The Burning White

So I read the first four books of this series maybe four years ago. This last instalment wasn’t released at the time and for some reason I never went back to it. Now I really wish I had for two reasons. First, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a great ending to a series of awesome ‘chosen one’ epic fantasy that was the culmination of progressively higher and higher stakes through the books. Brilliant. My second reason, however, is because I really struggled to follow what was going on for the first couple of hours. A lot happens in this series, with a veritable mountain of characters and a lot of names and classifications that sound very similar. It was a bit taxing to try and get my head back around all of the lore. Thank Orholam that Brent Weeks wrote a condensed summary of the first four books at the beginning, or I would have truly been lost.

  So, specifics about the book. One of my favourite things to see in any series is the progression of characters, people you’ve watched go from weak to strong, or occasionally strong to weak. We get great character development in this book, or more accurately we get the crescendo of amazing character arcs. It isn’t just the main characters. Sure, we get some brilliantly written trials and tribulations hammering Gavin, Kip, Karris, and Teia into the heroes we always knew they could be, but it’s also the side characters that I love. Specifically, the members of The Mighty and Quentin. I won’t go into any spoilers, but these aren’t just empty shells that Weeks has written to support his leads. These are fully fleshed out people who you grow to love, each in their own way.

With regards to the story itself, it’s not so heavy on the adventuring and falls more on the epic final battle side of things. I’m not complaining, mind. I love me a good battle, and this book really does deliver in that respect. That’s not to say we don’t get a bit of globe-trotting exploits, but they tend to lead more to delving into the shadowed recesses of the character’s souls more than those of some long-lost tomb and temple. But this brings me neatly to another brilliant aspect of this book. Weeks is able to write some seriously introspective proses here. Gavin’s storyline in particular has him (an you, by proxy) revaluation just about everything he thought he knew about the world and himself, and it’s awesome. Sometimes books can lose a lot of pacing to deliver these sorts of subjects, but not here. It's a perfect balance in my opinion, and it works beautifully.

Another aspect that always screams to good writing is the ability of the author to craft a character that you truly despise. I don’t mean someone who is just evil, but someone you actually grow to hate more and more at a visceral level, someone whose every malicious act you take as a person insult. That is what Weeks did with Zymun. Fuck that guy. I mean, every time that creep entered a scene I felt my skin crawl. Amazing writing. And that neatly brings me to one of my favourite characters from any fantasy series ever, that being the ineffable cutthroat that is Gunner. He’s one of those characters that will stick with you forever. It’s not just that every insanely tangled phrase that leaves his lips dances that fine line between genius and madness, but it’s that once you actually get a grip on his tentacular vocabulary, what he’s said is often so damned perspicacious that I had to go and look up a new word just to describe it. And if someone is capable of writing a character that brilliant, then surely they themselves must have a true nugget of that brilliance within them. Well done, Weeks.

Now the book isn’t a total success on every single front. It’s very good on most and truly brilliant on a few, but there were some downsides. We’re given glimpses into a much wider universe that had a massive hand in the events of the series, and we are certainly given some answers about it all. But at the same time, I was still left with a hell of a lot of confusion as to what exactly it all was and what it meant. This may all get explained in another series set within the same universe (though likely not on the same world), but for now I’m left with more questions about it all than answers, and at the end of a series I expect to have all my loose ends neatly tied up. But aside from those aspects, the book was brilliant.

As for narration, Simon Vance was, as it ever is with him, brilliant. The man has range, and his ability to make his voice sound like he’s gargle a pint of grit still astounds me.

Personal Score: 4.5 stars

Professional Score: 4.5 stars

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