Book Review: The Burning God
Wrote this earlier, forgot to post
Book Review: The Burning God
-R.F. Kuang
As a general rule, there are three ways to do book trilogies.
You can tell a reasonably coherent story across three novels (The Lord of the Rings). You can tell a starter story to set the scene, followed by a coherent story across two novels (Island in the Sea of Time). Or you can switch the setting each time so you’re telling a three-part story that can be read as both a trilogy and a set of stand-alone books (Mistborn) The third is the most rewarding, if done properly, but it is astonishingly difficult to bring it off without the cracks starting to show. I am happy to report that Rebecca Kuang’s Poppy War series brings it off magnificently.
The Poppy War is patterned on the history of China over the past two hundred years. The first book – The Poppy War – is set in an analogue of Imperial China, as the creaking edifice of empire wilts and collapses under an onslaught of invaders and, far more dangerously, it’s own massive structural flaws. The second – The Dragon Republic – is set in the Warlord Era, with various military warlords struggling for power against the remnants of the old world and far more powerful and dangerous outsiders. Third, and finally, The Burning God is set in the Communist era, with analogues to the Long March (in which the communists escaped enemy pursuit by marching through very rough terrain to safety), the fall of the old order and the problems of actually fixing the country after the combination of war and outside interference.
As before, we follow the story through the eyes of Fang Runin – Rin – as she leads the war against the invaders and the old regime, led by one of her old classmates. Rin – who wields the power of the Phoenix, a god of fire and destruction – is no longer content to be a follower, but has now become a leader – a leader of a vast army of peasants and commoners who may not be as capable as their enemies, but have the numbers to drown the invaders in a sea of bodies. But as Rin comes to grips with the problems of leadership, and the issues resulting from a country bathed in war and blood, she encounters betrayals as well as enemy fanatics, allies who have their own agendas and enemies who aren’t all bad. She has her dazzling rises to power, then her fall to crushing lows, then rises to power once again. She is both a very likeable character and someone constantly teetering on the brink of total insanity.
This has been a part of her character for all three books, but now it comes into the open. On one hand, Rin simply can’t give up. She keeps struggling even when resistance is seemingly futile, not least because she has nowhere to go and no hope of safety. On the other, she isn’t remotely suited to be the leader of a country and rapidly becomes overwhelmed by the problems facing the ruined empire. She can’t trust anyone to do it for her, either. She has simply been betrayed too many times to count.
Perversely, this works in the book’s favour. Rin burns away many of the problems facing the empire, from the semi-divine founders of the old empire (who threaten to plunge the world back into chaos) to the deeply corrupt and self-obsessed nobility that made it impossible for the empire to heal itself. She appears, at least partly by accident, to embrace the doctrine of Kylo Ren – “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to” – and this is, at least in the book’s universe, a good idea. (It was much less so in The Last Jedi, or the real-life aftermath of Imperial China.) In the end, when it becomes clear that Rin herself has become the final threat to the empire, she deals with herself in an ending that is both fitting and deeply ambiguous. In some ways, Kuang manages to do what The Last Jedi could not and subvert our expectations in a manner that catches us by surprise, while being perfectly predictable in hindsight. In others, the ending seems a little unfair. But then, the world is never fair.
The book spares no effort in depicting the effects of a brutal grinding multisided war. It shows how people can become accustomed to occupation and the forcible reshaping of their society; it also shows how people can simply give up as resistance becomes futile, a double-edged sword for the occupiers because there may be no resistance, but there is also no energetic crop production. Famine becomes a very real threat even as the war seems to come to an end. Rather more strikingly, it shows how a seemingly more advanced society can overwhelm a lesser one, although it isn’t clear how deeply this took root before the invaders were thrown out.
On a more personal level, the book shows how far desperate soldiers are prepared to go for victory, from the aristocrats casually sentencing millions of peasants to death just to eradicate an uprising to the fighters embracing cannibalism just to stay alive one more day. Kuang spares us nothing, convincing us the war comes with a high price even though victory might be worth the cost. And yet victory brings more and more problems in its wake.
I have often said that the truly great books are the ones that combine pulpy elements (action and adventure) with literature, the great ideas that make you stop and think. The Poppy War trilogy joins a handful of others that rise to the very top and satisfy both the desire for a ripping good yarn and meaning. That it draws on Chinese elements – rather than Western – helps to give it a sense of freshness that many other works, such as Game of Thrones, lack; it also lacks the grimdark fatalism of many more modern works, the suggestion that – no matter what the characters do – the world will remain an awful place. Perhaps the one moment where this fails is in the ending, yet that very ambiguity gives it a punch other works simply can’t match.
If there is an underlying theme to the trilogy, it is that you cannot trust anyone to have your best interests in mind. (A sneaky rebuke of the CCP, perhaps?) The old rulers are monsters. The warlords are fighting for their personal power rather than the good of their provinces, let alone the empire as a whole. The outsiders are colonists, either directly (settlement) or indirectly (cultural reorganisation). Even the gods have their own agendas. A secondary theme is that rigid thinking and orthodoxy rarely cope well with the unexpected, from tutors who dismiss Rin because of her country roots to armies and leaders who cannot handle outside context problems such as superior foreign armies with superior weapons. This is more evident in the second book – where a superior tactician has to give way to an inferior because the inferior is his elder brother – but true of all three … and, of course, one of the reasons China had so many problems when it reencountered the outside world.
Overall, The Burning God is a good – indeed brilliant – end to The Poppy War trilogy. I highly recommend it.
