The third Mistborn novel in the "Wax and Wayne" subseries, The Bands of Mourning, is very different from the other two, in that our protagonists leave Elendel for the first time, travelling to the city-state of New Seran in pursuit of Wax's sister, who was abducted by Wax's uncle back in the first Wax and Wayne book. (I guess; I honestly did not remember this subplot, though I did remember Wax's uncle was evil.)
It's impossible to read a Cosmere novel (impossible for me, anyway) without thinking about "magic systems." Sanderson is praised for his "hard magic," where everything is meticulously thought through. This just doesn't work for me at all. I actually recently had the privilege of getting to briefly chat with Ann Leckie, author of Raven Tower, and I asked her if she could explain her approach to fantasy, and she said she approached it like a science fiction writer. And I was like, "Aha, that's why I like it!" She takes a fantastic premise but then thinks it through completely logically. It's a good example of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": the difference from our world (what Darko Suvin would call the novum) is thought about in a methodical way. Compare the Harry Potter novels, with their "soft" magic system, which seems to have little organizing structure other than what J. K. Rowling thought would be good at the time she wrote a particular book.
Why, then, do I not like Brandon Sanderson, with his methodical magic systems? At least part of it is that for all their methodical nature, they still feel quite arbitrary. In Leckie's novel, there's an initial fantastic premise (anything a god says comes true, but this requires energy, which the god can acquire through worship), but that's it, everything flows logically from that simple initial conceit. Sanderson's metals, on the other hand, do not have a simple initial fantastic conceit. In the Mistborn novels, for example, there's three different "metallic arts" (allomancy, feruchemy, and hemalurgy), each of which has its own rules; there are sixteen different metals that can be used in these arts, meaning there's forty-eight different powers people can have. And each metal's use in each power feels arbitrary: why should zinc enflame emotions in allomancy but store mental speed in feruchemy? why should iron pull on metal in allomancy, but store physical weight in feruchemy? And that's without getting into when different powers interact; it all comes across as arbitrary. There's a system, I guess, to the extent that anything you can stick into a table (there's six pages of explanation in the back of the book) is a system, but there's no clear organizing principle to it all. The system doesn't feel "rational" or "logical."
My other issue is that it feels like there's nothing to it other than the system. Miéville says that the thing about rationalized alienation is that it's also something you can read metaphorically. Harry Potter's magic may be unsatisfying from a logical standpoint, but it's all about self-actualization, which makes sense in a YA series about teen protagonists. Ursula K. Le Guin is probably the queen of this; her magic is powerful because it lines up with the character's understanding of the universe. In being able to Name things, Ged says something about us as readers too. But what's the metaphorical resonance of burning nicrosil? You've got me. I like to quote Jo Walton's essay about "SF Reading Protocols" a lot, but I recently noticed something Jeff VanderMeer says in the comments on it:
I’m having some difficulty with this idea–as I read it–of the literal *versus* the metaphorical, since metaphor has so much to do with the subtext of a story. If you don’t have subtext, you have a pretty flat story–it doesn’t resonate. Metaphorical interpretation is key, on some subconscious level in a reader, between a text that is alive and one that, after a first reading, is dead. Some SF writers write “flat” in this regard and some do not–some resonate.
Is VanderMeer talking about Sanderson? Not that I know of. Has he ever read Sanderson? I've no idea, but he certainly could be. So when people in this book start to talk about what happens if someone invents this or that allomantic power, or combines this, or does whatever with their feruchemy, I tune out, because it's all meaningless magical jibber-jabber (what I sometimes call "thaumababble," the fantasy equivalent of technobabble).
My other issue with Sanderson is that for as much as the magic systems are (supposedly) deep, the worldbuilding often feels shallow. This was a particular problem with the first Mistborn trilogy, which were all about liberating an oppressed people from an enslaving empire, but where absolutely no thought seemed to have been put into the oppressed people, or even what it's like to live under oppression; one was sort of left thinking Sanderson didn't know anything about imperialism or colonialism beyond what he had read in other similarly shallow fantasy novels. (Like everything in a Brandon Sanderson novel, there's ultimately a magical explanation for this, but it still feels shallow when you're reading it.) Sanderson and his fans like to criticize Harry Potter for its not-very-thought-through magic systems and worldbuilding, but honestly, Mistborn feels fairly similar to Harry Potter to me in that it often feels like things other than the magic system are made up when we need them, and no sooner. I never really believed there was a whole world outside of Elendel in "Era 2" until this book actually sent us into it; even having done so, one feels like there's exactly the bits of New Seran we need to support Wax and Wayne's story, and no more.
The Bands of Mourning: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson |
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Originally published: 2016 Read: March 2026 |
Okay, this has become more of an essay about Brandon Sanderson and the Cosmere in general than an actual review of The Bands of Mourning, and one that probably reveals more about my own interests and obsessions than the actual book. So how is the book?
Well, actually, it's pretty good. If you can put all that stuff I just complained about aside (and there's a degree to which you can't—though it's even more likely that you, the person who is reading this review, don't care about any of this at all), it's probably the Mistborn book I've found the most interesting and the most successful. That is to say, I did find The Alloy of Law good fun but honestly it also felt to me like The Alloy of Law wasn't really trying to do very much other than tell a basic crime caper. Bands of Mourning, as I said, takes Wax and Wayne outside of Elendel... but it also brings outsiders into Elendel, as we get our first hint that there are people on this planet outside of a small region, with their own society and their own agenda. If you think what's interesting about speculative fiction is the creation of "epistemic crisis" (this is my take, at least), then this is a decent example of it, and it's probably the thing I'm most interested in seeing future Mistborn novels develop.
On top of that, I found this book had the most interesting depictions of the characters thus far. I find Wax himself a little one-note, but Wayne is always good fun with his sideways but strangely logical way of looking at the world, and this book has a lot Steris, a character who (to be honest) I did not even remember from previous books, who Wax is marrying for financial and social reasons, not love. There is a little bit of a tendency for us to be told Steris acts a certain way as opposed to seeing her act this way, but once the story gets underway, we do get to see her do a lot of stuff in her own way, and I found it enjoyable. I also like Marasi, though I feel like she doesn't get as much interesting stuff to do as the other three characters. Sanderson's end note says Marasi, Wax, and Wayne will return in the next book, but I hope the lack of Steris is just an omission as opposed to an indication she won't play a central role in the fourth and final book of this sequence.
As always, the use of the allomantic powers is probably the thing I am least interested in here, as well as the greater mythology. Wax actually dies for a bit, and talks to God(!) about suffering; this actually reminded me a lot of a similar discussion in Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Chronicle, which I reread recently, and I found the points here similarly unconvincing. (Is this because both Card and Sanderson are Mormons?) But put all that aside, and look for a book about some decent characters doing interesting things, and this is the best Mistborn novel thus far.
Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: The Lost Metal
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