Entering Elantris

I recently started reading Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. It's his first novel, and that fact does color my perceptions of the book. First, it's 60 percent longer than my Nethereal manuscript, giving me encouragement that my work is an acceptable length for a first book.

Besides the editing considerations, Elantris' plot is very high-concept, which is how I like it. A land inspired by late medieval Europe plays host to a race of immortal sages randomly divinized by unknown mystical forces. These chosen demigods all congregate in the tale's eponymous city, where they forge startling new technologies with magical runes and buy the commoners' adoration with free food.

Sanderson then brilliantly describes the crushing end of a bread and circuses based political structure when the same ineffable force that gave the Elantrians their power capriciously takes it away. In a delightfully perverse twist, the former divinities aren't just demoted back to human status. They become leprous undead wretches, unable to work their former magics or even to heal from the slightest wounds. The gods' former seat of power becomes their plague colony: a filth-ridden tomb shunned by its former subjects.

Ten years of upheaval follow as anyone and anything connected with Elantris' cursed inhabitants is violently uprooted and cast aside. The monied middle class, being the only group whose prosperity didn't depend on the Elantrians' largesse, step in to fill the power vacuum. One of Sanderson's master strokes is depicting the upjumped nobility's aversion to keeping servants after seeing the Elantrians' former worshipers turn on them.

There's always room for improvement, especially in a first novel (if eighteen months of revisions taught me anything, this is it). I'll list a few weaknesses I've found in Elantris with the caveat that I'm only a quarter of the way through the book, and it's difficult to judge a work's merits until the last word is read.

As mentioned above, Elantris is long. I'm a marathon reader; not a guy who consumes one coffee break-sized chapter at a time. Yet I'm progressing at roughly half the pace I set while reading Count to a Trillion, which is comparable in length. I think Elantris' pacing needs some work, but I'm not sure how yet.

Though their dialogue is solid, most of the characters serve as exemplars of established fantasy archetypes without enough to flesh them out (at least so far; some main and side characters show promise). The prince is an able leader trained in the arts of politics: in short, a prince. However, his native likability succeeds in gaining reader sympathy for his plight. Princess Sarene reads like a suffragette transported to Henry VIII's England. She's very good at it though, and her characterization could hint at why Sanderson was named Jordan's heir.

The character who most engages me is (of course) main antagonist Hrathen: a high priest of a militaristic faith who's given three months to convert a foreign kingdom. Sanderson gives him perhaps the biggest stakes of any main character in terms of immediate ramifications, for his failure will mean the country's bloody demise.

Those are my first impressions of Elantris. I'll reserve my final review till I've finished the book.