Words of Radiance: Book Two of the Stormlight Archive
By Brandon SandersonTor, 2014 The first volume of Brandon Sanderson’s “Stormlight Archive” series appeared in 2010 and clocked in at a thousand pages, a brightly-colored brick of a book with a vivid Michael Whelan cover. In 2013 Sanderson turned in his thousand-page concluding volume to Robert Jordan’s beloved “Wheel of Time” series, “A Memory of Light.” And now we have the second (out of a projected ten) volume of the “Stormlight Archive,” Words of Radiance, which is a little over a thousand pages. Quite apart from any other elements involved, this level of productivity is an accomplishment all of its own.On its surface, it’s a fairly dire accomplishment when viewed from outside the fishbowl of the famously logorrhea-friendly world of modern multi-volume fantasy-writing. To disinterested spectators, such grotesque word-counts become darkly hilarious, a sure and easily-parodied sign of juvenilia. Those spectators will look at Words of Radiance, with its gaudy cover (as usual, Michael Whelan follow-up covers in any big fantasy series become increasingly conceptually impenetrable, the low point surely being 1993’s The Fires of Heaven, which shows … a bunch of people standing around) and its 1100 pages, and they’ll feel comfortable leaping to one conclusion before all others: this whole thing a ten-act fanboy opera being sung behind closed doors and no attention need be paid to it.This would be a shame, because “The Stormlight Archive” is really quite good, certainly by a wide margin the best thing the very talented Sanderson has ever written.He’s mastered the tricky art of pacing like no other writer currently working – not just no other fantasy writer, but no other writer in any genre. This pacing art isn’t the be-all and end-all of novel-writing, of course – an author also needs human insight, empathy, and an intelligent control of the language. Pacing isn’t crucial to writing a novel, but it’s absolutely essential to writing a gigantic novel, and Sanderson has it down pat. He can scale the voice of his narrative downward to the personal revelations of individual characters and then upward to epic battle-scenes, and he can do it quickly, and he can make it look effortless – and his skill at it only seems to be increasing with each of these enormous books.The first of the “Stormlight Archives” books, The Way of Kings, introduced readers to the world of Roshar, which is ravaged both by vast, primordial super-storms (the planet’s entire biology has long since adapted to weathering these monster hurricanes, and both the planet’s humanoid species, humans and Parshendi, have developed civilizations that cringe along storm-tracks and cling to habitability) and by warfare springing from centuries-old grievances and fueled by recent bloodletting. Many of the main characters from this first novel carry on into Words of Radiance; there’s heroic Dalinar, his sarcastic sister Shallan and her teacher Jasnah, and the book’s main hero, Kaladin, whose rags-to-riches (or rather, in this case, slave caste-to-wielder of magical super-armor) story clearly gives Sanderson a great deal of pleasure to unfold.Actually, the entire book glows with that kind of storyteller’s pleasure. A good proportion of this book’s girth comes from Sanderson extravagantly imagining every last detail of Roshan’s cultures and natural history; there’s not just the Tolkien-like layering of written legacies but also … well, everything else: from the extremely specific schemata of the world’s magic systems (something of a Sanderson specialty) to the life-cycles of the world’s various animals. Such is Sanderson’s skill that none of this stuff is the least bit boring, and as an added treat, some of it is appealingly illustrated by Whelan. And in the midst of imaging all these details, Sanderson never forgets to consider how it would strike the characters who actually live inside it all:
Jasnah stood up, and Shallan hastened to follow. The walked along the ship’s rail, feeling the deck sway beneath their feet. Sailors made way for Jasnah with quick bows. They regarded her with as much reverence as they would a king. How did she do it? How could she control her surroundings without seeming to do anything at all?“Look down into the waters,” Jasnah said as they reached the bow. “What do you see?”Shallan stopped beside the rail and stared down at the blue waters, foaming as they were broken by the ship’s prow. Here at the bow, she could see a deepness to the swells. An unfathomable expanse that extended not just outward, but downward.“I see eternity,” Shallan said.“Spoken like an artist,” Jasnah said. “This ship sails across depths we cannot know. Beneath these waves is a bustling, frantic, unseen world.”
It’s fair to say that Jasnah’s claim applies equally to Words of Radiance: a frantic, unseen world bustles beneath its surface, and Sanderson has it all relentlessly thought through, with his characters working the details of a magical technology they can manipulate even without understanding it:
Aladar was a Shardbearer, though he commonly lent his Plate and Blade to one of his officers during battles, preferring to lead tactically from behind the battle lines. A practiced Shardbearer could mentally command a Blade to not dissolve when he let go of it, though – in an emergency – Aladar could summon it to himself, making it vanish from the hands of his officer in an eyeblink, then appear in his own hands ten heartbeats later. Lending a Blade required a great deal of trust on both sides.
There’s a very strong sense of discipline running through both these “Stormlight” books, a very different feeling from the shaggy-dog rambling tone that’s unmistakable in, for instance, Steven Erickson’s “Malazan Book of the Fallen” series – and that’s notorious all throughout Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series, at least until Sanderson got involved with it. The irony of these alarmingly huge new volumes of his is that they are in fact the exact opposite of what they appear: there’s hardly an ounce of authorial self-indulgence here. Rather, from first page to last, readers are in the sweaty, obsessive grip of a control freak with an apparently bottomless imagination.Lucky, lucky readers. Outsiders should throw caution to the wayside and hop right in. Whoppingly boisterous yarning like this doesn’t come along all that often.
