The Well of Ascension

The review contains spoilers for the first book, The Final Empire.

The second volume of its trilogy, The Well of Ascension is a much more flawed book than its predecessor. Still repetitive and occasionally inconsistent, the novel is also full of genre tropes and problematic characterization, and even the titular MacGuffin is not used well, feeling much more like an afterthought than a force or goal that drives the characters.

The story begins months after the climax of the previous volume: the Skaa are now free workers, Elend Venture is king, and Kelsier’s troupe has become his advisors, but the city of Luthadel is besieged by enemy armies, with the main one being led by Elend’s own father, Straff Venture. Meanwhile, Vin, who is dating the king, needs to investigate the rumors about strange figures lurking in the mists while worrying about a mysterious creep who likes to watch her from a distance.

Vin, despite being the previous protagonist, here remains in the background until the climax of the book. Elend is the one who takes up her old narrative position, being here the character that needs to make the most difficult choices, realizing that his unrestrained honesty may lead to ineffective political decisions. His character arc is a simple one: the tests to which the young king is submitted serve to tempt him to review his ideals, pushing him to believe that sometimes treacherous, violent, or even authoritarian attitudes can produce better results than dialogue and understanding.

Elend, therefore, tries to remain steadfast in his convictions, accepting the negative consequences of his choices by believing that the nature of one’s actions means more than the results they produce. Elend has a democratic spirit: he is not content with liberating the Skaa but insists that it is also fundamental to give them political power. One of his first accomplishments as a king, then, is the creation of a parliament, putting the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the people on a theoretically equal foot.

Two elements, however, complicate his government. First, there’s the fact that the interests of powerful businessmen and the upper class generally coincide, making the dispute often unequal for the common people. Second, the three groups don’t always know what they are doing: whether motivated by greed or fear, the members of the Elend’s Assembly show the irresponsible habit of caring solely for what’s happening at that precise moment, failing to visualize the long-term consequences of their choices or – in the case of the nobility and the merchants – not caring much about them because they know that the poor will be the ones getting the short end of the stick.

The king’s internal struggle, therefore, becomes clear: does he need to respect the decision of the parliament when he believes it to be unjust or even suicidal…or can he enforce his policies in these cases? Elend believes that upholding the parliament’s decision, whatever it may be, is the key to a democratic government. He believes that if he fails to do that, he will put not only his moral integrity but also the entire political system of his kingdom at risk. The character is often described as a “good man” and this goodness is demonstrated both by his incorruptibility and by the fact that his ideals are based on a democratic principle: Elend is “good”  because he tries to diminish inequality by handing power over to those who suffer directly from it, while rejecting any movement that ignores or denies that power.

This is, of course, an interesting political discussion, but it’s also one that Sanderson maintains at a superficial level throughout the whole novel. As usual with the author, the narrative is marked by repetition, which is reflected in Elend’s arc: the character faces a situation where the easiest way out is the authoritarian one, but refuses to go that route, which generates bad consequences for himself and his kingdom. His next problem, then, is the same as the previous one in essence, and Elend makes the same virtuous choice, facing similar results. Rinse and repeat. There is nothing wrong with a character not changing, especially when this is part of the logic behind their development, but the amount of scenes in The Well of Ascension with this same narrative purpose is considerable, which can end up making the narrative tiresome.

However, and this makes matters far worse, at the end of the book (general spoilers about the end of Elend’s character arc in this paragraph) Elend actually changes, but this change is sudden and ends up betraying the character at the last moment. It happens with a single line of dialogue, but it’s enough to throw all the development made until then completely out of the window: Elend suddenly acts like he doesn’t understand that making an ideological concession – even if a small one – marks the beginning of the collapse of his democratic system. When trying to close Elend’s arc with a kind of character growth, Sanderson actually makes the character go against the symbolism behind his previous posture: his insistence on his values has always been an act of resistance and protection, and not mere stubbornness. Therefore, the sentence uttered by Elend at the end contradicts everything that has happened so far, and this ending is not tragic, but deeply flawed, because, as the book ends soon after it, it doesn’t get a chance to be developed: the narrative doesn’t seem to acknowledge the tragedy of what has just happened.

Vin doesn’t fare better. In most of the book, her drama involves a poorly developed love triangle that leads her to believe that her choice between two men will define her identity. In her mind she has two choices: she can either stay with the man who watches her from the shadows, called Zane, and so become the warrior she thinks she needs to be, or stay with Elend, who she loves, and be drowned in political intrigue for the rest of her life. That is, regardless of who she eventually chooses to be with, these two options have her identity linked to her husband.

It’s symptomatic that, at the beginning, the character continuously tries to mold herself to better serve Elend: when Vin tries to suffocate her personality because she believes that Elend deserves a “normal” woman or one “better” than her, or when she tries to change the way she looks, like keeping her hair long simply because he likes it that way, even though that makes her uncomfortable – as it means a disadvantage in battle and Vin is a warrior at heart – Vin is submitting herself to a man. The opposite, however, never happens: when Elend changes his posture in the book, becoming more alert and less sloppy, he’s thinking primarily about the opinion of his people and not Vin’s. She even believes that a “better” woman for Elend is precisely a more submissive woman: she rejects the very characteristics that make her a strong character, associating them with the masculine. For Vin, the man is the one who protects, not the woman, and Elend deserves someone who conforms to this sexist gender ideology: “But, doesn’t he deserve a woman that he feels he can protect? A woman who’s more like . . . a woman?” she thinks). Elend, of course, also begins to refer to Vin with terms that basically objectify her: she is called a “resource”, a “tool”, a “weapon”, and especially a “knife”.

It doesn’t help that Vin’s other suitor, Zane, is insane, a man who literally hears voices in his head, and is also a badly developed character. In short, the warrior Zane is far from being one of Sanderson’s best creations. Narratively, he works only as a tool to create the love triangle – which is basically Vin’s only internal struggle for much of the book –, influencing few other characters. His personality is eccentric, but nevertheless little explored: although the voices he hears have some importance, they only function as dark humor for most of the time. Meanwhile, elements such as self-harm and a feeling of social exclusion are thrown into the narrative just to shock the reader, being discarded soon after. His dialogues also make him sound like a broken record: he approaches Vin, says that Elend is only using her to his advantage and that, if she decides to be with him instead, she won’t have to give up her freedom, and then he repeats everything when he finds her again and then says it again in their next scene together, and then again and again and again and… when the reader has access to his point of view, he starts not only to say these things but also to think about them again, ad aeternum. Zane is an exaggerated, tiresome character, whose only redeeming quality is the fact that he seems to be the only one in that world capable of manipulating people and forming strategies.

After all, for most characters in the novel – from villains to heroes – the solution to all problems always seems to be a show of strength. The greatest representative of this line of thought is Elend’s father, Straff Venture, who could have been compared to Tywin Lannister of A Song of Ice and Fire if Tywin Lannister was asinine. Straff thinks that his problems can only be solved through intimidation or a display of power – and he even sounds desperate when trying to do those things: to impress Zane, for instance, the character even drinks a tea that he knows to be poisoned, which leads him to quickly run to an antidote when Zane leaves his presence. The problem is that such action shows exactly the opposite of what Straff intends: if someone needs to reach this point to impose themselves, they have already lost the battle. The narrative, however, continues to treat his actions as great ones, despite the absurdity of everything: he is seen with respect and fear by Kelsier’s troupe and is still considered an effective commander by those around him.

Straff, however, is not the only character like that in the novel. The other two kings who appear in the story also seem to use only force – one of them tries a single political maneuver to seize power but that’s it – while the heroes themselves think the same way, often believing that the situation is lost because their power is, in theory, smaller than that of their opponents. In the same vein, the eventual solution for a good part of their problems doesn’t come from intelligent strategies and a lot of preparation, but from one of the characters revealing to be a weapon of mass destruction. For a book focused on political conflict, there is extraordinarily little intelligence and manipulation involved in the proceedings. This ends up reflected negatively in the siege that occurs in the climax, since it consists not of unexpected moves and countermoves, but only of more displays of power from both sides.

Another problem of The Well of Ascension is the fact that its heroes react more than act during the middle part of the book. After some armies form an impasse in front of Luthadel, the main characters keep trying to solve the problems others create for them, rarely taking the initiative to create obstacles for their opponents themselves. This inevitably affects the pace of the story: if it begins more agile than The Final Empire, it unfortunately comes to a halt during the second act, in which events serve more to postpone the climax of the book than to move the narrative to it.

It doesn’t help either that some events are of highly questionable relevance: (general spoilers in this paragraph) what’s the point of discovering how a certain king controls his army of monsters, for example, if the information is not used by anyone? Similarly, why do we have to accompany the ins and outs of a political maneuver of another king when he enters Luthadel, if, in the end, he will leave the city and his army will return to almost the same position as before? It’s a lot of pages for little change in the story.

Sanderson, of course, continues to write tiresome prose, repeating information often: in the second paragraph of the novel, Vin thinks that the killers she sighted were probably sent to kill Elend and not her, and then, a few paragraphs later, she thinks that the killers she sighted were probably sent to kill Elend and not her: “If she had just arrived with an army to conquer Luthadel, the first thing she’d have done was send in a group of Allomancers to kill Elend,”  x “Nobody sent assassins to kill bodyguards. Assassins killed important men. Men like Elend Venture.” Some points of view are also redundant. Why insert Straff’s perspective at the beginning, revealing that his Allomancers are his children, if later the same information will be conveyed by Zane to Vin? Likewise, why should the reader learn Straff’s plan in Part IV by Clover if soon after Breeze will repeat the exact same information?

There are only two plotlines in The Well of Ascension that are good. The first is Vin’s relationship with a Kandra (basically the shapeshifter of that universe): initially rejecting the creature for its monstrous nature, the character starts to perceive her hypocrisy for treating it badly and so tries to modify her way of acting towards it, which leads to unexpected results. The other is the development of Sazed, who begins to be questioned on several levels: his political activism is condemned by his compatriots, the usefulness of his teachings is misunderstood by the people, and the function of all the religions he tries to teach to others is questioned due to the absence of immediate practical effects – something that, in the end, he himself begins to question due to some personal tragedies.

In relation to shapeshifters, however, the author inserts a The Thing kind of plotline, with the heroes realizing that there is a monster in their midst that can assume the form of any person. The problem is that Sanderson uses the conventions of the detective/mystery genre, making any reader accustomed to this type of story realize who is the culprit right away: the strategy is always to discard who the investigator obviously suspects and instead pay attention to who they ignoring. And to make matters worse, this plotline is almost a distraction to Vin, who has to constantly remind herself that there is a traitor in her group and that she needs to do something about it: “She couldn’t ignore it any longer,” the narrator states… for the second time in the book.

Similarly, regarding the Well of Ascension itself, it is a place that Vin believes to be important, but she does not actively strive to discover its location right until near the end of the book. She indeed has other, more urgent priorities, but this makes the titular well a distraction, a kind of inconvenient responsibility that is often postponed by the character. The twists and turns involving the place also fail to have an impact because, despite subverting certain elements, they produce relevant consequences only for the last volume of the trilogy, having almost nothing to do with the whole political plot of this book. Despite being in the title, The Well of Ascension feels just like a hook for the next novel.

Finally, Sanderson also embraces several genre tropes, suggesting that a character is the “chosen one” for the most part of the novel, inserting a tiresome love triangle, and even making a villain tell their whole plan in a terrible monologue in the style of  “I can’t believe that I did this evil thing in secret I that would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your damn kandra dog.”

The Well of Ascension is not a good follow-up to The Final Empire, which was already a book with its good share of problems. With an incredibly repetitive narrative and a bunch of problematic characters, the novel, although ambitious, fails at almost every front.

October 24, 2020

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 08, 2017.