Review: The Art of Prophecy

The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an example of a well-written book that didn't much match my taste, hence its position in the Bronze tier of my Best of the Year list.

With the exception of one consistent common error (using "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration), there are few copy editing errors even in the pre-release version I got via Netgalley for review. That's a good start.

There are several capable, and distinct, women as both viewpoint and secondary characters, which is great. And (the reason I picked it up) it subverts the Chosen One of Prophecy trope; the remaining viewpoint character is that Chosen One, and he's a pouty, spoiled teenage brat, and he doesn't get a pass for it. The women, including a woman in her later years, are a lot more interesting; this is often the case with stories involving entitled young men, but here they are also given most of the focus, something that often doesn't happen when there's an entitled young man around.

All of this is great, and is the reason (along with general competent craft) that the book goes on my Best of the Year list. The reason it only just gets on there, though, is the tone and the nature of the events.

I am very much not a fan of dark, violent stories, and this is one (though not lacking in noir humour). What's more, it's a dark, violent story in which the violence is always shown to be futile, the consequence of a corrupt system that pits the characters against one another and destroys innocent bystanders, and in which all of that suffering ends up making very little difference. Nobody wins. Nobody triumphs. At the end of the book, the characters are not in a notably better state (apart from the entitled young man having unlearned some of his bad habits and being potentially salvageable as a human being) than they were at the start; the various parts of the political situation that caused all the suffering are not resolved, or even much changed; and I was left feeling, "What was the point of all that?"

It's not all the way grimdark, in that three out of four of the viewpoint characters are, in their own way, decent people caught up in events too large for them (the fourth is an outright psychopath). But it's not far enough from grimdark for my personal taste, and I won't be following the series any further.

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