The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The Universe is Knowable” or “People Do Strange Things for Love” The first novel in Ken Liu’s Chinese-flavored, “silk punk” historical epic fantasy-sf Dandelion Dynasty series, The Grace of Kings (2015), ends with the good-natured, ex-small-time gangster Kuni Garu drinking with the friends who helped him do the “interesting thing” by becoming Emperor of the islands of Dara. Ah, poor Kuni! As the second novel, The Wall of Storms (2016) begins five years into his reign, its name, Four Placid Seas, has become a misnomer, and he’s learned that winning an empire is far easier than maintaining one. He wants to make life better for his people, especially the commoners and women, but everyone (advisors, nobles, scholars, generals, merchants, farmers, rebels, and even his two wives, Empress Jia and Consort Risana) is competing for their own piece of the imperial pie. Perhaps what is needed to unify the fractious empire is an invasion by a formidable barbarian horde equipped with winged, fire-breathing ruminants? Ken Liu fully imagines his fantasy world, giving a Chinese cast to the main Daran culture (eating sticks, tripod drinking cups, logograms, different forms of bowing and sitting, emperors, advisors, etc.), retaining most of the flora and fauna of our world (horses, cows, wolves, etc.) while inserting exotic new ones (the gargantuan, horned, scaled whale-like crubin and the dragon-analogue garanafin, etc.), making the world and its inhabitants mostly conform to earth’s natural laws while introducing a pantheon of kibitzing and encouraging but (ostensibly) not directly interfering gods. He creates a long, rich history, complete with schools of philosophy (Fluxists, Moralists, Patternists, etc.), classical poetry, storytelling, festivals, crafts, and so on. While the first novel restricts itself to the Islands of Dara (and its empire), this second one introduces a far-off scrubland continent peopled by white barbarians partaking of Viking and Mongol qualities, hitherto cut off from Dara (and vice versa) by the wall of storms (a wall of massive cyclones). Liu’s large story unfolds via the educating, learning, strategizing, scheming, betraying, loving, and fighting of his fully human, flawed, and believable characters: no cardboard evil dark lords or pure heroes here. He develops strong figures from the first novel (like Luan Zya and Kuni Garu) and introduces interesting new ones (like Princess Thera and Pekyu Tenryo, the king of the Licyu “barbarians”). The female characters are more fully developed and complex than in the first book: Empress Jia, a ruthless rationalizer who trusts in systems rather than individuals and wants to make a stable state by reducing the power of the nobles and isolating the glory-seeking “heroes”; Marshal/Queen Gin, a heroic strategist general who scorns Jia’s schemes; Zomi Kidosu, a crippled, proud, and brilliant young scholar who wants to pass the first imperial examinations to win an important post at court; Thera, who loathes the idea of becoming a marriage pawn in the imperial game while either her wannabe hero brother or her wannabe scholar brother will succeed their father as Emperor. Not to mention Vadyu Roatan, a clever and bold barbarian princess-warrior skilled at piloting her cow-dragon garinafin. The ways in which Liu weaves these women’s destinies together are surprising and interesting. He injects plenty of thoughtful ideas and life wisdom into his novels, with great lines like: “A child who takes no risks will not lead an interesting life.” “Talent is like a pretty feather in the tail of a Peacock. It brings joy to the powerful but only sorrow to the bird.” “Patriotism, like white rice, was a luxury of the well to do.” “Every day in the life of a common flower is a day of battle.” “But memory was a lump of wax that was shaped by consciousness with each recollection.” “The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.” He writes culturally suitable similes, like “his voice so stiff it bounced off the wall like roasted chestnuts,” and savory lines, like “The inside of a cow's stomach is a complicated world.” The fantasy elements are pretty much limited to the gods, because Liu is an sf writer at heart, so that his “dragons,” airships, submarines, “silkmotic” weapons, “magic” mirrors, and so on have natural, scientific explanations for their workings. Instead of magic, then, there’s science and technology, engineering, logograms, engineering, machines, etc. Themes from the first novel developed in this one are that All life is an experiment; that Love makes one do strange things; and that The boundary between history and story is blurry: “Like all true stories, it was a mix of legends and facts, of myths imagined and deeds done, of the heart of darkness and the crown of light, of experiences borne and gaps filled, of things seen and visions that could only be authenticated by the mind’s eye.” Liu can write some bad lines of dialogue, jarring in their contemporary colloquial register, like, “Let's get out of here.” And there are moments where characters do disappointing things I can’t quite believe they’d do based on their characters developed up to those points. In the middle of the novel, I found myself muttering something like, “I can’t believe A would be so dense!” or “Wouldn’t B think of that?” And sometimes the gods get a little too hands on. Things could have gotten interesting for the empire more convincingly. While the first book ends in a comfortable resting place, this one does not, and I liked the first two books enough to probably soldier on to find out what will happen to the characters and cultures, but I can’t help but notice that each book in his Dandelion Dynasty series is longer than the one before, going from 21 hours, to 28, to 38, and then to a whopping 41, so I hope that he’s not succumbing to Success Bloat. Michael Kramer is a capable, appealing narrator, his base narration reminiscent of the excellent Grover Gardener, but his god voices tend towards the overly dramatic. View all my reviews
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