Jones, Howard Andrew. The City of Marble and Blood. Baen Books, October 2023.
Words: 2100 words
Those were not his only gifts. He was endowed with an unparalleled clarity of vision, a confident surety that was never conceit. Trial and tragedy had burned off the dross of vanity and pride that weight the lives of normal men; his experiences had not transformed him so much as provided fuel for the forge he had used to shape himself into a tool to achieve aims the Dervans had misunderstood from the start. (3)
A hyperbolic yet soaring, sincere quality rings out in this description, and whether you're attracted to its earnest tone will likely inform your overall enjoyment of the book. There are some notable exceptions to this broad, heroic characterization of Hanuvar, which I'll get into, but for me our titular hero is still too great, too brilliant, and, therefore, too inert; he is above the failures and weaknesses "of normal men." This is, of course, my own idiosyncratic reading of Hanuvar, my own resistance to one-note heroes and immutable characters, and I completely understand that, in a reality plagued with enough moral compromise and evil men, having a character you can actually root for, a character whose motivations you do not have to question, is refreshing. And in short doses, I could get behind broad characterization. But I've now spent almost 1000 pages with Hanuvar, and this preamble hype text is more or less exactly what you get, in every story, at every encounter. In this way, Marble and Blood struggles against its form as a novel, a form that was initially designed and built around sustained attention to interiority; in other words, the novel-as-form works because of the deep-focus, psychological investment it allows the reader to access; the novel, at its best, carries ideas and engages in polyphonic perspectives across several hours of intimate engagement with the reader. I only mention all of this because Jones is, in many ways, working against the novel's own strengths by composing his narrative as a series of short stories, a technique he likens to episodes in a television series. On the one hand, I admire the drive for resisting the novel form's own emphasis on sustained, long-form tension, opting instead for the rapid, nimble moves of the short story--a series of sprints over a marathon. It's this dynamic that gives each story its narrative thrust, and I certainly commend Jones for managing to contextualize dramatic action, crescendo toward a climax, and then resolve the immediate conflict, fourteen different times. But while the circumstances might change, Hanuvar rarely does, and across so much word-mileage, he buckles under his own mighty weight.
Luckily, however, Jones does reveal chinks in Hanuvar's emotional armor this time around, and it's in these moments where Hanuvar becomes a character of competing juxtapositions, read, more compelling. This is a moment from the second chapter/short story:
His pulse was a drum at his temples. Enemies and allies alike had called him calm, but he could feel rage, and it swept unchecked through him. His hands shook, his teeth bared … Silently he screamed, and silently he wept. Had he been granted divine powers at that moment he would have crumbled the walls of Derva, thrown lightning against its temples, and sent fire coursing down its streets. Women, children, the elderly, slaves, servants, foreigners…he would not have cared, not at that moment. He would have jeered to see flames engulf the city. (53)
Here Jones allows us access to a much more human, much more recognizable Hanuvar, a quiet moment of internal conflict as our hero wrestles with the countless Volani dead and struggles with the emotional desire for revenge. As I mentioned in my first review, I don't want or need Hanuvar to become a compromised, morally grey character, but if I'm to believe in his own earnestness, in his own "unparalleled clarity of vision" as something immutable and virtuous, it becomes much easier to identify his hyperboles as strengths when set against a moment of frailty and weakness. Without these moments, Hanuvar becomes staid and one note. Jones pushes Hanuvar's humanity forward in Marble and Blood, a welcome development from Shattered Land and, I would argue, a necessary one if, again, we're to spend over a thousand pages with the same character. Indeed, Jones sets up a series of juxtaposing contradictions in Marble and Blood, pitting Hanuvar's own goals against competing positions, asking us to weigh multiple solutions. In the seventh tale, "Mask of Beauty," Hanuvar reflects on another character's vengeance, and he reveals that he understands "how enervating it was to try and root strength in the anger and the hate … he had even asked himself the kind of questions Senanara had demanded of him. He wondered sometimes if he always wore a kind of mask, pretending everything he did was rational and sane because if he were to pause, he'd be overcome by rage and despair" (266-67). Wearing masks, convincing the self of something you might not fully believe: Jones achieves an, albeit brief, commendable complexity of character in Marble and Blood, which he carries into the novel's climax.
In the final full-length tale, Jones sets up the ultimate conflict between Hanuvar and the Dervan emperor. But rather than devolve into yet another bloodbath, we again glimpse a wounded hero caught in struggle; Hanuvar "could not contain the rage, and he bared his teeth, as though he were an animal," desperate in that moment to simply end the emperor's life, the source of all his grief and mission (488). Of course, Hanuvar resists and does the morally upright, heroic thing, sparing his life and attempting to get him to safety. One could argue it's yet another predictable outcome for Hanuvar the Hero, but the virtue in this moment is earned through our hero's denial of that more "animal" side of himself, a depth of characterization that, for me, at least, sells his genuine ethos. Identity is formed through emergent encounters with difference, and it's in these moments of difference--of struggle, of denial, and, ultimately, of grace--that I encountered the real Hanuvar, the one hyped up in our opening preamble.
"But you kill. I'm told more than fifty thousand perished that day with my father and brother, at Acanar. Ciprion was there. He might have died as well. You started the war. How would you have ended it."
It was Derva that had started the war, by making their plans for domination manifest, and by gobbling up, taxing, subjugating, and otherwise interfering with Volanus' formerly free trade relations. But this was not a time for debate. By starting the war she meant that he was the one who had invaded their lands. And by that reckoning she was correct. (455)
I found this exchange compelling for the terms of the debate that it establishes, revealing that Hanuvar's decision to preemptively invade Derva ultimately cost thousands of lives and indirectly contributed to Volani's downfall. Of course the text assures us that Hanuvar was ultimately correct in his assumptions that Derva would push for total conquest and/or assimilation anyway, but Jones is at least starting to critique Hanuvar's own assumptions, as well as continuing to condemn imperial practices writ large. Hanuvar is, fundamentally, offering humanitarian aid in response to a refugee crisis instituted by imperial subjugation, and I found this moment even more stirring in the wake of the contemporary international crises in Ukraine and Palestine. Jones does not want his text to become a political polemic, but he does want the world to be better; he wants characters like Hanuvar to exist, which is a sentiment I also share. "'Basic empathy shouldn't be such a hard task,'" a character remarks, perhaps naively, but if there's one word that I would use to describe Jones's texts, it would be earnest. And the world could use more earnest empathy.
Marble and Blood is a complex book for me to evaluate (which somewhat accounts for how long this thing is). It develops the character of Hanuvar and pushes the world and its characters into more complex situations, but those moments still felt too fleeting in a novel that's 500 pages. What's more, the tales themselves felt more repetitious than they did in Shattered Land, simply more variations on the same theme. The weird sorcery returns, but the de-aging of Hanuvar that occurs early in the book-- an act that feels appropriately profane and profound--is more or less dismissed and shuffled to the background before it's easily resolved through some interdimensional magic, returning our hero right where he started. The revenants, a shadowy inquisitorial organization that felt like a significant threat in Shattered Land, are summarily dealt with without too much fuss in Marble and Blood. In short, I felt that the conflicts seemed to resolve themselves too easily, a problem likely caused by its structure; each story needs to set up its own internal drama and resolution, and then we do it all over again. Across a book half this length, I don't think I would have noticed the repetition. But for 500 pages? Things start to sag.
My criticisms aside,
however, I still thoroughly enjoyed this second entry. I looked forward to
settling down to read a tale or two of Hanuvar's further adventures, confident
that Jones would deliver a lean and thrilling story. And for all my critiques
of Hanuvar's character, there remains a refreshing quality to his genuine
empathy for his people and his continual resistance to the predictable route of
vengeance and bloodlust. So I'm still on board for the Hanuvar ride, and I'll
definitely be picking up book three, Shadow of the Smoking Mountain,
in 2024. If you enjoy tales of high adventure, sword and sorcery, and superhero
storytelling, this is the best, most contemporary commercial offering you're
likely to find, and hats off to Jones for his commitment and genuine passion
for his characters, his world, and his stories.
