Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive: Book 3)

7/10

Reviewing a book like Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, the third book in his The Stormlight Archive, was always going to be tricky. There are very few books that can be claimed to be similar – Robert Jordan’s The Dragon Reborn is the only book on my shelves I can compare it to – and the hype for this particular book had reached epic proportions by the time it finally arrived on my doorstep.

To make matters more complicated, and in the interests of full disclosure, the UK edition of the book has quoted me on the back cover: “Brandon Sanderson is one of the greatest fantasy writers”, a crib from the conclusion to my review of his second Stormlight book, Words of Radiance. In full, it reads: “Brandon Sanderson has written a book that seals his spot as one of the greatest fantasy writers."

Though I have now finished Oathbringer and still believe Sanderson is “one of the greatest fantasy writers” I do not necessarily think I can attribute his latest effort as proof of that statement. This is what makes my situation trickier than it was going to be, because I stand by my ratings for The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance (10/10 and 9/10 respectively), but Oathbringer was a step down from Sanderson’s normal brilliance.

Coming in at a whopping 1,233 pages in length, Oathbringer is, as I have mentioned, the third book in The Stormlight Archive – a series which is intended to run for 10 books. Oathbringer is the third of 10, but also the third of 5 books – Sanderson’s intention is to write two five-book cycles. This was always going to be a difficult book for Sanderson to write, as it sits both smack-bang in the middle of his first cycle, must do justice to the two books that comes before it, make enough progress to make sense of the two books to follow, while still fit within a 10-book arc.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is a lot going on. There are 25 separate point of view characters – though, admittedly, the lion’s share of POV rests with Dalinar, Kaladin, Shallan, and Adolin – and numerous geographical locations. Normally Sanderson has always managed to keep a firm grasp on the width and breadth of his stories, but I found myself repeatedly losing track of names that were thrown about as if they had been introduced, only to find they hadn’t, and place names which I thought were the same, only to find they weren’t. 
I’ve been reviewing books for over a decade and have read Robert Jordan – I know how to keep track of what I’ve read and what is new, and Sanderson occasionally let this slip, which surprised me.

To do justice to a book the size of Oathbringer I feel I would have to write a review three times as long as normal – which I’m not going to do. Suffice it to say, I really did enjoy it, if for no other reason than the story progressed, and I was returned to some of my favourite characters – Kaladin, Syl, and Shallan are my favourites. And Wit, of course.

However, the primary reason I feel Oathbringer was something of a let-down was not the occasional slip-up with names and places – as I said, I’ve been reading and reviewing for a while, I don’t need someone to hold my hand the whole way – but was rather the blatant and repeated intrusion of the author into his story.

Authorial contrivance is the single greatest sin an author can commit, in my opinion. When I can see the author’s hand in a character’s decision-making or in the way circumstances come together, then the author has failed to properly tell his story. To be fair, The Stormlight Archive is a huge undertaking, but this is pressure Sanderson put on himself and, to my eyes and in my opinion, with Oathbringer he failed to properly execute. Characters reverted too often to type or were made to change their type as the story required, situations were too often conveniently placed in order to exacerbate other situations or were untold so as to hide their implausibility, and there were numerous times when rules that were put in place were suddenly broken at the author’s convenience.

Given the intricacy of The Stormlight Archives and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere work as a whole, I might come to realise that all of these seeming-issues were planned all along – though I don’t think so. Too often I saw the author’s hand in his story the same way we eventually saw the artist’s hand as Daffy Duck’s tormentor in the classic Merrie Melodies cartoon, ‘Duck Amuck’. In fact, Duck Amuck reminds me a lot of Oathbringer. The cartoonist behind Daffy Duck’s turmoil (Bugs Bunny) continually changes the scenery, clothing, voice, and instruments of Daffy’s destruction. Sanderson – though not to the same comic and extreme degree, of course – similarly played a little too fast and loose with the story and his characters so as to reach a specific, predetermined ending.

If I am to, at one time, call Brandon Sanderson “one of the greatest fantasy writers”, then I need to also be able to, at another time, highlight instances where I think he fails to live up to that title. I don’t like doing so because I still believe Oathbringer was a brilliant book. I just don’t think it lives up to the high bar Sanderson has set for himself. In the end, Sanderson remains one of the greatest fantasy writers because of his larger oeuvre and what he has accomplished therein. I just don’t think Oathbringer will go down as contributing to that title of “greatest” unless from this book he learns to remove his hand from the scales of his storytelling and continues to grow as an author.