Review: The Lost Metal

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sanderson is possibly my favourite living author (competing for the title with Jim Butcher, who hasn't been as productive in recent years), and the Mistborn books are my favourite Sandersons; I've given each of them that I've read five stars, which is not something I do lightly.

First and least importantly, they're almost impeccably edited, as you'd expect given the number of eyes that go over them before publication (judging from the acknowledgements). This one does have one probable error: "trestle" where it should be "trellis". But only one error (maybe) in a book this size is outstanding.

Second, they're exciting. They're basically fantasy supers stories; the inborn magical abilities of the characters are varied and cleverly used in solving a wide variety of difficult problems that also require courage, perseverance, teamwork and an unwavering ethical stance on the part of the protagonists. And lots of things go interestingly boom along the way.

Third, they have an ensemble cast, something I personally enjoy a lot; the cast is varied, they each get to have character development (a lot of it, which is a big factor in the five-star rating) and interiority, they work well together and respect each other's abilities, their voices are distinct, and which character has the point of view in each scene is well chosen.

Fourth, they're funny. Wayne, in particular, is hilarious, both in his thought process and the way he expresses himself (verbally and in his actions). There's a style of epic fantasy that takes itself incredibly seriously and never for a moment lightens up or gives us a glimpse of whimsy or humour, and that style is the poorer for it, and this style is not at all that style. At the same time, it doesn't try hard to be funny; it's not "funny fantasy" in the sense of broadly parodying its own genre with a cardboard cast whose main characteristics are their silly names. The humour is the spice, not the rice.

Fifth, they have high stakes and epic scope. That's not essential for my enjoyment; I'm all for a cosy fantasy, but I do like a good save-the-world plot too, and this is very much one.

That leads me to the one drawback of the books for me. They're set in Sanderson's connected universe, the Cosmere, which unites five or six book series and has an elaborate overarching mythology, some of which we get here; and the Mistborn books themselves are now seven thick volumes in the main series plus supplementary material, and several characters from the first trilogy (two books of which I read more than a decade ago and the third of which I've never managed to get to) are now figures of myth; and with all of this impinging on this volume and playing a significant role in driving the plot, I felt sometimes that the book was choking on its own accumulated lore. There were a number of places where I knew I was missing something because I haven't read everything Sanderson has written, even in this series, and what I have read I haven't necessarily read recently enough to remember all the details. Even the previous book in the series, which I read almost exactly a year ago, is complicated enough, and I've read enough other books since, that I didn't remember everything I was probably supposed to in order to follow everything that was going on.

Still, because the book works at multiple different levels simultaneously, it's not actually essential to follow all the details of the cosmic maneuverings in order to enjoy it. There's action, there's humour, there's lots and lots of character development, the things that are happening matter personally to the people who are involved in them, and none of that depends on remembering (or even knowing) what happened four books ago or in another series.

Apparently Sanderson's plan is, after the first trilogy (which was epic fantasy, but with a big old twist, and also a supers heist), and this second group of four (which is kind of steampunk, but also with a lot of supers and heists), that the third set of books will be sort of cyberpunkish (I'm betting on supers and heists, though), and the fourth will be space opera. I'm very much looking forward to them, because whatever Sanderson writes is well written, and I largely come for the style, not the genre. (Plus I like all of those genres, though I like epic fantasy the least.)

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