City of Stairs

Written by Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs is a great urban fantasy novel, building its themes around religion, persecution, and war. The novel excels when it’s dealing with its world’s lore, making it thematically important, but falters when it comes to building suspense in certain scenes.

After an important Saypuri historian is found dead in the city of Bulikov, Saypur puts a young female ambassador named Shara at the head of the investigation. Shara, however, soon understands that her task will grow beyond her wildest dreams, as she proceeds to uncover uncomfortable secrets about Bulikov’s history and about her own people.

The setting of the novel is its greatest strength. The city of Bulikov is deeply marked by its traumatic past: once ruled by Gods, it is now dominated by Saypur, who denies access to the city’s history to all the people of Bulikov and outlaws all of its ancient religious practices. As Shara walks through its dilapidated streets, questioning its bitter inhabitants, the ambassador starts to feel the claustrophobic, hostile atmosphere of the city.

Bulikov is described as a living entity, being personified constantly to make it feel like a dangerous character: “The city knows. It remembers. Its past is written in its bones, though now the past speaks in silences.” Sometimes it’s even animalized: “Bulikov’s like an elephant, see? It’s got a long memory.” The point is always to reinforce how the city is essentially a ticking bomb, just a few minutes away from exploding. The past is a dangerous, lingering thing in City of Stairs: its scars are seen and felt by the characters, being reflected on the crumbling state of the buildings, the twisted forms of the streets, and on the constant tension emanating from the anger that looms over each line spoken by Bulikov’s residents.

If the nation of Saypur is now the oppressor, ruling over Bulikov, it was not always like that. The past that Bulikov is so hell-bent on remembering is of the time when it was ruled by Gods, and, with the aid of those Gods, it ruled over everything else. Magic was a real presence in Bulikov and, if its architecture is now deformed and twisted, it’s precisely because it was made with divine magic. The city’s material foundations collapsed alongside its gods.

One of the most recurring themes in the novel is the problems religions can pose. In City of Stairs, religion is a force of resistance – a form to preserve the past – but also a force of oppression. The inspiration here is clearly the Old Testament, mainly the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (“YOU HAVE MIXED LINENS AND COTTONS WITH YOUR GARMENTS,” a character cries in anger in a marvelous scene), with Bulikov’s citizens yearning for the arbitrary laws that used to cast punishment on their enemies. Religion is depicted here not as the source of those bizarre rules, but as the cultural consequence of people’s desire for a justification for their hate and anger. As one of the characters points out: “Look at them! They’re praying to pain, to punishment! They think that hate is holy, that every part of being human is wrong.”

Shara comes into the mix as a member of another form of religion: patriotism. She watches people committing horrible acts and sacrifices in name of their abstract religions, but acts similarly in the name of her country. She is bitterly aware of the nature of her position, however, saying, “We must be judicious and bloodless. I am to be, as always, a simple tool in the hands of my nation.” Shara strives to make the best of what she got, using her role of ambassador to make small changes, save a few people, and try her hardest to make a difference. But she is often put back in her place. As an old friend of Shara tells her, “You’re not an agent of change, Shara. You don’t make the world better – you work to keep things how they are.” This friend goes on to put the final nail in her good intentions’ coffin, “You are a representative of your country. And countries do not feel sorrow.”

Shara is a character at odds with her political position. She is supposed to reinforce Saypur’s oppression in Bulikov but downright refuses to do so. Shara’s narrative arc has her trying to find a way to unite both nations without resorting to violence while having to face the intrinsic problems of politics and the prospect that her goal may be unreachable. She is working inside a system that does not want correcting, after all. As her aunt reminds her, “But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all – it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law.”

Her bodyguard, Sigrud, also stands out as a powerful, merciless bodyguard. He is given some time to shine, participating in an epic battle against a huge creature, with the fight reflecting his inner demons and tragic backstory. He’s a one-note character, for sure, but he works tremendously as a secondary one: his dark, serious demeanor often betrays his uncaring words, revealing a man that is haunted by his past but tries his hardest to pretend otherwise. Sigrud is a gloomy man, who thinks “the cold, the dark, and the waiting death” are what life is all about. Since his intentions and thoughts are mostly kept hidden by the narrative – as the story follows Shara and not him – it helps the character feels mysterious and engaging.

One of City of Stair’s strengths is its insistence on giving room for its secondary characters to breathe. Even an old lady, whose role in the plot is to be a witness in Shara’s investigation, has some traits that encourage the reader to empathize with her. She’s confessing to a crime – copying classified documents – but it’s clear that she was just being used and that she knows nothing about anything important. The moment that makes her come alive is the one in which she’s describing how she was able to make handwritten copies of the documents, and the reader can notice that she is very proud of what she has done… because she can’t read – although Bennet almost ruins the moment by reinforcing this detail to make sure we get it.

That said, the novel’s main shortcoming is actually the pace of Shara’s investigation. Since the element that reveals the interesting aspects of Bulikov and Saymur is precisely this investigation, the fact that it takes a while to gain traction means the narrative is struggling to find its feet during the first act. The suspense takes a while to build, making the novel’s beginning its worst and most boring part.

City of Stairs is a great fantasy novel that discusses religion and oppression with a great cast of characters and fantastic worldbuilding. It may take a while for it to pick up steam, but when it’s at its peak, City of Stairs makes the wait worth it.

September 20, 2019.