but his perspective is often accompanied by info dumps and his character change at the end is sudden and works against his previous character direction.
The magic is interesting and the trickle of details culminating in the final revelation of how the magic systems work together with the curse of Elantris is satisfying. The religious implications of the Elantrian gods and their fall and the political situation with the neighboring countries and how the magic, including the Seons, are used is well detailed. But everything else is drawn in the broadest stroke with little nuance or vitality. Characters are wooden and sketchy, the society is blocky and the plot of political machination is drawn in wire-frame with the broad strokes put in place but the deeper motivations generally lacking. The novel tells its story but it is obvious that story is the revelation of the magic system not the development of the characters. It succeeds in telling the story of the magic system and it launched Brandon Sanderson’s writing career and I give it high marks for that.