Few debut novels come loaded with as many high expectations as does Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings. For starters, Ken Liu is the first writer to receive the “Triple Crown” of genre awards (Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy Award) for a single story, “The Paper Menagerie.” Furthermore, Liu received attention in 2014 as the translator of The Three-Body Problem, the most prominent Chinese Language SF novel translated into English. I reviewed a couple of weeks ago and the book is now on both the Nebula and Hugo final ballot for best novel. What comes through in Ken Liu’s Epic Fantasy is a superb balance of human and mythic, of sweeping grand scale changes with intimate character moments and growth. He manages to pull of both familiar and fresh.
Set in the Dara archipelago (an imagined world with a Asian resonances), the Emperor Mapidéré has united the many islands under one banner. Immediately, in my mind, a flag arose. This could be seen as an endgame, for an epic fantasy novel/saga – the uniting of kingdoms by an ambitious ruler. But this is where Liu launches his story, at the apex of one ruler’s conquering goals as viewed by a trickster with lofty aspirations and an orphan seeking revenge. This trickster is a young boy who often gets into trouble, would rather frolic than read, but whose mother continually holds out hope that he’ll eventually “get it” and stop his tomfoolery. This is Kuni Garu, one of the primary protagonists of the novel. We see much of the action of the narrative through his point of view, we see him grow into manhood, become a husband, father, and unlikely leader of men. Kuni joins a street gang, has many adventures until he finally appoints himself Duke Garu and grows a legion of followers who pledge themselves to him. As Kuni climbs the social strata and makes a name for himself, he falls for a woman named Jia, the woman who becomes his first wife.
Across the globe, the unification efforts led by Mapidéré have spared nobody or no family, including the once-great Zyndu family. Their last scion is Mata, an enormous boy who was born with double-pupiled eyes. Mata’s size and strength are his greatest assets, he uses them to his advantage in his rise as warlord bent on revenge against the Emperor and his family for the destruction of his own family. The two characters find themselves allied in their conquering efforts. They become close enough to think of each other as Brothers. Of course, relationships where pride is involved have a great challenge in surviving the tests of time and conquest.
Through most of the narrative, what becomes clear is the price for toppling an Empire and rebuilding it; a human cost both in lives ended and relationships destroyed. In The Grace of Kings, Liu takes the labels often associated with Epic Fantasy – grand, sweeping, world changing, status quo changing and finds new ways to define those things. He tells an onion of a story, many layers in a Chinese tradition, but there are also some Western sensibilities as well. Told in Liu’s graceful, intelligent, and literate prose, the novel is a sumptuous Epic feast and the most surprising thing to me by novel’s end is that The Grace of Kings is only the opening salvo of a trilogy.
A major theme of Epic Fantasy, often when kings and rulers are involved, is the overthrow of the current regime for something (supposedly different). One of the things I found refreshing was that at one point in the novel, Kuni Garu indicates some sympathy for Mapidéré and that the late Emperor had noble goals and intentions.
“It’s easy to say that he was a tyrant who did nothing good. But it would also be untrue. I was a provincial boy, and yet I got to see some of the worders of all the old Tiro states because of his forceful resettlement of people all across Dara.
“We talk often of the hundreds of thousands who died in Mapidéré’s wars, but we rarely speak of the many lives that might have been lost had he not stopped the incessant petty wars between the Tiro states.
…A man’s legacy is a hard thing to foresee, especially when passions still run hot, and it is so much easier to speak ill than well.”
It is also an acknowledging of a change in the status quo that Kuni hopes to oversee: less death and stomping of the downtrodden, an eventual realization that women are and should be treated at least as equals of men. But he believes in the goals Mapidéré had in his conquests, and does not dismiss the man his path is leading to replace as purely evil or malevolent.
In recent years, the fantasy sequence that comes closest to truly transforming the rule of the world is David Anthony Durham’s Acacia trilogy. Here, Liu is laying the foundation for just how bad things were before the transformation can occur. One of the biggest signals of change in the novel comes about three-quarters of the way through with Gin Mazoti’s appearance in the text. Her backstory/history is told with the weight of legend and myth and her “current” actions in the novel carve out a unique and singular place for her in the world. She is a warlord herself, but one in great contrast to Mata. Where Mata gains his “respect” mostly through fear, Gin gains respect because she is a brilliant, master tactician.
The Grace of Kings is one of those books that is a major part of the ongoing “conversation” of genre, as Coode Street podcasters Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe often refer. (I –highly– recommend checking out the episode of their podcast featuring Ken Liu and Saga Press editor Joe Monti as well as Ken and Joe on Rocket Talk with Justin Landon). One of those topics of the “ongoing conversation” is the treatment of women characters and gender in the genre. There’s been a fair amount of criticism about the lack of female characters in this novel, itself just the first part of a trilogy. (This raises the question, I suppose, of how to review one novel in a series, which is a large chapter in a much larger story. That topic could be an essay or podcast itself.) While I can understand that frustration – to a point – it seems to me in order to showcase an element that might be underrepresented, one must first illustrate that deficiency. A broken or unwhole thing can better be amended or repaired when it is viewed wholly. For comparison, this isn’t too dissimilar a line of thinking regarding speculation the third season of Orphan Black [spoilers for the series’ first two season]. I know, bear with me. The first two seasons of Orphan Black were very much about female empowerment and feminism. When in the final episode of season two it was revealed that male clones existed in the world, people were shaking their heads at what this would do to a show with, as one of its greatest strengths/themes, feminism. To wit, the show-runners, in an interview with Think Progress the week before the third season premiere, say
“I think, definitely, if you want to explore feminist themes, you have to challenge those themes. And if there’s one way to highlight our feminist themes, it would be to throw a misogynist into the mix.”
My reading of The Grace of Kings, on the subject of the female characters is just that, as I’ve said. To better highlight a thing, it can be helpful to display its weakness before reversing the deficiency.
And yet…and yet, as a whole, for all the grand-scale beauty of the language, the mythic resonance, and drama, I found the pacing to be a bit uneven, with some sections that trudged along at a less gripping pace. The most intense scenes were involving Mata and Kuni, and Jia and Kuni’s second wife. But for swathes of the novel there was a lot of narrative that felt as if it was just holding water rather than moving the plot forward and the full weight of the 600+ pages of the novel was felt on my lap as I read it. Some of the scenes were necessary to the overall plot, but I found myself hoping for a return to the more gripping scenes. To the Liu and the novel’s credit; however, those slower scenes didn’t drag on for too long and Liu’s narrative soon hooked its claws into me and another hundred pages would go by quickly.
That criticism aside, the whole is a much better novel than its parts. It is a novel cognizant of its genre roots, for how else could it subvert and reinvent them? It is a novel that would welcome new readers to the genre, for it has a great feel of history and Literature about it. The Grace of Kings just might be the crown jewel in Joe Monti’s launch season of Saga Press and is an indicator (along with the previously reviewed Persona) of great things to come for the imprint. I suspect, and hope, this one will find itself on genre award shortlists next year.
Highly Recommended
© 2015 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover, April 2015, 624 Pages
ISBN 978-1-481-2700-5
http://kenliu.name/
Sample Chapter http://www.tor.com/stories/2015/03/the-grace-of-kings-excerpt-ken-liu
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Saga Press
