Chain of Iron by Cassandra Clare is the perfect sequel to Chain of Gold

This review contains spoilers!

I have a confession to make about Chain of Iron: I was prepared to be thoroughly disappointed by this novel. Cassandra Clare has over 20 published books in The Shadowhunter Chronicles series, and it’s hard to expect all of them to be as great as Chain of Gold. With her teasing yet more love triangles, necromantic attempts and visits to hellish dimensions, things could start to feel redundant. I felt that I had to lower my expectations for Chain of Iron, the second installment of her The Last Hours trilogy.

And yet, as someone who has been a fan of these books for over a decade, Chain of Iron turned out to be nearly everything I needed it to be.

The Writing Keeps Getting Better and Better

The perfect sequel to Chain of Gold, this book escapes the middle novel curse that some of her other trilogies fell victim to. Clare has clearly learned from previous blunders. One of the major criticisms readers had of her previous series, The Dark Artifices, was that the author went overboard with the number of narrator characters in an attempt to give multiple perspectives on the story. The narrative was labyrinthine, with too many fragmented storylines.

But here, Clare makes a point to limit the narration to three protagonists (Cordelia, Lucie and James) and only give other characters (Thomas, Ariadne, Anna, Grace, Christopher) a couple of chances to give their points of view when the plot calls for it. This allows the story to retain an aura of mystery, which is crucial, since it involves our heroes looking for a serial killer in their midst.

It almost feels like the real protagonist of this book is Miscommunication. So many issues could be solved in the span of one single sincere conversation that all characters categorically refuse to have. Other guest stars include Omission, Interruption and Misinterpretation. Missed opportunities and things that stay unsaid provide the real conflict of this book, perhaps even more than the larger-than-life villains, biblical demons Belial and Lilith.

One thing I can’t praise Clare enough for is the amount of research she undertakes before starting a new series. The setting, social conventions and language in all her period dramas are always historically accurate to a fault. Chain of Iron feels like a time machine back to the Edwardian era, and is guaranteed to satisfy history lovers.

The book is also full of overt literary references, and not just in direct quotations and chapter titles. Librophiles will recognize parallels to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, as well as to Jane Austen’s Emma or Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The tone of the book is often poetic, with each word always carefully loaded with meaning.

The Character Development in Chain of Iron Is Amazing

In terms of character development, Chain of Iron has a lot going on. The characters hardly ever stay put: some are evolving, some are regressing, some are just spinning and rolling sideways, but they’re all moving towards something, towards somewhere.

We see our heroes go through many trials and tribulations in this one, we follow them as they run headfirst towards danger and blunder as only teenage Shadowhunters can. We watch enraptured as each of the protagonists struggles to keep afloat in an ocean of secrets on which they’ve set themselves adrift. It’s incredible how, with all the love they share, none of them are ever fully honest with each other.

Little Lucie Herondale painfully reminds us of her young age every step of the way. I could argue that she is the only character who doesn’t get any positive development in this novel. She’s the only one hiding a secret that she shouldn’t be keeping in the first place. The way she’s been sheltered all her life leads her to make reckless and irresponsible decisions. Her sin is that, as a writer, she transposes her god-like powers of decision-making while creating stories to her actual life, appointing herself judge, jury and executioner as if she were playing with dolls. I believe Clare chose to pay homage to Jane Austen by making Lucie blunder in the same exact way as Emma Woodhouse. I just hope her conclusion is as happy as Emma’s, even though the consequences of Lucie’s actions will surely be much more dire.

Cordelia Carstairs is by far my favorite of the narrator characters. She and Lucie are polar opposites, because as Lucie regresses, Cordelia reaches a new level of emotional maturity in this book: in the way she takes in her father’s death, in the way she handles her (fake-but-on-its-way-to-becoming-real) marriage, in the way she faces every other problem coming her way. Every character is suffering or hiding feelings, but Cordelia deals and is a functioning adult despite the pain.

However, she does act rashly when Wayland the Smith proposes she become his paladin, hastily accepting in her desperate quest to matter, to become a legendary hero, which we know has been her drive since the beginning.

James Morgan Henry Herondale (so happy to finally know his full name!) undergoes a significant metamorphosis, as he is freed from the spell that enslaved his emotions for years. The rose-tinted Grace-shaped glasses come off, and we finally see a side of him we had only glimpsed before. As the bracelet’s spell weakens, that cold curtain separating him from the world gradually drops, and James is finally allowed to show his true colors and proves to be the perfect blend of his parents’ personalities. It warmed my heart to see how caring and attentive James was to Daisy, the way he devoted himself to being the ideal husband even in a marriage blanc, how he designed the perfect house, surprised her by learning some Farsi on his own, and how he never failed to spot Cordelia’s every need.

I think his final confrontation scene with Grace Blackthorn was handled wonderfully, with James maintaining a clear head despite his justified anger, and I was immensely glad to see him finally openly address his parabatai’s self-destructive behavior.

Speaking of the devil, Matthew Fairchild represents arguably some of the most well-crafted character work Clare has ever done. He has so many layers and resonates so well with the audience because he is flawed and scarred and wears his heart on his sleeve. It is a truth universally acknowledged that he’s the most beloved character in The Last Hours, more than a sidekick but not quite a protagonist. I’m not exactly clear why Clare denied us of his POV in Chain of Iron, especially as we already knew what his terrible secret was. Regardless, he has proved for two books he doesn’t need to be a narrator to be the most well-rounded character.

Despite being the character who’s in the worst shape emotionally, Matthew is on his best behavior in Chain of Iron, and earned many gold stars by always doing what was right. I admired his selflessness in not acting on his feelings, but more on that later. Matthew is actively sabotaging himself, but he still tries to crack a joke and help others in the meantime. By the end of the book, even if for the wrong reasons, he is finally on a journey towards self-acceptance which will hopefully end with him being happy and healthy rather than exiled or dead, as most of us fear and as plenty of hints foreshadow.

I could talk for hours about the massive cast of characters and their growth: how Thomas and Alastair finally take the leap to confess their feelings for each other and act on them in the oddest of places, only for Alastair to take three steps back at the end, ironically for similar reasons that led him to break up with Charles, namely pride, bad impressions and reputation. How Christopher became more self-confident and assertive, how Grace became almost remorseful about what she did to James (but even the flashbacks of her not-so-sweet life don’t excuse her repeated choice to stay and do her mother’s evil bidding). How Anna and Ariadne will always be in love but Anna has lost all faith in love and Ari needs to earn her trust back… deep down they might want the same thing, but they still seem very far apart at the end of the book.

Room For Interpretation, Food For Thought…

Clare pays a ton of attention to subtle changes in interpersonal relationships in this book; it’s one of the things she does best. Above all else, she is ever a connoisseur of the human heart. I could do nothing but weep — sometimes in joy, sometimes in pain — as I witnessed all the slow and the sudden transitions in the various character dynamics.

I want to make note on two in particular, because I think the author is loading the chapters with lots of subtext that might not be immediately evident to every reader. I like to believe Clare is not endorsing Lucie’s behavior, but that she is purposely presenting it as childish and morally grey. I could tell as early as Chain of Gold that Lucie’s infatuation with Jesse Blackthorn was a bit sudden, almost forced. At the end of the day, even after they profess love in this book, it still feels like Jesse and Lucie have no real chemistry or reason to be together, other than the cheap fact that she’s the only girl who can see him, apart from his mother and sister.

For the first time in her books, Clare here had to resort to telling us about a main character’s feelings, instead of simply showing us. I believe this to be a deliberate choice on her part: in my opinion, she is showing us that Lucie is interested in Jesse because he represents a forbidden adventure, one that she may read about in a novel — one that she is, in fact, writing about in her novel, with her as the main character. Clare is tempting Lucie with the one thing she can’t resist. In the first book, Lucie lamented not having enough adventure, whether rebellious or romantic. In this book, she is literally creating that for herself. Ultimately, there’s no way she and Jesse can legally be together after all the necromancy involved to bring him back. I hope Lucie wises up somewhere in Chain of Thorns, or she will be the one to be exiled and stripped of her marks.

Clare is not an intrusive narrator, so she can’t explicitly let us know what she thinks of her characters’ choices. But I believe she is giving us a clue about her opinion of Lucie’s obsession with Jesse when Lucie herself points out that it’s driving her away from Cordelia, who should always come first. I have no doubt at this point that the two girls will never become parabatai, and it will probably be because of Lucie repeatedly choosing “her dead boyfriend”, in the author’s own words, over everyone else.

Shifting gears, Lucie seemed to have understood that Matthew’s romantic feelings have shifted away from her, and she’s constantly calling attention to herself and engaging Matthew to get it back. I confess I ran a weird experiment when reading Chain of Iron for the first time: I wanted to prove a negative, that Matthew isn’t really in love with Cordelia (why else not give him a POV?), so I decided to chase Matthew’s attention to its primary source, his parabatai. I read the book through the lens of Matthew being in love with James instead of Cordelia, and I promise that everything worked just fine until the last chapter where he confesses to Daisy. Every single thing Matthew said or did still made perfect sense without him catching feelings for Cordelia. This is another thing I believe Clare is subtly communicating to us: does Matthew have genuine feelings for his parabatai’s wife (which would sound a little too familiar to readers of Clare’s works) or is he just convincing himself that he is? In the words of Anna Lightwood, “Matthew prefers a hopeless love,” he always, always fancies himself in love with people he can’t have, pursuing the unattainable as part of his masochistic drive to punish himself, to deny himself the opportunity for a happiness he believes he doesn’t deserve.

Matthew’s feelings (whether true or false) could have been erased from the story altogether and the book would have been better for it. Regardless, Clare made the right choice to avoid writing yet another love triangle between parabatai (despite teasing it repeatedly on social media to set up conflict). Ultimately, a love triangle only has reason to be if the third person’s feelings are reciprocated, and I was immensely glad to receive the canonic confirmation that Cordelia could never love Matthew romantically. The genuine, disinterested friendship they have built on trust is one of the highlights of the book. You could argue that the dynamics between Cordelia, the Merry Thieves and Lucie are the driving force of the entire series.

The Murder Mystery Kept Me Guessing Until the End

Clare’s novels might be character-driven, but that doesn’t mean the plot isn’t intriguing; indeed, this one can be a total brainteaser. Chain of Iron is a real murder mystery, and it kept me to the edge of my seat as I tried to figure out who the killer was, what was their motive, and who sent them. While it wasn’t hard to imagine that Belial and Tatiana were behind most of the crimes, I proudly admit I had guessed the plot twist of Lilith making an appearance in this novel. However, that’s only because I had spent an obsessive amount of time theorizing, not because the book itself was predictable; it was anything but. The plot still took me by surprise when it came to so many little things and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

The emotional cliffhanger at the end was the hardest blow of all. Our four main characters are all asked to make a choice, one that upsets the balance of things, and only one of them makes the selfless choice. Lucie has officially chosen Jesse over her family, Cordelia and Matthew have decided to leave London to escape the pain of memories and rejection, while James, even hellbent as he is on making things right with Cordelia, decides he needs to save his sister from doing something very dangerous and very illegal before he fixes the happiness of his marriage.

Chain of Iron did a number on me, and I’m sure it will on the fandom. I can’t wait to see how Cassandra Clare plans to unravel the various knots in Chain of Thorns, and I wish we could hold on to these characters a little while longer than just another final novel. For now, The Last Hours is looking to position itself at the same level as its — previously unmatched — parent series The Infernal Devices, blunders and all.

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