I would love to say that Empire of Silence was
a book that I just gravitated towards, but no once again this is another of those
books that I took a chance on based on the recommendations of YouTube. There are several booktubers over the years
who have sung the praises of Christopher Ruocchio’s first installment in The
Sun Eater. As a text, it is quite
large, Ruocchio wearing his many influences on his sleeves. Empire of Silence is presented as the
first volume of the memoirs of Hadrian Marlowe, initially an heir to a throne
and in the text clearly meant to go onto some sort of greatness that this volume
does not actually explain what that greatness is. It’s explained in the title as eating a sun, but
Hadrian as narrator is coming from the perspective of the reader being familiar
to exactly who he was. Ruocchio’s gamble
with Empire of Silence is explicitly making this a first volume, it was
published traditionally and it’s one of those novels that ends at a point where
it is clearly one small part in a bigger story (though this case will clearly be
a much, much bigger story). This is a
novel that reaches a stopping point but honestly manages to straddle the line
of being clearly the first part of an epic and telling a complete story, heck
it almost tells multiple stories. Brandon
Sanderson has described writing installments of The Stormlight Archive
as writing a trilogy and presenting it at one book; that’s what reading Empire
of Silence feels like, experiencing a trilogy of stories about the developing
life of Hadrian Marlowe and his road to hell.
While there is no certainty that The Sun Eater is
going to turn out with Hadrian as a villain, Empire of Silence is full
of Hadrian’s personal struggle with morality in a monarchist, imperialist, intergalactic
system. Hadrian begins the novel in a
position of great privilege, and Ruocchio’s plot follows a structure of seeing
him essentially having his own wants. Those
wants are initially in line with his privileged position, wishing to be
declared the heir of his father, but his father is a ruthless tyrant. While Hadrian’s father and brother both view
him as soft and weak, Hadrian is still clearly the product of privilege. This is evident when what spurs him to change
is not some genuine sense of morality, but because he was slighted by his
family. Hadrian acts out and blusters on
his own, something that gets him severely injured and his estimations in his
father’s eyes plummeted to the worst.
His wish to become essentially a scholar instead of a priest as his
father predestines is not really for a love of knowledge but to go against his
father. He gets this incredibly rude
awakening when he is injured by people on the streets, his first real
interaction outside of the aristocracy.
Yet, his rejection of the aristocracy and secret plans to become a
scholar, plans that in the second act of the novel (or second leg of the
trilogy if you wish to view it like that) go wrong and put Hadrian among the
lower classes for a number of years.
Throughout these sequences the reader gets this true sense that Hadrian
as a person is still the aristocrat, still blinded by his own privilege stripped
from him. Ruocchio manages to fully
encapsulate a selfish protagonist and links that selfishness clearly with his
previous high class at the top of his mind.
There is a middle segment of the novel that is essentially a tribute to
films like Gladiator and Spartacus.
Tempering the selfish aspects of Hadrian as a
character is a genuine thirsting for knowledge.
There are multiple romantic relationships included in the novel and they
highlight these aspects, Hadrian while suffering romantic loss throughout the
novel, these losses deconstruct the selfishness, especially the first which is
with a woman who falls ill and dies because she doesn’t have the eugenicist
genetics of the aristocracy. This is the
romance that feels the closest to a traditional and genuine romance, Hadrian
isn’t really using her but her death is used to further blindside Hadrian to
the injustices in the universe. Humanity
has been at war with the alien Cielcin, a hermaphrodite race whose individuals
use “it” pronouns. While the Earth is a planet
of the distant path and humanity has built through a new religious order that
is largely believed to be false, the Cielcin essentially provide a scapegoat
for the enemy that imperialist empires like the Earth empire needs. They are not actually a major element until the
final third of the novel when Hadrian actually takes an interest with their
language and culture. This leads to the
ending of the novel as a completely tragic affair which feels as if Ruocchio
needed to really show Hadrian the horrors of imperialism and empire; that is
without the possibility of rationalizing that horror through his life. There is a Cielcin prisoner whose perspective
is what doesn’t so much as break a life of pro-human propaganda but allow
Hadrian to question it.
Overall, Empire of Silence is an incredibly
interesting blend of science fiction and fantasy. This review honestly feels as if I’m only
scratching the surface of what Christopher Ruocchio is doing with his novel. Hadrian Marlowe is the central figure of the
novel that clearly deserves the amount of time this review dedicated to him,
but the novel’s worldbuilding is equally vivid and an exploration of the imperialist
system that can create a person like Hadrian Marlowe. There’s so much in this tome that it feels as
if I’ve only scratched the surface of what Ruocchio can do as an author. 9/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment