Farilane by Michael J. Sullivan Book Review
This is the second installment in the third prequel series in the world of Riyria. Sullivan has a great talent in storytelling, but I am getting tired of this world (though books 3 of this series and book 5 of the prequel series following the original characters, I am looking forward to…). My problem with this book, and the one before it, is that I’m just not invested. We are following characters we have not fallen in love with in any of the other series. This series is a three set of standalone books too. So, other than following the bloodline of the emperor, we have no real through-line.
This series transcends several thousand years worth of time. And the first two books are relatively short, page count wise. We are literally following the rise, plateau, and fall of an empire that lasted millennia. In three books. In the original series, we got 6 books (combined in a way to be 3 books for all of us that picked up the series after it gained a following), that spanned a handful of years. The Legends books span over a decade, but again there are 6 books, and we focus on the major event of the war with the elves. Fairly straight forward. The Chronicles of the original series for Riyria are standalone books, but each one is very contained to a major adventure by Royce and Hadrian.
I am going to reiterate, Sullivan is a very talented writer. His stories are well put together and well paced. It’s just that this world, to me, is becoming a bit tired. I want to see him break out into new worlds. Explore new concepts. Stretch his writing abilities and storytelling in ways that will better show the growth of his craft.
Now to get to the specifics of this story. And yes, as always there will be spoilers. Especially since this is the middle story of a trilogy and an overarching set of stories to boot.
Farilane is a tragedy. Going into it, it isn’t immediately obvious. But the whole time I was reading it in the light of another plucky story, I felt that it was predictable and a bit contrived. Sullivan has done that for many of his other stories. But, at some point, I don’t know exactly when, I realized that this might not end in a happy way. It slowly gets more manic and darker as Farilane discovers more of her family’s history and who her quirky companions are.
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One of Sullivan’s greatest yet also most annoying writing abilities is how he can change the histories of the story. When one reads the original series, The Riyria Revelations, we get a whole religion laid out to us. It is spectacularly detailed without it being overbearing. Then we move to the Legends series, and while the reader can recognize aspects of the gods and goddesses from the original series, you quickly realize that the stories had been warped drastically from the beginning of time to when we meet Royce and Hadrian. We basically have to relearn the whole religion again. For those that love studying history, it is something they will recognize when studying how religions change as cultures evolve and change. It is superb. In Farilane, we see those metamorphoses taking shape into what we will see in the original series. But it is still very different from either version; basically its own religious sect all on its own. Again, masterfully done, but at the same time, I kept finding myself wanting to scream because I’m having to learn again a new religious system.
The tragic ending changes the whole tone of the book and the series. It puts Malcolm in a light that makes him more grey than we saw him before. We know he is atoning for his unspeakable sin, but in the Legends books, we get the sense of his fighting for the human race. In this book, we realize that doesn’t mean every human gets to be a winner. The Dune series explores this well, especially in God Emperor. The Atreides (Paul then later his son, Leto) must make the sacrifice of billions of humans to save the human race from not only itself but from some mysterious outside force. It makes what should be the hero’s journey into something far more complex and philosophical. Sullivan is not writing on quite the level Herbert was writing on at his peak, but we get a parallel between these two stories.
My biggest problem with this book is that there was no need for it. I am just not that invested in knowing every little detail of the world. Having so much mystery to it was what made it compelling. It is the problem the Star Wars universe is having, in part. We are running out of story that people want and need to know, so we are getting the other stories that just aren’t that interesting and don’t change any revelations that we received in the earlier books. For me it made much of the story boring. I just didn’t care about what happened to Farilane or any of them.
A more minor problem with the book is that we are only ever in Farilane’s head. And she is smarter than everyone else around her, or so she thinks. It makes it seem like, for much of the story, that her family has completely lost the thread of ruling. That they are basically weak, stupid rulers. Malcolm even encourages that thinking, even after we get hints that these emperors and soon to be emperors are actually making good decisions, it is just the times are so good that they will be largely forgotten to history since little of note ever happened during their rule. That doesn’t make a bad ruler, just maybe a lazy one. It would have been nice if we got out of Farilane’s head and got some of the other perspectives of those around her.
My final minor gripe is the number of named characters that are two dimensional and barely there. It makes sense why Sullivan did this. Farilane is part elf. She is two hundred years old. She has seen so many humans be born then die in her life that most of them are paper cutouts. Similar to how we see our pets. A dog that is going to be a huge part of our lives but only for a decade or two, then replaced by another one. But that is putting the devotion and intelligence of the Teshlors and scholars and other humans on the same level as a dog. When in reality, Farilane and the other elves aren’t actually that much smarter, if not slightly below their human counterparts in intelligence, than the humans they are dealing with. The human magicians for instance are often one step ahead of their lords in information if not also preparations for actions that need to be taken.
By the time I finished this book, I was well into a, what is now, months long reading slump. I think it was in part due to this book. I just never got enveloped into this story. It is not that it is badly written. Nor that it subverted expectations. It is just getting to be a tired series. That said, I am looking forward to the next book in this series along with the next book in the Riyria Chronicles. Those stories are the stories we were teased from the original books.
I do hope that Sullivan is going to break away from this world and create new ones. I so want to see where he can take us and show us how much he has improved as an author. His time traveling mystery book, Hollow World, was a breath of fresh air. I know he can do that again.
