The Mad Professah Lectures: BOOK REVIEW: The Night Angel Trilogy by BRENT WEEKS

Thursday, September 20, 2012

BOOK REVIEW: The Night Angel Trilogy by BRENT WEEKS

One of the biggest fantasy authors of the last few years or so is Brent Weeks, who stunned the fanboy world with the debut of his Night Angel trilogy in 2008, when for three consecutive months a new book in the trilogy (The Way of Shadows, Shadow's Edge and Beyond the Shadows) was published. Pretty neat trick for a first-time novelist! I was made aware of these books after I was exposed to another fantasy phenom author, Brandon Sanderson, whose Mistborn series I read earlier this year.

The central character of the Night Angel trilogy is Kylar Stern, who starts life as an orphaned street ragamuffin named Azoth in Cenaria City. His only two friends in the world are Jarl and Doll Girl; they are all members of a group of street thieves called the Black Dragon guild. The head of the guild is Rat, who rapes Jarl and instead of raping Doll Girl, slashes her face so that her classically beautiful face is basically unrecognizable. Rat prepares to rape Azoth but Jarl gives him a number of coins that he has been saving for years and tells him to use them to become an apprentice to Durzo Blint, one of the most famous (and deadly) known assassins in Cenaria. Technically Durzo is known as a "wetboy" which is a hired killer who is also talented enough magically to insure that once he accepts a target it is only a question of when, not whether, that person will become a corpse in the near future.

The Night Angel trilogy is a large, sprawling tale populated by numerous characters that span the gamut from intensely (almost cartoonishly) evil to subtly balanced between doing evil or violent things for arguably reasonable rationales. There is no single character who is unquestionably "good."

Kylar and Azoth are the central characters of the entire series, especially in the first book. As the story develops in the second and third book other important characters are introduced, such as a female wetboy named Vi and the roles of Jarl and Doll Girl (we later learn her name is Elene) become more prominent.

Other important characters are the Gyres, Logan Gyre, who is the son of a Duke who becomes friends with Azoth in one of his impersonations, and Jenine Gyre, Logan's newlywed wife who is kidnapped on their wedding night.

Weeks does a very skilled job of keeping the action fast-paced and the plot developments surprising. These are books that once you start, they are hard to put down. Part of this is because of the multitude of characters and Weeks penchant for presenting the story from each of their points of view.

The books are not perfect. The writing is not complex and the large number of characters can become confusing and somewhat annoying, since some characters are more interesting or compelling than others. Another problematic feature of the series is the conclusion, which is somewhat overwrought. This is not unsurprising, because one would expect that the author would want to produce an end to the books to satisfy the reader who has been invested enough to persist through nearly 2,000 pages. However, the climax of the books ends up having basically every single main character converge on a certain battlefield, which strains credulity.

That being said, the series is definitely worth reading, and is at least as engrossing as Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series. The two series are somewhat similar, in that they both have intriguing systems of magic, complex central characters who are flawed and multi-layered and plots which involve huge stakes. These are all features of excellent fantasy books, which include the books in the Night Angel series.

Title: The Way of Shadows.

Author: Brent Weeks

Length: 688 pages.

Publisher: Orbit.

Published: October 1, 2008.

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.

IMAGERY: A-.

IMPACT: A-.

WRITING: A.

Title: Shadow's Edge.

Author: Brent Weeks