I once heard Sanderson speak at a local university and he said that one of the things he was good at as a writer (and probably why he was chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s series) was ending things. Unlike a lot of other epic fantasy writers, who like to write quadrilogies and quintilogies and however else you can refer to those long, long series. At least, when Sanderson says he’s going to write a trilogy, you know that the story is going to end in book three.
And what an ending it was! The Hero of Ages was totally worth the wait.
At first (about the first 200 pages), involved a lot of setup and a lot of repetition of ideas from the first two books. It was a little irritating, having things and ideas repeated every couple of chapters. But at about the page 250 mark, things really started to get interesting. Sanderson set up such an apocalyptic scenario that I wasn’t sure how the protagonists were going to come out on top. I had a really hard time putting it down last night. Oh, it was nice to read a book where the loose ends got tied up.
There were so many things that I liked about this book that I’m going to have to write this out in a list:
1. Religion and faith. Even though I’m not much of a churchgoer (I only go on Christmas Eve to sing carols), I am fascinated by religions. In The Hero of Ages, the character Sazed is searching through all the lost religions that he knows, trying to find one that will give him solace since he lost the love of his life in the previous book. One of Sazed’s duties was to remember all the tenets and beliefs of religions that were wiped out a thousand years ago. As he goes through the list, he keeps finding logical inconsistencies. To which, I thought, duh. Whenever he would eliminate another one, I wanted to tell Sazed that religion is not about logic, it’s about faith. It doesn’t matter that they don’t make intellectual sense. Towards the end of the book, Sazed does realize this and starts to believe. And because he believes, Sazed helps to save the world with his knowledge of how the world used to be before the powers of Preservation and Ruin started fighting each other.
2. Science. Part of what was causing the end of the world was how out of whack the characters’ world was with its own science and natural processes. The planet was too close to the sun, so the Lord Ruler (evil overlord from book one) created volcanoes to put enough ash and particulate matter into the atmosphere to cool off the planet. And that problem led to other problems, which led to more problems.
One of the ideas that keeps getting repeated in this series is that every action has a consequence. So, in the middle of all this religious talk is Newton’s law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When the characters all charge ahead trying to fix all the new problems instead of undoing them, they make things worse. Hence, the whole end of the world thing.
Interestingly—and I kind of hate to give this away—the answer to restoring the world came from all the religions that Sazed remembered. Because they were all created before the Lord Ruler started messing with physics and biology, they had the information needed to undo the “problem-solving” measures.
3. Duality. This was one of the things that held my attention all through. In the first book and for most of the second, I didn’t realize (probably as Sanderson wanted) that the world was caught in a dualistic struggle between equal and opposing forces: Preservation and Ruin. Preservation is, just like the name says, the force that keeps things alive and opposes Ruin. Ruin is the destructive force, and keeps things changing. They’re both necessary as long as they’re in balance with each other.
The duality helped keep me reading once I got to the interesting bit and made it hard for me to figure out how the world was going to survive. I mean, you can’t defeat a force of nature, can you? And if you destroyed Ruin, then things would stagnate and stop changing. You need change as much as you need a preserving force. At first, I thought it was a little odd that Sanderson chose Preservation to match up against Ruin. I understand destruction, but isn’t destruction’s opposite creation? Of course, then the forces wouldn’t have had to work together to create and the plot would have been a lot more one-sided, not to mention totally different.
4. The ending itself. The ending of this series was just magical, in both senses of the word. I loved it! It’s kind of hard to describe because you really need the background of the first two books. It was amazing to see it all come together the way that it did. I don’t want to give away more than I already have, so I’ll stop.
Run, don’t walk, to read this book. If you haven’t read the series, go get it.