Daevabad trilogy
Jan. 31st, 2021 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
halojedhaI'm halfway through S A Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy - City of Brass, Kingdom of Copper and Empire of Gold - and I keep on changing my mind about whether to bother finishing it.
It's a sprawling Middle Eastern epic about djinn and magic and myth and city politics and civil war. There are three major factions who all hate each other - two pureblood djinn factions, the Daevas and Gezeri, each of whom think the other are evil and only they deserve to rule, and a mixed race oppressed minority, the shafit, who are regularly beat on by both the djinn factions and occasionally fight back. There are three main protagonists, one from each of the factions, although Nahri is half daeva and pretending not to be shafit. She and Ali, the Gezeri protagonist, are both sympathetic to the shafit. But Dara, the daeva protagonist, isn't, and his point of view is so dislikeable it makes me want to stop reading whenever it's his turn.
Dara isn't just a bigot, he's also thousands of years old and a war criminal, who has perpetrated sickening acts of cruelty, torture and genocide. I don't want to be inside his head. He's meant to be a complex character, an antihero making bad decisions and wrestling with his conscience, but I just can't get past what he's done - and continues to do. He's consistently violent and cruel. He agonises over it, and justifies it to himself, hating himself and telling himself he's being noble by doing the hard thing so someone else doesn't have it on their conscience. But he's a monster. I don't like spending time with him and I don't like the constant reminders of the hideous things he's done.
Ali has also done horrible things - he's the son of a tyrant and has been forced to do his father's bidding - but otherwise he's the most consistently principled character and my main hope of a peaceful resolution to things. But at times this trilogy feels like a Greek tragedy: every side does evil things, everyone wants vengeance, noone is ready to forgive or compromise, and it feels like mutually assured destruction is the only inevitable outcome. I'm not sure I want to stick around for that.
To make matters worse, the evil things done by each faction often take the form of violence against and murder of children, which is something I just can't handle reading about these days. Most often it happens off stage and is reported as a device to steer people's motivations, so we don't have to see it first hand, but it still feels gratuitous. Like okay, I get it, the tyrant is a tyrant and the bigots are bigots and everyone hates each other, you don't need to kill more children in horrible ways to convince me. I don't need those images in my head.
So reading this book is often deeply unpleasant, both when I have to grit my teeth through yet more reported atrocities, and when I have to spend time with the angst of someone who's commited them. I stopped reading it once already, but then I went back to it, and I still want to know what happens next.
Because the world-building is rich and detailed and vivid, the court politics and intrigues are convincingly chilling and complex and difficult to navigate, the backdrop of myth and history that's gradually revealed is compelling, and many of the characters are fun to spend time with - I love Ali, Nahri, Jamshid, Zaynab, and even Muntadhir, for all his flaws. It's lovely to read a book populated exclusively by people of colour, many of them Muslim and dark skinned. It has canonically queer main characters, moral ambiguity, and genuinely tense, difficult situations where there's no easy answers and every action has a million unwanted consequences.
So for now, I'm keeping on reading it - but it's still touch and go whether I'll make it to the end.
It's a sprawling Middle Eastern epic about djinn and magic and myth and city politics and civil war. There are three major factions who all hate each other - two pureblood djinn factions, the Daevas and Gezeri, each of whom think the other are evil and only they deserve to rule, and a mixed race oppressed minority, the shafit, who are regularly beat on by both the djinn factions and occasionally fight back. There are three main protagonists, one from each of the factions, although Nahri is half daeva and pretending not to be shafit. She and Ali, the Gezeri protagonist, are both sympathetic to the shafit. But Dara, the daeva protagonist, isn't, and his point of view is so dislikeable it makes me want to stop reading whenever it's his turn.
Dara isn't just a bigot, he's also thousands of years old and a war criminal, who has perpetrated sickening acts of cruelty, torture and genocide. I don't want to be inside his head. He's meant to be a complex character, an antihero making bad decisions and wrestling with his conscience, but I just can't get past what he's done - and continues to do. He's consistently violent and cruel. He agonises over it, and justifies it to himself, hating himself and telling himself he's being noble by doing the hard thing so someone else doesn't have it on their conscience. But he's a monster. I don't like spending time with him and I don't like the constant reminders of the hideous things he's done.
Ali has also done horrible things - he's the son of a tyrant and has been forced to do his father's bidding - but otherwise he's the most consistently principled character and my main hope of a peaceful resolution to things. But at times this trilogy feels like a Greek tragedy: every side does evil things, everyone wants vengeance, noone is ready to forgive or compromise, and it feels like mutually assured destruction is the only inevitable outcome. I'm not sure I want to stick around for that.
To make matters worse, the evil things done by each faction often take the form of violence against and murder of children, which is something I just can't handle reading about these days. Most often it happens off stage and is reported as a device to steer people's motivations, so we don't have to see it first hand, but it still feels gratuitous. Like okay, I get it, the tyrant is a tyrant and the bigots are bigots and everyone hates each other, you don't need to kill more children in horrible ways to convince me. I don't need those images in my head.
So reading this book is often deeply unpleasant, both when I have to grit my teeth through yet more reported atrocities, and when I have to spend time with the angst of someone who's commited them. I stopped reading it once already, but then I went back to it, and I still want to know what happens next.
Because the world-building is rich and detailed and vivid, the court politics and intrigues are convincingly chilling and complex and difficult to navigate, the backdrop of myth and history that's gradually revealed is compelling, and many of the characters are fun to spend time with - I love Ali, Nahri, Jamshid, Zaynab, and even Muntadhir, for all his flaws. It's lovely to read a book populated exclusively by people of colour, many of them Muslim and dark skinned. It has canonically queer main characters, moral ambiguity, and genuinely tense, difficult situations where there's no easy answers and every action has a million unwanted consequences.
So for now, I'm keeping on reading it - but it's still touch and go whether I'll make it to the end.