Elantris by: Brandon Sanderson

 

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.