My Mixed Feelings about Rhythm of War

Before I’m overly critical of Rhythm of War, I do like Brandon Sanderson, and his work has meant a lot to me. As I’ve said the other time I nitpicked his fantasy world, the Cosmere, his work got me through a lot of tough times. They gave me hope when I didn’t have it. The Mistborn original trilogy are some of the best fantasy books I’ve ever read. Warbreaker is phenomenal (and free!), and the Way of Kings starts off the Stormlight Archives (Rhythm of War is the fourth book in the series) really well. This year, I’ve tried to make a return to my roots in  epic fantasy after becoming a snob who only read world classics and literary fiction with mixed success. On the one hand, Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke are two of my favorite books I read this year. On the other, Dune started far too slowly and then managed to end too quickly. I enjoyed Sanderson’s novella Dawnshard which filled in the time between Stormlight 3 and Rhythm of War, and I do like Rhythm of War but I still have a hard time getting past over-analyzing the world. 

Rhythm of War picks up a year after the previous book in the series. The main characters of the first three books, Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar, have all stagnated or regressed in the progress as Knights Radiant, an order where you advance by speaking oaths which crystalize character growth. We find the characters outside of their comfort zones, trying to come to terms with who they are when they don’t have their normal mode of life. Who is Highmarshal Kaladin when his field command is taken from him, who is Shallan where her coping mechanisms of three semi-independent personas break down, and who is Dalinar when his role as a Knight Radiant make him obsolete as a general? I was expecting the book to continue the nonstop war of the previous three books, but instead it settled into a slow burn of changing perspectives and relationships. It wasn’t what I was expecting but I loved it. That all changed in the second half of the book but I’ll come back to that.  

Reading Rhythm of War reminded me of reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in all the best ways. War and Peace is considered by many to be the peak of realism in literature. Fellow Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "My strong conviction is that a writer of fiction has to have most profound knowledge—not only of the poetic side of his art, but also the reality he deals with, in its historical as well as contemporary context. Here, as far as I see it, only one writer excels in this, Count Lev Tolstoy.” Sanderson, despite being a fantasy writer who crafts complex and dazzling other worlds, is also devoted to realism. Sanderson wants the characters and magic to feel familiar to us, to ring true, even when they’re on different planets fighting gods and spirits. It's both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. 

Realism works really well for the characters. Yes, they’re magical knights fighting the Fused,  immortal embodiments of hatred, but they struggle with depression, anxiety, impostor syndrome, and navigating new relationships. The way they react and emote in response to their changing world and stations in life pulls me into the story and leaves me wanting more. While I’m reading War and Peace the result of the war with Napoleon isn’t all that important (and I already know how it’s going to end). I want to know if Andrei will recover from Natasha’s perceived betrayal, or if Pierre will be satisfied with the Free Masons. Similarly in Rhythm of War, the war that drove the previous books begins to fade into the background, but I still want to know how Kaladin will deal with losing his place as a soldier, or if Shallan will be able to open up to her husband Adolin. Like Tolstoy’s tome, the incredible length of the Stormlight Archives (and the fact that I’m reading it while Sanderson is writing them), allows me to change and grow with the characters. Kaladin, was always the character I most identified with, but now I’m in a different place, and he’s stuck in the same rut. I was excited to finally understand Adolin in this book. Previously, he just seemed like a happy-go-lucky pretty-boy who was okay, but not my style, but now we’re both in our first year of marriage, trying to understand what being a good husband looks like. My favorite scene in the books isn’t the soaring fights, and edge-of-your-seat action, it’s Kaladin, Shallan, and Adolin hanging out in a bar trying to figure out how to live. Sanderson is at his best when he’s creating dynamic characters with real emotions, and I was excited that the first half of the book gave us just that.   

For me, the second half of the book was a bit of a let down. The Fused launch a surprise invasion on the homebase of the Knights Radiant. This re-ups the stakes and drives the pace for the rest of the novel. I understand why Sanderson does this from a writing perspective, but it puts most of the characters back into familiar roles. Kaladin is back to being one man with nothing against impossible odds, Shallan is back to lying to people to get information, and Dalinar is back to leading a campaign. I want them to stay in unfamiliar territory, but Stormlight is an action series so it has to deliver on that.

What frustrates me more is Sanderson applying realism to magic. Sanderson seems to invert Clarke’s third law, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and operate with a formulation like, all magic insufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology. A mechanistic understanding of magic is Sanderson’s calling card. His first law for magic is “an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” This is a good law, because it prevents magic from being a crutch to get characters out of any situation. Instead, the characters have to rely on their creativity and skill. Following in the footsteps of Tolkien, Lewis, and Susanna Clarke, I disagree with this view. Magic should be a little untamed, if not completely wild. But a technological view of magic can work if the author doesn’t take it too far. Sanderson strikes a perfect balance in Mistborn. The magic has rules which it follows, so the actions that the characters take flow from the reader's understanding of the principles of magic, but doesn’t get into the physical mechanism of the magic. He doesn’t dive into magnetic field theory; people can just move metal because of magic.  

Rhythm of War goes beyond merely having rules. He brings magic into the realm of science, and tries to use real wave mechanics to justify the magical mechanism. Then he gets the science wrong. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it before on the blog, but I am a physicist, and interfering light is my field. So when one of the characters, Navani, is using interference to solve problems with magic, they’re almost right about the physics, but it’s fundamentally wrong (he’s conflating particle antiparticle annihilation with destructive interference which aren’t the same thing). This bugged me, but focusing so much on ‘theory’ misses what I think is great about the Stormlight Archives.

I’ve taken to describing Brandon Sanderson as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of fantasy. For both Sanderson and the MCU, the real draw is the interaction of the characters. The fighting and powers are cool, but they’re primarily a vehicle for intra- and interpersonal matters. Battling Ultron is exciting, but it’s got nothing on the Avengers just hanging out after a party. Ultimately for Rhythm of War, it doesn’t matter that the physics is wrong; it works in the universe of the story. However, the whole time I was reading about Navani’s okayish physics, I wanted to be reading about Adolin. I wanted to know how he was dealing with his imprisonment and Shallan’s mental break, but that’s left off of the page to make room for Navani’s experiment. By the time we read about Adolin again, all of that is passed and he’s focused on external pressures. Navani’s experiments are good for her development, but I want to see her deal with the implications of her research, and her internal conflict of making weapons for the Fused. Yes, the physics is wrong, but more importantly, Sanderson’s great character work is neglected to needlessly be in the magical weeds.