Mistborn: The Final Empire Review

Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire does something I've yet to see a novel do: show what would happen if the villain won.  A thousand years ago the hero of prophecy set forth to save the world.  He failed and now the Lord Ruler reigns as both immortal emperor and god.  The descendents of the people who supported him are the nobles and aristocracy, while the descendents of the people who opposed him are known as the skaa and are treated as slaves.  Ash rains continuously from the skies blocking out the sky and making the sun appear as a molten red ball.  People have never seen green plants or flowers and the ash floods the world by day while the mists come at night.

The novel starts out really strong in the prologue with Kelsier, a man known as the Survivor since he's the only known one of a horror called the Pits of Hathsin where a metal known as atium is mined (more on that later).  Kelsier visits a group of plantation skaa at the end of the day after their backbreaking labor is done.  Elusive and legendary, Kelsier is both a beacon of hope and a cause for alarm among the skaa since he openly defies the nobility and associating with him could have any skaa beaten and/or killed.  The lord of that particular plantation no longer participates in that since Kelsier murders him that very night setting the tone for what's supposedly going to be a vengeance story, but then the gears switch over to the actual main character of the tale.

Vin is a street urchin currently working for a thieving crew headed by a brutal man named Camon who consistently beats her.  Vin is around sixteen years old and has been abandoned by everyone she thought she could trust.  Her brother Reen, who also beat her, left her long ago, fulfilling his words of "everyone will betray you" by doing so himself. The thieving crew operates in Luthadel, the largest city in the Final Empire and where the Lord Ruler resides, and Vin is useful to Camon for her ability to calm peoples' emotions, which is very useful for when one is trying to scam the nobility.  Vin is aware that she has some sort of power that she can't explain, but also knows that it's in limited supply and too quickly runs out.  She often spares some to use on Camon to avoid being beaten though this has backfired on her when he realizes she's doing so.

Kelsier comes back into the picture during an attempted job by Camon's crew to secure a canal route and thereby steal from one of the city's noble houses.  Kelsier is less than impressed with the way Camon has been treating Vin, ousts him and his crew from their lair and secures it for him and his crew taking Vin into his employ.  Kelsier's crew consists of a bunch of various characters including his brother, and the Survivor of Hathsin's big scheme is to do no less than to overthrow the Final Empire and kill the Lord Ruler, which everyone thinks is insane seeing as the Lord Ruler is (supposedly) no less than God, and, well you can't defeat God.  Kelsier vehemently disagrees with this belief and hates that everyone has fallen for it even unto the point that By the Lord Ruler is a common exclamation.  He thinks the emperor is a very powerful fraud, but a fraud nonetheless.  In this the novel shows some Gnostic leanings as that ideology states that the being we believe to be God is actually not and is rather an entity who claimed the title.  Whether Sanderson has studied this mode of thought or not I don't know, but you can definitely see its influence in his novel.

Before all of this can happen however, Vin needs to be brought into the realization of what she is.  Kelsier kept her in his crew because he recognized she wields the same power he has.  She's Mistborn, a person born with the ability to use allomancy or manipulate metals in a method they refer to as burning.  When Vin was calming emotions, she was actually burning brass to use a power called Soothing, but there are numerous other abilities a Mistborn has at their disposal.  Most people if they can use allomancy can only use one aspect of it and are called Mistings.  There are ten known metals, which work as opposed pairs for both physical and mental enhancements, and (we find out later) an eleventh "secret" one, which suggests to me that Sanderson was dabbling a bit in Qabbalistic theory as well.  This really solidifies when we find out more information about the Inquisitors (oh boy...), men with spikes hammered through their eye sockets that stick out the back of their heads.  Granted this is just the first book so there are probably more than eleven metals, which rips my Qabbalistic theory apart, but it works for this first installment and STILL stands true for the Inquisitors (I refuse to give up on making this my theory of everything!).

Crash course in allomantic metals! There are metals that grant physical and mental enhancements and they're generally paired.

Steel - people who can burn this are called Coinshots and use it to Push on nearby metals.  If the object weighs less than they do they'll fly through the air.  If it weighs more than they do they'll be pulled toward it.  I guess if they weigh the same it'll be a stalemate (random thought).

Iron - this is the opposing metal to steel so Lurchers, as they're called, Pull on nearby metals and it's similar to what Coinshots can accomplish with Steel.

Tin - Tineyes have the ability to enhance all of their senses, which makes them great as lookouts.  The disadvantage to this is that they can easily become overwhelmed since the volume is turned up to eleven all the time they're burning their metal.

Pewter - used by Pewterarms or the much simpler term Thugs, this metal allows the user to enhance their physical prowess so Thugs are useful in physical altercations.  Pewter is also useful if the user is injured as it gives the ability to carry on in the face of serious wounds or weariness.  Of course once the pewter runs out the Thug is faced with the full brunt of what they've endured, and they could potentially die from their wounds.  This would also be disastrous if they were carrying something really heavy...

Bronze - Seekers can burn this to find out if anyone is using allomancy in a particular vicinity.  I guess the area range is dependent on the strength of the seeker.

Copper - Mistings who can burn copper are called Smokers and they essentially create a smokescreen or (in their vernacular) a Coppercloud (which is their other name) from Seekers.  This ability is priceless to thieving crews who want to hide their metal burning from Inquisitors, Mistings or Mistborn.

Zinc - this metal inflames the emotions of people in the vicinity and Mistings who can use it are called Rioters (for obvious reasons).

Brass - this is the one that Vin has been unknowingly using all of her life, and it serves to sooth peoples' emotions so the Mistings that can use it are known as Soothers.

Gold - this one is rare and Vin doesn't find out about it until later in the story (I have some feelings about that, but I'll divulge later).  Gold shows what you could've been in the past.  It's rarely used since something like this can obviously cause emotional trauma and regret for what could've been.

Atium - ah the big one!  Atium is sort of the MacGuffin of the story and a big driving force behind the plot.  As gold shows the past atium reveals the future.  Burning this extremely precious metal will show a target's future moves so that the burner can easily avoid them.  Of course if the other person burns atium, as well, all possibilities will be visible since the original burner will then alter their course of action, which will then alter their opponents course of action and so on and so on.  Both people burning atium will bring the fight back to equilibrium, with the only advantage being if one person runs out.  Atium is what was being mined in Hathsin from whence Kelsier escaped and his master plan is to find the Lord Ruler's source, which will make him vulnerable.  The fact that a "deity" needs a source of power that will show him the future throws another wrench into the idea of his godhood.

The Eleventh Metal - this one doesn't even have a name and is in fact legendary.  Kelsier does manage to get his hands on it, but he doesn't know what it does; he only believes it can somehow defeat the Lord Ruler.  This may actually be the true MacGuffin of the story.

Alright...enough exposition and introduction of the plot.  Let's get to what I liked/didn't like!

Vin is pretty much your average orphan, foundling, urchin, etc. with mystical powers who is going to save the world (shocker).  I'm okay with this.  She's a fairly interesting character who definitely shows a lot of growth.  Her other part in Kelsier's plan (besides training her to use her powers as a mistborn) is to play the part of a young noble women and spy/infiltrate the aristocracy as Valette Renoux the niece of Lord Renoux who's actually an imposter planted by Kelsier.  Lord Renoux has been dead for a while (probably killed by Kelsier, but I forget), and she definitely is drawn out of her abused child shell with this task.  It's a total 180 from living hand to mouth, subsisting on scraps, and sleeping on the floor to having her own room/bed, dining and dancing with nobles, and not being beaten every day.

Kelsier's crew is made up of various Mistings: Breeze, an aristocratic looking man who serves as their Soother; Ham, their Thug, Kelsier's brother Marsh whose the Seeker; Clubs, the Smoker who owns a carpentry business that's often used as a cover (hehe, double entendre here); Lestibournes later referred to as Spook is the group's weirdly accented Tineye, and  Dockson who isn't an allomancer but serves as Kelsier's second in command and hates the nobility as much as the Survivor of Hathisin does.  Finally there's Sazed, a Terrisman who acts as steward to Lord Renoux in the plot.  He can use Feruchemy a contemporary but opposite ability set to Allomancy where users of the former use metals as holding units for power.

Honestly, I had to use the Mistborn wiki to remember all of these.  A lot of the crew is so forgettable and not fleshed out that I seriously had to force myself to remember how they fit into the narrative.  Breeze stands out due to his aristocratic speech since he deals with the nobility so much, and Sazed is memorable due to him being a Terrisman, which I'm guessing is another race like elves/dwarves especially owing to Sazed's description.  Spook has a soft of weird accent and is (of course) lovestruck with Vin, but Sanderson actually starts explaining certain aspects of some of these characters more than halfway and almost three-quarters of the way through the book!  He'll also brought up the term "kandra" in respect to some random noble's servant and I sat there scratching my head wondering what the hell he was talking about.  About fifty or so pages later the term is mentioned again in front of Vin and she questions it and I found that to be poor writing.  It would've been far better to bring up the term initially in front of a character who could be used as the foil to explain it.  My guess is he wanted to introduce it and leave it mysterious, but it came off as sloppy.

I had a tough time remembering what each metal did and what the name of each Misting who controlled said metal was called.  There was a lot of flipping back to the glossary at the end of the book to refresh my memory.  I feel that Sanderson could've done better with that by working descriptions of each into the narrative when they're mentioned in the beginning.  It was disruptive to be constantly checking on what the hell a Coinshot or a Tineye was when I was nearly through the book.

The dialogue in this novel is far too simplistic for what the story is about.    Besides Spook and Breeze there didn't seem to be much individualization in how each character speaks.  Nothing really sets them apart much in mannerisms either (unless we're told it does..more on that in the next paragraph).  The nobility is the same way.  I can't count how many times Sanderson mentioned something was said in an aristocratic way instead of just saying it in an aristocratic way.  Even the Lord Ruler has this very generic speech pattern.  He does call Vin a child, a lot, which I'm guessing is Sanderson's attempt to make him seem condescending.  It doesn't really work out all that way to distinguish him, and I felt the same way about the Inquisitors.  I almost wanted him to make them have this very distinct speech pattern due to what had been done to them; it would've made them seem far more creepy and other, which I'm assuming he'd want to do.  We're more told what a character's personality rather than shows, which leads me into my next point...

Sanderson is a HUGE perpetrator of telling instead of showing.  He'll often have a character think something along the lines of He's so strong! in the midst of a fight and then he'll go into showing how this is so where he could've easily dropped the thought bubble.  This telling besides showing takes away from some of the more brutal parts of the book as well.  There's one scene where Kelsier has the entire crew attend a public execution so that they can be reminded what they're fighting against.  He then makes a speech while in between paragraphs Sanderson reminds us that four more skaa have been killed, and that's literally what he says, "Four more people died."  It's so amazingly drab and doesn't begin to explain the horror of what they're seeing.  We're told throughout the novel that skaa women are consistently raped and then murdered by noble lords so that no halfbreeds are (supposedly) born, but the only time this is really ever seen is in the prologue, which is honestly what drew me into the book in the first place.  Don't get me wrong, I don't need to consistently see graphic rape scenes (I've been accused of not going into detail with one of those myself, wtf...), but Sanderson seems to work on a system of narrative where we hear people mentioning it to characters instead of having it shown within the work.

What kept me reading was the idea behind the Lord Ruler being a god usurper.  Unentitled apotheosis has always been an interest of mine.  The beginning of every chapter had a blurb that appeared to be the hero's story about how he defeated something known as the Deepness (shivers) and THAT definitely interested me.  I really wanted to know what this Deepness was and what he had to do to defeat it.  I also began to believe that the hero of legend was actually the Lord Ruler, but something had gotten into him and changed him into the emperor/tyrant god that he became.  Maybe he didn't defeat the Deepness...maybe the Deepness took over him.  This had a bit of a Cthulhu vibe and I'm a sucker for anything Lovecraftian. 

I struggled between giving Mistborn: The Final Empire 2 or 3 stars, but I think I can give it 3 due to the fact that I'm interested in reading the next installment.  Despite the flaws Sanderson did manage to intrigue me and make me want to know more about this Deepness and what the Lord Ruler was really protecting mankind from even if I do have to take it along with the mostly generic characters, overly verbose dialogue, telling vs. showing, and uninteresting fight scenes.  I think despite all of that it was still worth my time in reading it, and if you can get past the foibles I mentioned, it's worth your time, too.