Mistborn: The Final Empire

The first book of a trilogy, Mistborn: The Final Empire is a competent introduction to one of the biggest fantasy worlds created by Brandon Sanderson. With The Final Empire, the author is successful at creating a compelling cast of characters, which helps to save a narrative marred by repetitive prose and problematic symbolisms.

The setting is the great city of Luthadel, the center of a feudal empire that has in its foundations the constant exploration of the poor, the peasant class called Skaa. It frequently rains ash over the city, which is commanded by a man goes by the name “Lord Ruler” and, being immortal, is considered a fearsome god by his subjects, ruling with the help of an equally intimidating ministry, whose main officers have nails in place of their eyes.

After several failed attempts of rebellion, the Skaa finally see a possibility of victory when they hire a famous band of thieves, led by the mysterious Kelsier, to take on the task of coordinating the conflict. The book’s protagonist is the newest member of this group, Vin: a girl who grew up on the streets under constant oppression and, paranoid, is always expecting a betrayal from those closest to her. When she discovers that she is a mistborn – a special person that has access to an enormous range of magical powers that involve the manipulation of metal – and is recruited by Kelsier, Vin suddenly finds herself amidst friendly people who offer her unwarranted kindness, which makes her even more alert.

Vin is a girl who grew up in the ghetto, a Skaa who has been treated relentlessly throughout her life: even the person who was supposed to care for her – her brother Reen – ended up traumatizing her by betraying her trust. Her brother’s sayings accompany the character throughout her entire journey, always reinforcing her paranoia and distrust: she was taught by Reen that the world is cruel and that people are horrible and, therefore, she thinks that good actions always have ulterior motives.

Vin believes she can never let her guard down, lest she be hurt again by those she trusts the most. After all, in her mind, everyone not only can betray her but will indeed do it at some point: for Vin, betrayal is just a matter of time. Her worldview becomes so cynical that she reaches the point of seeing cruelty as a practical emotion, which would help to ensure her survival in that brutal society. The best description of this vigilant and paranoid state of mind lies in the seventh chapter: “Vin didn’t sit, she crouched. She didn’t walk, she prowled. Even when she was sitting in the open, she seemed to be trying to hide.”

However, subtle excerpts like this are rare. As is apparently typical of Sanderson, characters’ traits are constantly and directly tackled on, which means that Vin will often think about her paranoia or remember her brother’s teachings, when not both in sequence, always in simple and objective sentences. In the second chapter, for example, her thoughts couldn’t be more obvious (“Everyone betrays everyone else. That’s the way life is…”), and, to hammer the point home, there’s also the voice of her brother a few lines later: “Anyone will betray you. Anyone.”

As a female character, Vin is built in an interesting way. She’s an independent character, who never accepts orders passively: when her stance seems submissive, it is just to deceive her oppressor. Vin, however, rejects traits that reveal her gender: with her cynicism disguised as practicality, she sees in the feminine a fragile quality, which would make her look like prey to those around her, drawing attention to herself. To keep herself alive, then, Vin believes she needs to reject her femininity, which is symbolized by the earrings she got from her mother but doesn’t wear for safety. After meeting Kelsier’s group, however, she starts to wear the earrings, almost as an affirmation of her own identity: she starts to understand that she can be feminine and strong at the same time.

The second most important character in the novel is the one that assumes the role of Vin’s mentor: the thief Kelsier. Having suffered in the past at the hands of the Lord Ruler, he swears revenge against all the nobility – which he sees as invariably evil –  and sets up a master plan to bring down the Empire.

His gang immediately shocks the protagonist due to their positive dynamic: there is trust, gestures of affection, and real concern about the wellbeing of each member. This friendship is nurtured by Kelsier precisely to contrast with the cruel nature of their world. One of Kelsier’s most striking features is his smile, which is ambivalent by nature: the gesture indicates not only contentment but also anger and indignation. It’s a smile that carries a deep sense of sadness but also seeks to deliver a little joy to those around him: Kelsier’s smile is an act of resistance. As the character himself explains: “the Lord Ruler thinks he has claimed laughter and joy for himself. I’m disinclined to let him do so. This is one battle that doesn’t take very much effort to fight.”

Kelsier’s main arc, however, involves his arrogance, which can be felt even in the nature of his revolution, after all, it takes someone too full of themselves to believe they can challenge a god and win. Kelsier gradually builds a heroic image for himself under the justification of raising the morale of his army, but it doesn’t take long for his companions to notice that he can’t distinguish this image from himself, which leads him to reckless actions. Kelsier’s arrogance gives him a tragic air, which reinforces the impact of his arc.

His mortal enemy, The Lord Ruler, is a character that appears initially as an abstract evil force. They describe him as something “like the winds or the mists. One did not kill such things. They didn’t live, really. They simply were.” Being portrayed as an absolutist king, almost like Louis XIV with magical powers, the Lord Ruler holds in his authority a divine and indisputable character. To position oneself against him is like to position oneself against God: besides being heresy, it is a certain step to get oneself killed.

His authoritarian government, then, is a theocratic one. The intrinsically political nature of religions, derived from their normative function, doesn’t appear to escape Sanderson. One of the characters even raises the question: “But, the Lord Ruler – as God – defines what is good. So, by opposing him we’re actually evil.” It’s no wonder that one of the duties of the Lord Ruler’s ministry is to eliminate all religions from the Empire: there can only be one religion – his own – which gives him immeasurable power for being the spokesman of its precepts and rules. In a specific reference to the Catholic Church, Sanderson even names the most terrifying figures in this world – those responsible for the religious “cleansing” – as Inquisitors.

In close dialogue with Catholicism, the novel builds an unusual contrast between a specific character and Jesus: the character who sacrifices themselves to try to save their people in The Final Empire, becoming a martyr, doesn’t do it in the name of God, but as a direct challenge to divine authority.

The oppression against the Skaa is constantly described as cruel, but, as it is usual with Sanderson, this gets repetitive very fast, with all the related scenes following the same pattern: there are frequents scenes of disproportionate cruelty like the one, right at the beginning, in which a Skaa is beaten by his master for having “blinked inappropriately,” or the account of someone especially defenseless being beheaded, butchered or killed in another horrible manner.

The development of the aristocracy, then, is a bit problematic. Sanderson tries to avoid painting them as one-dimensional in their cruelty and alienation, but fails at this attempt because he has just a single character from that class being a good person: this character, therefore, becomes not a representative of the nobility’s complexity, but an exception to its one-dimensional villainy. As a consequence of this, Kelsier’s binary worldview becomes justified: although several cruel Skaas appear, there is only one example of a good aristocrat – or three, if we consider his two disciples, but they never do anything to confirm this or not. As for the Lord Ruler, he starts to become more complex in the middle of the novel, but his development is ultimately thrown away with a twist that puts him back in the position of a unidimensionally evil villain.

The nobility is largely developed by contrasts: its members may appear beautiful and civilized, but are capable of the most ruthless actions and selfish thoughts. In their world, there is the wealth and opulence of the balls, but outside their fortresses, surrounding them, there is only misery. When Vin visits a castle – which looks more like a cathedral with its stained glass windows – she is dazzled by what she sees. However, as she leaves, she immediately watches a boy being beheaded in front of an impassive audience. Vin’s relationship with the aristocracy gains prominence in the narrative: while Vin, in a curious disillusion, tries to make excuses for their actions – claiming that they act the way they do because they don’t know better – Kelsier tries to make her understand that they are just a bunch of bastards that even believe that the Skaa are naturally inferior to them, intellectually and biologically: this references the determinist school of thought of the 19th century, which was mainly directed at people of color and, unfortunately – and enragingly so –, still persists nowadays.

The Final Empire’s narrative is loaded with symbolism related to social oppression. The city of Luthadel itself, for example, is stricken by a rain of ash, which makes even more apparent the injustice that lies at its foundations: in the same way that the ashes that stain its landscapes never stop falling from the sky, the power structures that bring down most of the population to subhuman conditions are reinforced by a power considered divine and unshakable. Only the Skaa live with the soot, whether in their homes, covering their streets or their own bodies, as the nobles are free from this plight by exploiting the Skaa themselves in an intermittent cleaning job.

The way in which the Lord Ruler keeps the population from rebelling every day is also curious as it finds an answer in the novel’s magic system. With so much oppression, injustice, and impunity, what pushes people to remain immersed in their own affairs instead of going out to the streets to fight for change? Sanderson bets on a parallel with the media’s capacity to manipulate emotions, disguising this criticism inside the internal logic of this fantastical world.

The Final Empire presents a well-developed magic system, but the narrative tries too hard to make it absolutely transparent for the reader, relying on those classic training scenes in which the reader learns together with the protagonist how everything works. Here, magic is the ability to manipulate metals, which, when consumed by an individual with a specific predisposition – the so-called allomancers – gives them some exceptional characteristic, such as greater resistance or the possibility of manipulating the emotions of others. Normally, a person can “burn” only one type of metal, but a mistborn can use all of them.

A symbolic problem of this magic system, however, is that it is hereditary and tied to a noble lineage. In other words, as the revolution in The Final Empire only has a winning chance due to the use of this magic, this points out that the poor population is absolutely incapable of rebelling and winning by itself, needing the support of part of those who oppress it. It’s a cynical worldview that some characters in the book, like a certain nobleman, openly assume at various moments. Now, a very serious and inexcusable consequence is the resulting distinction between the nobility and the Skaa. As already pointed out, the novel references a certain deterministic logic, with nobles believing that Skaa are naturally inferior to them. Although the overall narrative tries to show that this is wrong and that they are all the same, this magic system practically throws everything out of the window: since only those of noble blood can become an allomancer, the aristocracy really becomes more powerful than the Skaa. Magic, therefore, justifies the deterministic ideology of the nobles, establishing a hierarchy of biological power between them: that is something reprehensible not only from a social point of view in its symbolism, but also from a narrative standpoint as it goes into direct conflict with the overall message of the novel. If later books deconstruct this need for a noble lineage for the use of magic, this doesn’t change the fact that this should have been done here, where the question is already relevant.

A problem with allomancy that slips into the prose is Sanderson’s insistence on using its own limited terminology when he could very well use synonyms to make the reading more fluid. The central point of combat involves the characters’ ability to “push” and “pull” metals, usually coins, using them as a direct form of attack or to propel themselves into a certain direction. Especially at the beginning, such as in the battle in chapter five, and probably to make the reader understand or get used to the terminology, the author hardly uses general verbs to describe the characters’ actions, such as “propel,” “throw,” or “launch,” or even expressions such as “he repeated the same move,” but instead confines himself to using only “push” and “pull” to everything. This makes the narrative tiresome and is something, in the end, unnecessary: the more precise terms could have been used only to refer to key actions, or to those that could have been interpreted ambiguously, and readers would have still understood very well whether the other actions were to “push” or “pull” the metals without any difficulty.

Sanderson’s prose, then, is problematic not because it is unsophisticated, but because it is also repetitive on several levels. There is the tiresome repetition of the terminology, but also of adverbs, such as “Apparently”, and of information, which is constantly hammered home. There is, therefore, a difference between being direct and being condescending, and the profusion of explanations and exposition in the narrative, besides being boring, tends to the second group.

When it comes to repetition, The Final Empire also makes apparent the use of a certain formula by Sanderson. In Elantris, for example, there is a meeting between a bunch of men and only one woman that gets nowhere until the woman finally intervenes, showing how fundamental she is to the group. If the repetition of a certain scene between books is not a problem, the repetition occurring within the same novel is another story: here, this exact “meeting scene” occurs not once, but twice.

In terms of structure, it’s also possible to argue that the book would have been more efficient if it had followed only Vin’s point of view, instead of also offering that of Kelsier, a nobleman and, in some random cases, also of smaller characters. The absence of Kelsier’s point of view, with the exception of his participation in the prologue, for example, would have done wonders for the narrative: there would not have been an artificial evasion of his thoughts to avoid spoiling plot twists and this would also make the character more intangible and mysterious, which would contribute to the construction of his special aura, besides avoiding some redundancies with him and Vin discovering the same things.

Serving as a microcosm of the problem there is the moment, right at the beginning, when Kelsier visits Vin’s hideout. The chapter is following her point of view, which sees Kelsier as a potentially dangerous figure. However, as the reader was already following the character, his intentions in the scene, especially if they are friendly or not, are already known, which distances the reader precisely from the point of view they are supposed to be following. In other words, following Kelsier eliminates the suspense of the scene and brings the reader closer to a secondary character to the detriment of the story’s protagonist. It would be possible to counter-argument that Kelsier’s point of view is fundamental to the story because the character himself is fundamental to the story, but this is a fallacy: otherwise, there would never be the figure of a “witness narrator” like Watson in Sherlock Holmes or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Moreover, it is Kelsier’s actions that most reveal his personality and they are sufficiently witnessed and understood by Vin.

Finally, there is the question of some events in the climax, especially in chapter thirty-seven, appealing to coincidences that practically assume the role of a deus ex machina (spoilers to the end of the paragraph): Elend’s group coming across Vin, by itself is forgivable because it has dramatic value, but this happening in the same room that the protagonist’s clothes are being carelessly guarded is to push the happy coincidences a bit too far.

Mistborn: The Final Empire presents a fascinating world and a cast of characters that is full of potential. It’s a pity, then, to attest that the narrative is so marred by repetition and some conflicting symbolisms.

September 24, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on November 04, 2017.