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| (Cover Artist: Cynthia Sheppard) |
Martha Wells's 2023 novel Witch King is a book which I wish I had a more positive opinion of, though not because this was a story which I lacked enthusiasm for. I enjoyed the characters, and the world which Wells has imagined for this novel is unique and well-realized. Moreover the book's core storyline, while slow to establish itself, has many elements of intrigue and nuance. Yet unfortunately in spite of these many points in the novel's favor, I'm not convinced that the narrative that Wells is attempting to tell with this story functions in the way that it should.
Particularly given Wells's broader success in the science fiction genre (her wryly profound Murderbot Diaries series), it was hard for me to not read Witch King, and begin seeing within this story every element of Wells's writing which normally functions so well, but which here never quite manages to bring itself to fruition.
The main plot of Witch King is divided, very broadly, between two narrative threads. As the novel begins, Wells thrusts the reader into the midst of the action, and opens the story as the main protagonist--an immortal body-hopping demon prince named Kaisteron (or Kai)--unexpectedly awakens in a cell alongside his friend of many years--the also immortal witch Ziede Daiyaha. Both Kai and Ziede have been abducted by mysterious figures and locked in an underwater tomb designed to limit Kai's power, with each harboring only dim memories of the ambush that has resulted in their captivity. Immediately setting to work escaping their captors via use of the powerful magic they both possess, Kai and Ziede soon deduce that it is not just they who have been abducted, but also many of their friends and allies from a war they both fought several generations prior--a war in which they succeeded in overthrowing a corrupt globe-spanning empire known as the Hierarchs.
Quickly escaping their prison after Kai takes possession of the now soulless body of a recently killed teenage boy whom their captors had executed, the two protagonists embark on a desperate race to track down the whereabouts of Ziede's wife, the powerful sorceress Tahren. They are joined in this quest by a young street urchin named Sanja whom they manage to rescue from the very same ritual sacrifice that claimed Kai's current host, as well as (later on) a historian named Ramad who has spent his life studying Kai's centuries' long exploits as a political rebel. Still later, they also meet up with Tahren's younger brother--the reclusive but well-renowned scholar Dahin who has his own history with the Hierarchs' war.
The second narrative in Witch King is a story that functions at least in part to gradually fill the reader in on the details of the book's present day plotline. As Kai and Ziede's increasingly eclectic group of unlikely allies attempt to track down Tahren's whereabouts so as to rescue her from her captivity, a parallel narrative unfolds many generations in the past. Within this story, Kai is introduced immediately after he is first summoned to Earth, and takes possession of the body of a recently deceased woman named Enna so as to cement an alliance between the nomadic Saredi people, and the demons of the Underearth like himself. Yet this initially peaceful life is shattered when the Saredi are attacked by the armies of the Hierarchs. Captured by this colonialist society after every other member of his newfound human family is brutally slaughtered before his eyes, Kai eventually meets up with much younger versions of the immortal Tahren, Ziede, and Dahin, as well as, most importantly, the mortal prince Bashasa.
Despite ostensibly hailing from factions that would normally be in conflict, everyone in this eclectic group quickly sets out to enact revenge against the Hierarchs for what has been done to their respective homes and families, with this venture in turn gradually morphing into a full-scale rebellion. Soon, the numerous and diverse societies subjugated by Hierarch rule are finding within themselves the ability to band together and form a meaningful resistance against their oppressors, with Kai sitting unwittingly at the center of this growing political power--an emerging nation which comes to call itself "The Rising World."
Having read the entirety of Witch King, the way that I think both of these two stories are meant to function is as follows: In Witch King's flashback timeline, Kai and the other members of the newly formed Rising World rebellion wage their war against the Hierarchs, with Kai witnessing first-hand the violence of the Hierarch empire, and through the horror this violence triggers within him finding the conviction required to tear down this corrupt nation and replace it with something better. This story unfolds alongside that of Kai's lingering grief at the deaths of the family he had found during his life with the Saredi, and the tentative way through which he slowly builds new connections in the unlikely family he finds in Tahren, Ziede, Dahin, and Bashasa.
All of these characters, despite the frequently contentious histories of their respective cultures, nevertheless come to be united in their shared feelings of rootlessness as a result of colonial oppression. Moreover it's through acknowledging these shared experiences of isolation and trauma that they each come to collectively build supportive structures that resist their oppressors.
Meanwhile in the novel's present day timeline, the narrative follows something of the inverse story. As Kai and Ziede flee their mysterious captors and set out to rescue Ziede's wife from the shadowy figures who have abducted her, they both also realize the extent to which the institutions and individuals comprising the now continent-spanning government of the Rising World may have turned on the humanitarian ideals that gave rise to its existence. While in the past Kai, Ziede, Tahren, Dahin, and Bashasa all worked to tear down the Hierarch's empire and replace it with the Rising World, in the present day Kai is forced to confront the fact that the nation he was personally instrumental in founding has in the end become nothing more than another iteration of the very same empire he once fought to dismantle--an empire which many whom Kai deeply cared for died seeking to destroy.
I want to be very clear that this is not merely a good story, but a vitally important one. In addition to being built upon compelling themes surrounding the enduring and often multifaceted nature of history, Wells's world-building is unique and creative, while her characters are engaging and nuanced. Likewise it's through these strengths that the novel's deeper themes begin to emerge, with moments of outwardly flippant action easily pivoting to the subtler examples of character reflection that have made Wells's other work so famous. In both concept and craft, Witch King excels flawlessly.
The problem that I have with Witch King is, unfortunately, something much less interesting than any issues I could have otherwise had with the novels themes or subjects. On a structural level, I see this book as trying to accomplish two contradictory things simultaneously, and as a result ultimately failing at both.
Both the present day and past-tense storylines of Witch King represent elaborate and expansive narratives meant to draw the reader into an immersive world filled with nuanced political conflicts and unexpected narrative twists. This novel doesn't merely frame itself as a rapidly-paced action adventure text whose eclectic band of unlikely heroes flee shadowy forces as they set out to (essentially) save the world, but also a detailed and nuanced story of many-leveled political machinations and multi-generation long power-plays so complex that even the characters themselves often struggle to grasp the true consequences of their actions. Yet it's also the case that, despite the skill via which these two stories are told, the vantage point from which Wells chooses to tell both of these elaborate and interconnected narratives is limited to a degree that does not always seem justified by the scope of the material.
Much as with the titular protagonist of Wells's more famous Murderbot Diaries series, Kai represents a dryly sardonic narrative voice--an inhuman character whose terse descriptions of the book's moment-to-moment action frequently elides an unspoken moral strength. Yet unlike Murderbot, Kai also possesses far more agency and institutional power than his science fictional counterpart--a fact which in turn makes the disorienting way that Witch King's early chapters thrust its readers into the middle of the action harder to accept.
Critical to the arc of the Murderbot Diaries was the fact that as the first book of that story opened, its protagonist was a literal slave enduring a lifetime of corporate servitude--a security android whose "governor module" required that it mindlessly carry out whatever commands humans demanded it perform, and whose perspective on that story's world is consequently severely limited. This lack of free will gave rise to a being whose own conceptualization of its identity was marred by the horrifying memories of pain and violence that had defined its existence--pain and violence which Murderbot not only recalled experiencing first-hand but, in one very notable case, also unwillingly being forced by its programming to enact against others.
The enduring nature of this trauma is eventually shown by Wells to be influencing this character's behavior in ways far more profound than is initially apparent, with part of that trauma manifesting in the furtive way that Murderbot, as that book's narrator, regularly dismisses its own agency in its story while obscuring key details of its past. The result is that as the series progressed, Murderbot's gradual realization as to the truth of its recently gained free will unfolds in tandem with the readers own gradually expanding knowledge of Murderbot's true motivations. We learn more of Murderbot's world in tandem to the manner by which Murderbot comes to recognize that world as something with which it can meaningfully engage.
By contrast, Kai is similarly a character whose central focus in the novel showcases his unique unreliability as a narrator, with this unreliability similarly implied by Wells to derive from Kai's own traumatic past. Every action Kai takes in this story is predicated on a backstory that he not only strives to conceal from many of his fellow characters, but in more than a few instances himself. Yet unlike Murderbot, Kai's moment-to-moment actions are presented in a context that requires knowledge of this backstory in order to be legible to the reader. While Kai and Ziede are in the present-day storyline revealed to be high ranking officials within the Rising World government--individuals who even before the novel begins are indicated to have been deeply immersed in this government's ongoing political machinations, even in the flashback timeline Kai is introduced as a very literal Demon Prince from the Underearth sent to the mortal realm on behalf of his formerly human grandmother so as to renew a treaty she had forged with the Saredi millennia prior.
Yet despite these elaborate motivations, we as readers are nevertheless thrust into the middle of both narratives without any understanding of Kai's objectives or contexts. Much as how the novel begins in the midst of the action as Kai and Ziede have been abducted and locked in a prison by trusted allies who have betrayed them (allies whom we as readers know nothing of), even in the past, Kai's story begins as he is summoned out of the Underearth by the Saredi to possess the body of a recently deceased woman we have never met, to fulfill a treaty we know nothing of, on behalf of a grandmother whose immense significance to Kai's life we, similarly, are entirely ignorant.
There are many ways in which this disorienting approach to storytelling can work, but the unfortunate result is that in this particular case, Kai and Ziede spend much of this book pondering what Wells seems to have intended to be her primary mystery (which of their many allies in the Rising World government have betrayed them) all while as readers we have not yet had time to gather the context required to become invested in this narrative. Why is it that the historian Ramad is so interested in questioning Kai about his war against the Hierarchs when they randomly stumble across him during their exploits? Is he secretly the one who has orchestrated Kai's and Ziede's abduction? Alternately, why is it that Kai and Ziede randomly stumble across Tahren's younger brother, Dahin, in the ruins of a temple they destroyed during Bashasa's rebellion decades earlier? Is Dahin the one who has turned on them? When Tahren's aunt, the powerful sorceress Saadrin, abruptly arrives on the scene and agrees to join Kai and Ziede in their search for her niece's whereabouts even despite her long-stated hatred of Kai for his demon ancestry, is this an indication that she is their true enemy?
As the initial framework for a broader set of character dynamics this multifaceted web of interconnected threads of suspicion works wonderfully, and there's a part of me that honestly wants to reread this novel in a few years now that I have a better grasp of how every character's place in this story fits together. The problem is just that as a first-time reader, it's not possible to draw from these elements the character nuance and intrigue needed to comprehend the true significance they hold to the book on the whole. Kai's fear that Dahin may have betrayed him only has importance if we as readers know at least a little of who Dahin is, and why it is that Kai would feel so betrayed if this person in particular were to turn on him. Likewise Kai's desire to unquestioningly trust the historian Ramad because this man reminds him of his now long-dead mortal friend Bashasa can only truly have narrative weight if we know at least a little of who Bashasa was, just like how the mystery of Saadrin's motivations only has significance if we understand the contentious history that she, Kai, and Ziede all share.
These dynamics represent wonderful foundations upon which a larger narrative can be built, it's just that Witch King introduces all of these questions without giving us the context needed to become invested in their answers.
To be clear we do eventually learn much of this context. By the novel's end, both the present day and historical storylines seem to have fully introduced us to this book's admittedly massive cast. In this way it does eventually become clear just how nuanced and well-thought-out the conflict that Wells has created for this series is. Yet even this success is just an affirmation of this book's core issue. By the time we learn who everyone is and how they are connected, the mystery that we could have finally had reason to be invested in has for the most part been resolved. We only truly learn why the story of Witch King matters after it's reached its end.
None of this is to say that Witch King is a bad book, but I also can't honestly make the case that it's an entirely good one, either. This novel has wonderful characters, compellingly explored themes, and unusual story dynamics that, to the degree they are discernible in the moment, are rewarding to follow. Moreover the world that Wells has imagined for this series is a unique but also intriguingly grounded fantasy realm which I am genuinely curious to learn more of in future sequels. The problem that I have with Witch King isn't that it's badly written, or even that its story doesn't work thematically, but that from a structural perspective the strongest qualities of this book are those elements which awkwardly remain concealed from the reader until after they've reached their conclusions.
For readers familiar with Martha Wells's other work I think that Witch King makes for a fascinating case-study in the ways that an author's style changes with genres. However for anyone seeking a more polished introduction to Wells's fiction, I would advise they look somewhere else--perhaps that series of wryly profound novellas about a self-proclaimed homicidal android who insists it wants nothing more than for people to leave it alone so it can spend all day wrapped in a blanket watching TV.