Oathbringer is the third in the planned ten volumes of high fantasy saga The Stormlight Archive, reaching the halfway point of the ongoing first arc. A societally stratified monarchist nation, having just abandoned a war of vengeance, is immediately thrust into a battle against an encroaching Armageddon, as a malevolent deity transforms a former slave race into an army of nightmarish warriors.
The story brings the current narrative full circle, its developments harking back to the cryptic prologue of the series’ first instalment The Way of Kings, chronologically occurring four and a half thousand years previously. The cycle of primary characters’ backstories moves around to high royal Dalinar, starkly contrasting the seemingly reasonable ruler of the present with the bloodthirsty warmonger he is revealed to have previously been, and so the various nations he attempts to unite against the gathering apocalypse end up seeming perfectly reasonable in not trusting a word he says. While it’s an important aspect of the story, the interminable politicking takes up far too much of an already ridiculously long book, and so the necessary sense of urgency is slowed into a crawl of directionless arguing and nobles attempting to one-up each other’s posturing.
It seems like the primary antagonist is being built up as not just the villain for this series, but also for the shared universe of the Cosmere as a whole. While cross-series references serve to tie together the expanding mythos, it can be a little frustrating to follow offhand mentions of characters from other novels, especially in a story that already has an overly-extensive cast whose names you may already be struggling to keep track of, and who feature in sub-plots of varying clarity of purpose.
The excitement of the book’s latter section goes part of the way towards redeeming the drudging build up, with several characters venturing into a shadowy dreamscape that shifts events onto an extra-planar level, while the climactic and multi-perspective action sequence is easily the most epic battle in a series that has already been riddled with them. Uncovered revelations delve into one of the series’ primary themes of taking responsibility for your mistakes, and muddy the debatable morality over whose actions (if any) are actually in the right.
With its position in the saga there was no way that Oathbringer was going to move things towards any kind of meaningful conclusion, but at the very least it would have been preferable to at least come away with a greater sense of development towards actually getting there.
OATHBRINGER / AUTHOR: BRANDON SANDERSON / PUBLISHER: GOLLANCZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
