The Darkness That Comes Before: Book Review

I just finished reading The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker. This is the first installment in The Prince of Nothing trilogy—which is, in turn—the first series within the larger Second Apocalypse series. The novel centers on the events leading up a Holy War, where the Shriah (The Pope) calls for a Holy War to be waged against a particular enemy. The book follows the storylines of multiple characters as they all conspire to take control of this Holy War for their own ends. Amid them all is a character introduced in the prologue, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, who has mysterious motives and possesses a terrifying power that few people understand.

Overall, I thought this book was amazing. I will be jumping right into the next book and then the third after that. We'll see how I feel when I've finished the trilogy; I might continue into the following tetralogy.

Link to my video review: https://youtu.be/SGjp3nBu6wI

No Spoilers

Overall

As I mentioned above, this book centers on the events leading up to a Holy War, but the perpetual backdrop is the looming Second Apocalypse, which is a potential threat that is introduced very early on in the story. It is a threat that has long since been dismissed by those in society—and the one group of people devoted to anticipating this catastrophe, the Mandate School of sorcerers, are laughing stalks. This two-level approach to story-telling—where there is a more immediate threat (the Holy War), with a more distant, looming threat (the Second Apocalypse)—helps add layers to the story from the very outset. We are keyed into both conflicts from the outset, which hooked me for the whole series. And the basic premise is just so compelling from the outset, so that helps.

Much of the story conflict is built around political intrigue. There is a battle and some fights in the story, but they are always part of a larger political game that is being played. Indeed, the climax of the story is not a fight, but a strictly political face-off between characters, and the story is all the better for it. My favorite conflicts are political intrigue, so this is an instant win. And something that I have noticed is that sometimes intrigue isn't well done, mainly because it is so over-the-top or contrived, but this book is neither of those things. The schemes played in this novel are grand, but they also seem grounded and plausible. This is mainly due to the very precise nature of the schemes. They are very involved, bound up in the histories of the characters involved, so it shows that Bakker is a very careful thinker who is intimately involved with his work. (Apparently the schemes are based off real historical events, so that explains much of it).

Built into the political intrigue are the many mysteries of the story. I'll wait to give the specifics for the spoiler section, but I can mention here that the various mysteries regarding character motivations and how the story might come together in the end are fascinating and leave the future of the story so open ended. I can't help but speculate endlessly about how things might turn out.

Characters

The characters are something that surprised me. I read some non-spoiler reviews, and I got the sense that the characters weren't the best. But that was not my takeaway at all. The characters, nearly all of them, are very well realized and their inner conflicts are bound up with the events of the story. This story is surprisingly intimate, even as the conflicts are literally continent spanning. I understand why people won't like these characters, they are very flawed and unlikeable, but I am such a sucker for these kinds of characters, and I cannot wait to see where they go.

I think my favorite character is Kellhus. He is both terrifying and fascinating, and his interplay with the characters around him is so compelling. One of the best parts of the story is a conversation Kellhus has with Cnaiür. The way Bakker executed the dialogue and provided perspective shifts made the whole experience so engrossing. Quite literally, I came out of the scene feeling a bit taken aback and even tired. Dealing with a man like Kellhus would be so mentally taxing.

Cnaiür is another great character, all in his own ways. He fits into the intelligent/philosophical barbarian trope, and I especially like this version. Bakker does not hold back on his most unlikeable traits, and I find that stories that do are misleading, if not dishonest, so I can appreciate the portrayal. As I mentioned above, the interactions with Kellhus are especially great, and Cnaiür is at his best during them.

Achamian is another character that stands out. As a Mandate sorcerer, he serves a very particular role in the story and is uniquely poised to anticipate some the threats that confront the characters. And his emotional connection to other characters is another factor that stands out, and I suspect that there will be some beastly developments for his character down the line.

Nersei Proyas and Ikurei Conphas are another two characters that I am looking forward to seeing develop later on in the story. What we've seen so far, with Proyas being a zealot with political acumen and Conphas being a conniving bastard, was fun to watch, especially with how they played off other characters. Better, it has laid the groundwork for what will undoubtedly be very tense conflicts down the road. I mention them together because they are perfectly poised to lock horns as the war progresses.

The Ikurei family as a whole was also hilarious to watch. Xerius and Conphas playing the political game side-by-side even as they hate each other is such a powder keg, and I can't wait to see it blow. Xerius, the glorious bird-shit emperor, also deserves a special mention because of his unapologetically arrogant nature. As I mentioned above, I am a sucker for unlikeable characters, and his is just so entertaining.

I should also mention the two female main characters in the story, Esmenet and Serwë. And this will be where some of my first negatives for the story are. But let's start with the good parts. I think both characters are well-crafted and realized. They both have been through a lot, and I think I felt bad for them more than any others. Esmenet, being a prostitute, has a particular background that makes her an outcast in society, and I thought Bakker did a good job establishing her life and struggles, while also showing that she had higher aspirations. Serwë, likewise, has similar experiences being sold off as a concubine, and has been continually used throughout her life. Her interactions with a certain character were particularly tragic.

But while I think both characters were well-realized, I thought that their relevance to the plot was scant. They did not seem to matter much at all to the story. When I finished, I honestly wondered why Bakker even thought to include them in the story at all. They did not seem to have agency or a place in the plot, and this affects how I might recommend the series to other people. The world is very patriarchal, and I don't mind this approach to worldbuilding, but I also think people often underestimate the power women can have, even in these societies. After all, prohibition of alcohol was largely driven by women, who didn't have the right to vote at the time (in America). I particularly like ASOIAF because it balances these two things quite well. Even Sansa had more agency and effect on the plot than either of these women. Apparently, things start to make sense as the story continues, so this might not be as sharp a criticism as it stands now.

Another point is the lack of variety in the female characters. Some people aren't going to take kindly to the idea that all the female characters are prostitutes (though others might appreciate the representation and the focus on their unique issues). Either way, the women seem rather one note. There are some differences between Esmenet and Serwë, but they both have the expected dependency on men brought about by their lives, and the lack of agency makes them both look helpless. This is not to say that characters must have agency in every circumstance, nor does it mean that some characters can't be completely helpless (people like that exist), but variety helps make things more interesting.

Worldbuilding

Related, and something that is actually a negative would be some of the worldbuilding. While the worldbuilding was actually very well done, overall, with the world unfolding with the plot and the characters, I thought that some elements were surprisingly lacking. I think the majority of the information that I got on the differences in beliefs between the Inrithi and the Fanim comes from the appendix at the back of the book. I just did not think it was very on the page. Additionally, I don't really understand the differences between the schools, either. For this latter thing, I imagine it will be expanded upon as the story progresses (and maybe for the former too), but you would think you would have more background at this point in the story.

Assorted Musings

The prose is another thing that is worth mentioning. I really liked a lot of the description and the sayings, with much of it being very poetic, while also being comprehensible. If this balance is hit, then the writing basically sings.

Tied to this is the philosophical side of the story. I was motivated to pick up the book particularly because of this influence, and it shows. I actually expected the story to be a bit more dense in this department, but it is very readable. As I saw mentioned in one of the reviews that I read, a lot of the philosophy is condensed into aphorisms, which makes the ideas easier to grasp. I hope the story gets denser as it proceeds.

The creep factor in the story is pretty high in places. I don't want to mention specifics, here, but some of the encounters that characters have, especially Esmenet, are enough to make me feel dirty and sick. And apparently these sequences start to make sense as the story progresses, so that makes it even better.

At the same time, I thought some of the horror elements steered a little too close to the goofy side of things. Horror has to ride that line, and some parts of the story totter along that edge.

A minor pet peeve of mine is the dialogue tag "cried." The tag is not always bad, but I swear the image the word conjures in my mind is vastly different from the image Bakker intends to conjure. The image I get is shrill and teary, but most of the contexts in which it is used are nothing like that. Alright, whining over.

Overall, I thought this was a great entry in the series, and I am amped to get started on the next book. I will give this one an 8/10.

Spoilers

Mystery

The mysteries of the story, specifically who all the characters and factions are and what agendas they have, are what keep me thinking about the story. I came in with some assumptions about the story, and I quickly found that they are not exactly true. My mind made an immediate association between the Dûnyain and the Consult, which does not seem to be the case (though that might change). I expected Kellhus to have some agenda, but what is so fascinating is that he doesn't seem to understand his own motivations, and he further doesn't seem to understand key things about the world. He has no knowledge of sorcery, even though his abilities seem to be just that. He has no knowledge of the Consult, either.

This opens up some interesting possibilities:

Kellhus is the No-God, and he simply doesn't know it. The Consult might not know who the No-God is, either, and are conducting searches of their own. Or perhaps Kellhus is actually against the Consult and is uniquely poised to take them on. In this possible path, Kellhus might actually be the greater threat, and the Consult might be a red herring. Building off this, I wonder if the actual apocalypse might be caused, not by some No-God, but by all the parties involved. Indeed, the paranoia of a single man looking to destroy everything might drive the very destruction of the world that people want to avoid. After all, what untold atrocities can you justify when your enemy is literally the man who will destroy everything? I still think Kellhus and the Dûnyain have a good chance of having something to do with the apocalypse. They are anti-history, they try to be forgotten, and this seems to neatly tie into an agenda to destroy everything; in that case, history would literally stop. Finally, there is the question of Kellhus's father. Is he the real harbinger? Is he the No-God?

Given that this is a story that has many different factions with different motivations, I am very interested to learn about what the Consult are up to. What are their motivations? Why would they want to cause the apocalypse? Something tells me that things are not going to be as simple as what the Mandate suggests. I even question the dreams that infect the minds of the Mandate. We haven't seen that much from those dreams, and we have no idea how much context might be missing. The back of the book literally says that history is written by the victors, so the immediate question becomes, what would history be if the Consult had won and written it? Bakker's emphasizes that on the back of the book for a reason. How does the anti-history of the Dûnyain tie into this?

Unfortunately, I accidentally spoiled myself by glancing at the wikipedia article for this book. I simply looked at a couple sentence long section on the world's races, and there is apparently an alien race that crash-landed on the continent. That is the extent of my knowledge, and this opens up so many questions. The skin spies invoking the face huggers from alien make me wonder whether the Consult are aliens. Either that, or the non-men or the Sranc are aliens. All of them? Who knows?

Kellhus

Anasûrimbor Kellhus, as I mentioned, is my favorite character. This is in spite of the fact that he seems to lack the usual complexity of my usual favorite characters. He is similar to a character like Littlefinger, where the motivations are simple, but the character still stands out because of the scope and complexity of his schemes. Except Kellhus is a better character. Littlefinger is extremely lucky, when you stop to think about it, and Martin's obvious thumbing of the scales kind of undercuts his cool factor—but you really don't get that impression with Kellhus (at least not yet). Even better, you get to see things from Kellhus's perspective, and the way Bakker captures his unceasingly analytical and careful scheming in even the most basic interactions is expertly done.

The standout scene in the book is the conversation that he has with Cnaiür. This is where we get to see Kellhus at his best, when he finds that his simpler manipulation strategies do not work on the barbarian. And the sheer meticulousness that we see when Bakker shifts perspective into Kellhus's mind makes the interactions so much more interesting.

Something that I have noticed is that you can guess how smart the author is based on how they write intelligent characters in their story. If the author is not, dare I say, exceptionally smart, the portrayal of intelligence often comes off as cartoonish, like the author thinks being smart is some inscrutable magical ability that no one can understand because no one is a genius like them. Lost is the notion that some problems are incalculable or unsolvable because of their very nature: the optimal strategy in Game Theory for rock, paper, scissors is playing randomly, which does not guarantee winning every time.

The later seasons of the BBC's Sherlock stooped well into this territory with the genius characters practically possessing supernatural abilities without any real notion of how any of it works. They're just really, really smart! I think you can get away with pushing boundaries to show characters with extreme intelligence, but then it becomes a matter of execution. Is the portrayal meticulous and detailed enough to make me think it's plausible?

While Kellhus essentially has supernatural abilities (even if he doesn't see his abilities as sorcery), the way it is portrayed is so compelling and grounded that Bakker makes it seem like it could be the case. In other words, he's clever enough to write an exceedingly clever character in a believable manner.

But enough with the pretentious blathering.

Assorted Musings

Like Slowly Red mentioned, this quote describing the death of a character is amazing: "The stone rail slammed against his hips, broke like cake. Again he was floating, but it was so different—air whipping across his face, bathing his body. With a single outstretched hand, Paro Inrau followed a pillar to the earth."

This is poetic and haunting in its imagery. I like the way the text flows. And the fact that this has no gore added to it kind of makes it better. This is coming from someone who wants to bathe in the blood of the characters when their death arrives. I can recognize that gore can be pared back in some contexts to great effect. Though double points go to the descriptions that are both gory and poetic.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I will give it an 8/10.