Do you ever feel like you’re the one person who doesn’t really get the joke, but you don’t want to admit it in case everyone else thinks you’re crazy? Well, that’s kind of how I felt about Senlin Ascends, a book that seems to be garnering extraordinarily positive reviews but which, I’m sorry to admit, pretty much left me cold.
What’s it about? A newly married couple called Senlin and Marya who visit the Tower of Babel on their honeymoon and are almost immediately separated. As Senlin searches for his wife he begins a journey through the Dantes Inferno-like ringdoms of the Tower, each of which is a miraculous and dangerous world in its own right. En route he encounters all manner of friends and foes and comes to the slow realisation that if he is ever going to see his bride again he must jettison his mild-mannered bookish ways and fight to rescue her.
What’s good about it? The quality of the writing. Josiah Bancroft is obviously an accomplished wordsmith and he knows how to weave a compelling sentence. This is a long book but it’s tightly and elegantly written and is surprisingly easy to read.
What doesn’t work? To be honest, this is where I’m feeling conflicted because I can appreciate the quality of the writing and I can usually eat this type of romantic high fantasy up with a spoon, but Senlin Ascends feels arch and overcooked, a kind of Ichabod Crane-does-The Pilgrim’s Progress, stuffed to the brim with eccentric ideas and intriguing characters but we’ve wandered around fantastical corridors like this too many times before and it all quickly becomes repetitive. It’s a lovely story, and Bancroft has polished it up and given it a great shine, but it’s still the same old allegory with very little new to add and the fact that there are (apparently) three more books to come is something I find vaguely depressing. Writing this strong deserves better ideas, but if Terry Gilliam ever directs a movie of this (he’d be the perfect filmmaker for this project) I’ll be first in line to buy a ticket.
SENLIN ASCENDS / AUTHOR: JOSIAH BANCROFT / PUBLISHER: ORBIT / RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 18TH 2018
