The Cosmere began to rise in popularity once Brandon
Sanderson was chosen to finish the late, great Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of
Time, skyrocketing his popularity with sales of The Mistborn Trilogy
and allowing the first installment of The Stormlight Archive to
success. But before that, Sanderson as
an author debuted in 2005 with a standalone Cosmere entry that introduced the
world to his style and storytelling, Elantris. Elantris, at least according to the extra
material of the Tenth Anniversary Edition, was the seventh novel that Brandon
Sanderson had written, and (even admitted by Sanderson himself) is an atypical
book. It’s still firmly in the realm of
fantasy, though not quite reaching the epic heights of the genre. As a story it’s standalone, taking plots of
three characters and weaving them in a city just outside of Elantris, a
historic walled city now overrun with the walking dead as an infection has indiscriminately
targeted known as the Shaod. To be
completely transparent, this was the Sanderson novel I knew the least about,
really only knowing that Elantris was a city so imagine my surprise when
reading the book for the first time to find it was inspired by zombie fiction
and its opening leans quite heavily into nihilistic ideals before gradually
transitioning to a story about hope and bringing a community together and lifting
up the dispossessed and forgotten.
As a story it is also almost completely out of place
in terms of tone and ideas that the rest of the Cosmere would become, though
not in a necessarily bad way. It’s a
book that doesn’t quite scream the evolution of who Brandon Sanderson would
become as an author, as a standalone there aren’t many obvious connections to
the larger Cosmere outside of a small cameo from Hoid who appears in
essentially every Cosmere novel and most of the novellas and short stories. It's a story with a beginning, middle, and
end, and three main point of view characters which will become a standard style
for Sanderson but here the chapters are divided in a three character cycle that
is adhered to every single chapter. This
is a bit of a problem for the pacing of Elantris as a story as not all
three of the plotlines feel nearly as in depth or as interesting as the other
three to warrant the time spent on all of them.
There is an argument to be made that they are of equal importance, but
in writing a novel that does not necessarily mean they deserve equal
attention. The character of Hrathen, a
priest with his complex inner turmoil, is the plotline that suffers the most
from the most from the cycle. It’s a plotline
of a man attempting to spread his faith and religious views through propaganda
and sadly its one that starts out slow and never really builds any speed
throughout the novel until the very end where the climax hits. Sanderson hasn’t quite mastered using the slow
pace either and that really makes these portions of the novel drag.
The other two point of view characters fair far
better, Raoden being a prince thrown off his throne at the beginning of the
novel due to contracting the Shaod and thrown into Elantris, and Sarene, a
princess betrothed to Raoden without ever meeting him thrown into the politics of
Arelon to fend for herself. Their journeys
parallel each other through the first half of the novel before they eventually
meet, though don’t necessarily know they have met each other, just after the
halfway point and Elantris has started to grow as a society. Raoden’s plotline gets off to a bit of a
rocky start with a lack of any real establishment of normalcy for the prince
before he is thrown into Elantris, though his discovery of what it means to be
Elantrian and have the Shaod thrust upon him is fascinating and brilliant. Sanderson describes the hopelessness and pain
they all suffer due to their undead condition before eventually building up his
first magic system with the Aons. There
isn’t as much time to flesh out this magic system as others, but it is integral
for the second half of the novel to really work. There are also side characters throughout his
portions that really show the culture of zombies. Sarene’s
plotline is the closest to simple political drama as she is proving to the city
that she has what it takes to be the queen, despite her fiancé being presumed
dead, his actual fate being kept from everyone including the princess as to not
cause panic that the illness is still spreading even among the nobility. Her uncle is in the city and allows her one
ally as well as some genuinely humorous sequences that show some of the charm
Sanderson will be known for. The two
plots eventually intertwine nicely though with Hrathen’s plot there are some
issues with pacing just feeling uneven at points.
Overall, Elantris is a great first novel, or at
least a first novel to be published.
When initially picking it up I was quite worried that it would be closer
to The Way of Kings Prime in terms of quality, but it is a mainly polished
piece of fiction. While still an outlier
it is a book where two thirds of the leads are incredibly compelling and there
is some interesting ideas for the genre.
The magic system is great and honestly it’s perfectly good as a
standalone, even if Sanderson intends a sequel to be written at some
point. 7/10.
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