The Goblin Emperor

The Goblin Emperor is a steampunk novel that is primarily interested in its characters, relegating plot and action to the sidelines – and, in that sense, it’s a breath of fresh air. However, the book’s focus exacerbates its most glaring flaw: the characters are not complex enough to sustain the constant gaze directed towards them.

The narrative follows the ascension of a half-goblin to the throne of the Elflands, after a disaster kills the rest of his family. This half-goblin – which means he has dark skin – is called Maia. He is young and inexperienced. He has lived his whole life as a pariah, consciously forgotten by his father, the late Emperor, and being raised by an abusive mentor in a faraway piece of land.

The novel opens with a symbolic sentence: “Maia woke with his cousin’s cold fingers digging into his shoulder.” The protagonist is waking in more than the literal sense, having to deal with the fact that he cannot live isolated from everything anymore. Maia discovers that the royal family – his family – has perished in an airship accident. This means that he has the best claim to the throne now, and the cold of his cousin’s fingers wake him to the reality that he’s not yet ready to become an emperor, that the people will reject him because of his goblin nature, and that his future, although grand, will be far from a comfortable one.

His cousin, Setheris, believes Maia to be too naive and utterly unprepared to face the political machinations that await him in the Untheileneise court. Maia shares the sentiment, and it’s telling that one of his first reactions is to go to him, to Setheris – the same man who abused him for so long – to ask for help: Maia is caught unprepared, and, in desperate need of guidance, allows himself to forget his grievances to get things done. The narrative is entirely structured in this way: Maia must deal with a certain problem and his solution to it tells us a bit more about who he is.

And he has to deal with a lot of problems. The first is his appearance: Maia is a half-goblin, something that makes him have to work twice as hard to get the same respect any regular elf would get by default, in a clear metaphor to racism: “He knew that his dark hair and skin that he had inherited from his goblin mother would do him no favors in the Untheileneise Court.”

To make matters worse for him, Maia never dreamed of ruling one day – he had too many relatives with a better claim – and was never schooled to that end. Therefore, he really is totally unprepared for the usual demands of the job. Maia doesn’t know the political nuances of the decisions he has to make, the names of his most important subjects, or even what is happening in his own country. And he chastises himself for that: “The Chorazas asked him no questions, seemed to have no interest in his opinion or ideas. They know thou hast none, he thought scathingly.”

Maia is aware that his inexperience may cause the loss of lives and the ruin of others. The scope of the position he finds himself in overwhelms and terrifies him. As he rightly puts it at one point:

“He was emperor now. Factions and industry and compromises and the war against the barbarians in the north: they were all his responsibility, and if he made the wrong choice, hundreds of thousands of people might suffer. People might even die, and all because their emperor was too young and stupid to know how to save them.”

The sense that he’s being suffocated by his job is perfectly conveyed by the title he now has: “Serenity”. A title that, besides sounding profoundly ironic to Maia’s ears – being an emperor is everything but serene to him – is repeated so often that it transmits to the reader the protagonist’s own aversion to the word, as it starts to bother us as well.

Since political machinations are the cornerstone of the book, the emphasis is less on what the characters say, and more on how they say it: the tone, the expression, which words are used, which ones are stressed, which ones are not when they should have been, and, in a whimsical touch, how thee movement in their ears reveals some hidden intentions. However, as The Goblin Emperor’s story unfolds, the reader may start to understand that those nuances don’t really matter, since all characters end up being precisely who they first appeared to be.

Maia, for instance, is a kind ruler, who would rather ask what his subjects want instead of just use them to accomplish some political goal. He cares for the people who live in the margins of society, attending, for example, the funeral of those who died alongside his family but had no political importance whatsoever: the common workers. And he cares because he lived his whole life as the “other”, the one who is rejected, the living being that is discarded by those in power and is frowned upon when they decide to show any sign that they still exist. Now that he’s got power, though, Maia is not interested in any kind of revenge – the thought almost never even crosses his mind – focusing on becoming that actually wants to help those who need the most. For being different, he is finally someone who can bring change to the Elflands.

This is great, but also very straightforward. There is not a single problem that Maia has to deal with in which the best solution is not the kindest one: A Song of Ice and Fire this is not. Here, Maia is the utopian leader: a ruler whose kindness is what matters the most, being the trait that – always, in any kind of situation – produces the most desirable results.  The challenges of leadership are just reduced to the question “is Maia going to be a good person here as well?” and the answer to that question is always positive.

Maia suffers from some kind of Freudian complex in relation to his parents (deeply loves his mother, deeply hates his father), but that is as far as the narrative goes to paint him in complex shades. Ultimately, Maia doesn’t have any character flaw whatsoever. He really is utopian in this regard, which is a narrative problem when the narrative is structured to make the reader progressively find out more about him: Maia can be figured out in the first 50 pages and the rest is just repetition.

That wouldn’t be a huge problem in itself if the same could not be also said about every other single character in the book. Those who appear to be loyal are loyal, those who appear to be friendly are friendly, those who seem evil – surprise – are evil, and so on. For a book centered on politics, everything being precisely what it seems to be is not just odd but also shallow and naïve.

The book also fails to capitalize on its steampunk setting: besides the fact that Maia’s family died in an airship accident, the steampunk technology doesn’t affect the narrative in any way. The Goblin Emperor could very well be set in medieval times with little changes to its plot. This, however, can be considered part of a social critique, since Maia’s society, although advanced enough to have airships, is still buried in tradition: it’s a place, for example, where is still commonly believed that “a university education is felt to make a woman unfit to be a wife.”

The protagonist of The Goblin Emperor represents the best and worst parts of its narrative. On the one hand, he provides a utopian view on politics, giving voice to marginalized groups, but on the other, his binary view on politics is sanctioned by the narrative, providing a clear distinction between good and evil that ultimately rings hollow.

May 20, 2019.