A first-time Brandon Sanderson reader reviews Mistborn: The Final Empire

Brandon Sanderson has been writing sci-fi and fantasy books for decades, and his profile has only risen in recent years. He famously finished writing The Wheel of Time series after the death of original author Robert Jordan and has authored several successful fantasy series of his own, including The Stormlight Archive and The Reckoners. He's getting unhinged profiles written about him in major publications and setting records on Kickstarter. It's only a matter of time before some studio decides to adapt his books for movies or TV.

Perhaps the first of his works to appear onscreen will be Mistborn, a series set in a fantasy world where ash is always falling from the sky and eerie mists curl around to keep the population indoors at night. I'd never read any of Sanderson's books and heard that Mistborn was a good place to start. So I picked up the first book in the series, The Final Empire, and tried to discover the truth behind the hype. Overall, I enjoyed myself. Here's why:

What is Mistborn about?

The Final Empire, published in 2006, introduces us to Vin, a teenaged thief who runs with a gang of criminals in the city of Luthadel, the central hub in a vast empire presided over by the Lord Ruler, an immortal tyrant treated as a god by his subjects. Vin has been hurt by a lot of the people in her life, including her mother and brother. She is traumatized, has little to no self-confidence, and is mistrustful or everyone she meets.

She also, as it happens, has magical powers. In the Mistborn series, some people are Allomancers who possess an array of abilities tied to which metals they ingest. If they swallow a sliver of a certain metal, for example, they are able to Push or Pull on metal objects, which when used properly gives them to the ability to fling around small bits of scrap like Magneto or fly through the air like Spider-Man. Ingesting another metal gives them to power to either soothe someone's emotions, making them calmer and more pliant, or whip people into a frenzy, making them angry.

The book details several of these metal-based powers. Most Allomancers can only do one thing, e.g. some can Push on metal objects and others can sooth emotions, but they can't do both. Vin is a Mistborn, one of the rare individuals who can use all of these powers, which comes as a complete surprise to her. She finds herself drafted into a plot to kill the Lord Ruler and bring down the Final Empire, the dream project of another Mistborn named Kelsier. Will they succeed? Better read just one more chapter to find out.

Pros and cons of Mistborn: The Final Empire

The best thing about The Final Empire is the page-turning plot, which Sanderson deals out in precisely portioned chunks. There's always another twist around the corner. After Vin discovers she's a Mistborn, she has to learn to use her powers, and Sanderson has fun playing with his invented physics system. Right when things start to flag, Vin and Kelsier make a daring raid into the Lord Ruler's inner sanctum. Not long after, the army Kelsier and his crew have been gathering gets into a fateful clash.

And then there's the exciting final stretch, where the Lord Ruler shows up in person and we frantically turn the pages hoping to find answers to the questions the novel has been teasing since word one. What is the secret of the Lord Ruler's immortality? What's the deal with the creepy Inquisitors, the Lord Ruler's super-strong lieutenants who have spikes jammed through their eyes? I wanted to know, and it kept me reading. And Sanderson cuts all of this with a subplot where Vin the street urchin has to don a fancy dress and infiltrate the ranks of the nobility, adding a dash of Pride & Prejudice to this fantasy retelling of Les Misérables. It all works well together. The Final Empire is excellently paced.

What it's lacking, at least from my perspective, is depth. My questions, if they're answered at all, are answered in pretty perfunctory ways. The Inquisitors are dealt with quickly and the Lord Ruler ends up being a bit of a whiny edgelord. And there are lots of questions — about the mists, about the ashfalls — that are left completely open. For a while I admired that Sanderson left these elements unexplained — they felt a little like the long, unpredictable seasons in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, an element of the world we just accept without needing an explanation — but after the book's epilogue, where the characters ostentatiously ask each other about the world's deeper mysteries, I got the feeling that Sanderson was leaving them open on purpose so we would buy the next book. Sanderson has a reputation as a good writer, but he may be even more talented as a businessman, someone who's taken a made-up fantasy multiverse and turned it into his own final empire. The ending laid that fact a little too bare for my liking.

My interest is still teased, though; I've already bought the sequel book, The Well of Ascension. But I'd rather have bought it because I want to see what the characters do next, not because I want answers to these mythological questions.

Review: Mistborn: The Final Empire

The characters in The Final Empire are likable, but again, I wanted more depth from them. Most of the supporting players are reduceable to one or two characteristics — the affable bruiser, the snobby merchant, the wise counselor, etc. — with only Vin and Kelsier getting much in the way of a character arc. And there's still something shallow about them. When they were put in mortal peril, I raised an eyebrow, but I wasn't emotionally moved.

The Final Empire is a brisk, pleasant read that wants to remain accessible and not upset people, which seems a little odd for a book that builds to a massive slave revolt. The setting most resembles Renaissance-era Europe, but the dialogue is up-to-the-minute quip-speak that recalls the work of Joss Whedon. ("Uh, Spook," Vin says at one point to a character with a heavy accent, "Could you try to speak...normal?") Kelsier's orations about the value of friendship struck me as a bit simple for the room. And of course, readers can rest assured that no one is having sex. The book is unfailingly chaste.

The Final Empire is firmly rooted in the American tradition of storytelling that's happy to pile on extreme violence — buckets of blood are spilled, the Inquisitors brutally torture people, at one point Sanderson describes the results of a genital mutilation, etc. — but deeply squeamish about anything sexual or sensual between characters. That gives the book a superficial quality, because it has pretensions of engaging honestly with the deep dark heart of humanity, yet it all but excludes mention of some of our most basic drives. It presents us with a version of darkness and grimness most palatable to teenaged boys nervous about talking to the girl in class they like.

And there's definitely a place for that kind of story. The Final Empire speaks to the awkward teenage boy in all of us. Still, I think there's a tension between the book's grimdark pretensions and its timidity to engage with the full range of human experience. It's not A Song of Ice and Fire, which attempts to conjure a realistic vision of a fantasy world in all its horror and banality. Nor is it J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which tries to operate on the level of pure myth. The Final Empire is in a tricky middle ground. The end result feels a little more ordinary, a little less special, than either of those other attempts at high fantasy.

Of course, Mistborn doesn't have to be Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones to be good. It's good just the way it is: a page-turning fantasy adventure with light philosophy, light comedy, and book-ending battles where characters fly through the air like they're in Dragon Ball Z. I'm already looking forward to diving into the next book.

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