REVIEW: City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
Dear Robert Jackson Bennett:
I’m not sure how I came to know about this novel; probably from the blog Two Dudes in An Attic, who participated in a multi-blog read of the book and put it on their Best of 2014 list. I was intrigued by the combination of murder mystery and colonialism-oriented SFF, as well as the intersection of Czarist Russia and Mughal India. I didn’t see any Mughal India in it, but there are definitely South Asian names, characters with South Asian attributes, and appropriate cultural allusions, including tea, which seems to be ever so popular in colonialism-oriented SFF these days. (Someone needs to tell authors that the French, Dutch, and Belgians also had colonies, never mind the Spanish, so coffee obsessions work too.)
The book opens in a courtroom in the Continent’s capital city of Bulikov, but instead of drama and high oratory we have bored judges and surly onlookers. It is a great reminder of the quotidian aspects of colonial rule, the way choices are constrained by rulers who find mundane ways of undermining their subjects’ culture. Into this scene comes the news that the one absent judge has been murdered, and that sets the actual plot of the book in motion and provides the rationale for the main character to appear. Shara Thivani is sent by the Saypuri government to investigate the murder, and the first third or so of the book follows the lines of a conventional murder mystery, albeit one set in a culture whose world collapsed when their divinities were killed.
The backstory of the novel is that the Continent and its Divinities ruled Saypur (which was never blessed with a Divine presence) for hundreds of years, until Saypur rose up in revolt behind a leader who was able to kill the Divinities. Their absence shattered the structure of the Continent, especially Bulikov, which is war-damaged and oddly incomplete in a way that no rebuilding can repair. Saypur’s 75 years of dominance aren’t nearly enough to wipe out either side’s memories of the centuries when the shoe was on the other foot, so both societies carry the arrogance and resentments of dominance and subordination. It’s a fascinating twist on the usual depictions of colonialism, one I don’t remember seeing before (I’ve seen hybridity explored, but not a flip that gives both sides parallel experiences). The rest of the world-building is great too, with each Divinity’s physical and ideological domain developed in thorough, complex ways.
I could spend paragraphs talking about the way religion is depicted. I especially appreciated that the author gives us portrayals of several different religious traditions in the novel; each Divinity has a following and a discrete territorial hegemony, but they come together in Bulikov, for good and ill. The different doctrines reflect real-world religions, but they aren’t one-for-one mappings by any means.
The novel is written in 3rd present, which I’ve not come across very often. Although I’m not usually a fan of present tense, I didn’t notice until well into the book. It’s an interesting choice that worked for me, perhaps because it makes characters in an unfamiliar environment feel more immediate, nearer to me as I’m reading. In addition, flashbacks and recollections are written in 3rd past, so there is a clear break between then and now. It sounds self-conscious when I write it down, but it didn’t read that way to me at all.
There’s occasionally some info-dumping, but for the most part the reader can trust the author to speak through the characters and the story itself:
She watches the crumbling arches, the leaning, bulky vaults, the tattered spires and the winding streets. She watches the faded tracery on the building facades, the patchwork of tiles on the sagging domes, the soot-stained lunettes, and the warped, cracked windows. She watches the people—short, rag-wrapped, malnourished—stumbling through oblong portals and porticoes, beggars in a city of spectral wonders. She sees everything she expected to see, yet all these dreary ruins set her mind alight, wondering what they could have been like seventy, eighty, ninety years ago.
Bulikov. City of Walls. Most Holy Mount. Seat of the World. The City of Stairs.
She’d never figured that last one out. Walls and mounts and seats of the world—that’s something to brag about. But stairs? Why stairs?
Yet now Ashara—or just Shara, usually—finally sees. The stairs lead everywhere, nowhere: there are huge mountains of stairs, suddenly rising out of the curb to slash up the hillsides; then there will be sets of uneven stairs that wind down the slope like trickling creeks; and sometimes the stairs materialize before you like falls on whitewater rapids, and you see a huge vista crack open mere yards ahead.…
The name must be a new one. This could have only happened after the War. When everything … broke.
Shara is a brilliant spy and descendant of the Kaj, the Saypuri who killed the Divinities and liberated Saypur. She has been away from Saypur for years, supposedly because of a botched investigation, and despite her successes is never called home. She was close to the murdered historian/judge, sharing his fascination with Continental history, and her investigation soon leads her to ask all kinds of questions about the past, which doesn’t seem to be as buried as people on either side would like to think. In addition, she encounters a former lover, a Continental whom she wants to trust but has very little reason to.
Shara may be intelligent and powerful, but she’s neither kickass nor a Mary Sue. Everyone she meets doesn’t love her and she both acknowledges her weaknesses and takes confidence from her strengths. The other characters are similarly nuanced and include Mulaghesh, a female Saypuri officer-turned bureaucrat; Shara’s Auntie Vinya, an influential Minister; Shara’s Viking-like henchman, Sigrud; and the aforementioned Vohannes, Shara’s college flame, who happens to be one of Bulikov’s city leaders and most important businessmen.
Once the murder investigations open up into a larger exploration of strange and suspicious happenings in Bulikov, the novel becomes more conventionally fantasy-like and the pace intensifies. I enjoyed the slow burn of the first half, but for those who like more action and might be frustrated in the early going, hang in there because the backstories which are developed early on really start to pay off. There are monsters and battles, and the hulking Sigrud goes from scary and monosyllabic to sympathetic and interesting.
There’s no clear romantic storyline, apart from Shara and Vohannes’ old relationship and their residual, unresolved feelings for each other, but the ending is relatively optimistic, and I found the non-romantic relationships very satisfying. It was really satisfying to read a book with a narrator who is a small, not-obviously-attractive, dark-skinned woman in her 30s, and Sigrud turns the romance-genre barbarian Viking stereotype on its head. He’s not gorgeous, just frightening, and while I found him immensely appealing by the end, it was because of the way I got to know him.
There was one character whose arc fell into a very common stereotype, which was disappointing. It’s a spoiler, so don’t read if you don’t want to know key aspects of the last quarter of the novel.
Spoiler: Show
It turns out that City of Stairs is the first of a planned trilogy, with the second installment coming out in January 2016. Its central character will be Mulaghesh, the (female) officer-bureaucrat whom we meet on the first page and whom I liked a lot. This is absolutely a world I want to spend more time in, so I’m looking forward to City of Blades. Grade: A-
~ Sunita
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I read this book on Sunita’s recommendation. I found it amazing ( except the spoiler :)). Go read it now !
Excellent review of an excellent book!
This book is one of those sleeper titles that I’ve been talking up to patrons. All of the principal characters (even the villains) are beautifully drawn, nuanced and complex, and as much as I liked Mulaghesh, I feel terribly sad that we won’t be spending more time with Shara and Sigrud.
And the worldbuilding! I am so done with “monoculture” sff — you know, where it feels like the entire world has just one culture, maybe with token “exotics” (ninjas or Vikings or whatnot) and your standard issue totalitarian / theocratic villain country. Here there are not only very different regional societies (and the differences have Reasons! based in e.g. climate and geography) *and* different classes and ideologies withIN each culture.
With reference to an earlier thread, this is one of those books where I feel the author has notebooks and spreadsheets on all the various regions of the world, even ones we only hear about in tossed-off asides; a visit to the author’s webpage confirmed that feeling, as he shares pictures and maps and all sorts of additional goodies.
The spoiler bothered me a LOT — enough that I have even spoiled it to those I think it might be a real problem — and I disagree that it “made sense” in context. I’ll agree it was necessary to the plot, and maaaaaybe was in character, but that last bit involves invoking a lot of assumptions that are just plain lazy stereotypes on the author’s part.
@hapax: Who knows, maybe Shara will still have a role to play in Mulaghesh’s book maybe? Spoiler, yeah. I cannot speak for Sunita, but when I say that it made sense in context I am thinking about it making sense for the character arc – basically fit in the story author decided to tell. Did this choice work for me though? No, it did not and I do not think that playing it the other way would have changed the story that much, but it would change the story won’t you agree?
And absolutely, worldbuilding was so good and I am pretty sure that lots of notes, notebooks or in his head are available somewhere, it is just so well thought out.
Oh I saw you went to his site and saw maps and stuff, never mind :).
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@hapax: Thank you! That’s a great point about how much background there is to the world-building. I haven’t looked at the extra materials on his site, but like you, I got the same feeling when I was reading.
On the spoiler, I have the same take as Sirius. Once the author made that character choice, he followed through on the logic of it. So it’s really an argument about the choice more than the execution (although the execution didn’t subvert conventional patterns the way some of his other choices and executions did). I didn’t feel as if it was necessarily about the character’s attributes so much as the role many characters can play. I’ll try being more specific under a spoiler cut:
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@hapax: I agree with you that this is the kind of spoiler some readers need to have because it will hit them hard. I also think that it’s something that strikes us as readers because we read a lot of romance and regularly read books with underrepresented characters. I’ve read a number of very good reviews that don’t mention this issue at all.
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I decided against reading City of Stairs after I heard about the spoiler some months back, but now I’m much more interested in reading it. Let me ask another spoilerish question, though:
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@Janine: A whole lot.
@Janine: Very much, except since the character set-up led me to know what to expect (as others have said), I was prepared for how it worked out (although even to the end, I kept hoping it would be subverted).
Oh, I forgot to mention — for those who like to listen to their books, the Recorded Books edition, narrated by Alma Cuervo, is very good (depending on your public library, you might be able to download it for free!)
@Janine: Not as much as Sirius and Hapax. I was more interested in other characters.
@hapax: That leads me to the question. Any books you can recommend where such subversion of this trope/storyline actually does happen? It could be gay romance, it could be any mainstream SFF or literary fiction, does not matter. Thanks :).
@Sunita: I just want to be clear that I was *very* interested in other characters, but yes, got extremely attached to this one and it does not happen too often and gives a huge credit to the author – normally in the situation like this I would react with annoyance at another character if that makes sense.
@Sirius: Oh, definitely, I understood that. ;) And I agree that this author created some really memorable characters (which is part of why we are all annoyed at this particular plot/character direction).
@Sirius:
Hmm. I’m going to identify characters by letters, then identify beneath SPOILER alert for those who are interested.
First ones that come to mind: Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan series has a few. One very minor character X who runs through the series subverts this trope nicely; another major character Y might be considered a subversion as well.
Also, in Lee and Miller’s NECESSITY’S CHILD there is a character, Z, who subverts the trope perfectly, even though the reason for the character’s “brokeness” is very different from CITY OF STAIRS. Of course, that book comes with its own *huge* problematic blind spot, to wit, GYPSIES!IN!SPAAAAAACE! , so as much as I liked it personally for other reasons, I can’t really *recommend* it.
I’m sure there MUST be others, and maybe even some in romance? I’ll have to think on this for a while… Anyone else got ideas?
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
Character keys
X = Byerly Vorrutyer
Y = Mark Vorkosigan
Z = Rys
END SPOILERS
@hapax: Oh good point about Vorkosigan saga! At first I misread Mark for Miles and was thinking really? LOL. But Mark fits well, I agree. Byerly? I suppose so. I will check out Gypsies, thanks and any other recommendations are appreciated.
@Sirius: I can’t think of any offhand, so thank goodness Hapax has come to the rescue. I’ll keep thinking, though.
Thank you for mentioning my increasingly derelict blog. I feel kinda unobservant that I completely missed the character arc that you are talking about, but I guess its clear that my interests with things lie elsewhere. I came for the politics and stayed for the Cold War-esque spy story. :)
@Brittain: Not at all! You undoubtedly saw familiar stuff where I didn’t; one of the fun things about reading reviews from different angles is that we all have our own axes to grind. And if it hadn’t been for your review and discussion, I don’t know that I would have picked this up. Your appreciation of the political and spy aspects helped sell me on it.
For readers who haven’t run across Two Dudes before, they write great reviews of SFF.
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Re: about being mad at the character – going to try to explain under spoiler cut what I meant
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