The blurb:
As Marat’s siege engine bores through the Tower, Senlin can do nothing but observe the mayhem from inside the belly of the beast. Edith and her crew are forced to face Marat on unequal footing, with Senlin caught in the crossfire, while Adam attempts to unravel the mystery of his fame inside the crowning ringdom. And when the Brick Layer’s true ambition is revealed, neither the Tower nor its inhabitants will ever be the same again.
The review:
I’m going to start this review in a way that isn’t the most professional. Rather than diving straight into any praise or critique, I want to talk about what this series means to me.
Reading can a very emotionally intensive hobby. That’s an obvious and somewhat trite statement, but it’s true. We put ourselves in the shoes of other people, and in some fashion live through a simulation of their lives. The best writers allow us to feel the emotions that their characters would have felt. But even beyond the skill, experience, and hard hours that go into creating a book… On the reader’s end, there’s sometimes — very rarely — an intangible, magical something that allows a book to connect with you on a deeper level.
As wonderful and magical and Disney as that sounds, that intangibility frustrates me as a reviewer. Because I don’t know how to tell you how these books made me feel. I used the word “professional” earlier, but at the end of the day I’m just a guy on his lunch-break fumbling to describe the words of far more talented writers. I can tell you that I felt that connection with the Books of Babel. I can tell you that this series is one of the very few that felt like it actually transported me to a different world. I can hit all the buzzwords, or construct short, snappy sentences to be lifted for social media, but I just… My feelings for these books are too huge, too complex, too contradictory for me to articulate.
I never expected to love them like I do. I first picked up Senlin Ascends for a book club on Reddit. It had some buzz behind it following some good reviews, but as contrary as I am, I wasn’t prepared to buy into the hype. Four or five years later, I feel like I’m grieving the loss of a friend now that the series is finished. If all the stories I’ve ever read could form a library in my mind, that library would have statues to Tom, Edith, Voleta, and Marya inside. There would be paintings of my favourite scenes on any spare patch of wall, and the closing scene of the series would have pride of place.
I’ll try to tease without spoiling anything here, but that scene was everything I’d wanted. I love finales that end with more of an ellipsis than an exclamation mark, and I’d say this fell into that category. Josiah Bancroft has such a way of setting a scene, posing a question, and leaving enough space for the reader’s imagination to bloom. And for me, that kind of feeling is at the heart of this series. I love the way that reading these novels can feel more like examining a painting or a poem, rather than watching some kind of action movie.
…unfortunately, that leads into my main criticism. One which, honestly, I’m expecting to be entirely personal and very at odds with what most readers will think. Essentially, I thought that The Fall of Babel was quite action-and-fight-scene heavy, in a way which I felt was out of keeping with the rest of the series.
Most of this, I think, is down to my personal expectations. I had internalised The Books of Babel as a voyage of discovery for their characters — both in terms of physical discoveries within the tower, and more introspective discoveries about themselves. The Fall of Babel is bookended with blocks of chapters that totally deliver on that front — the opening chapters were some of my favourites from the book. In the middle, however, there’s a lot of fighting and running and chasing that, while exciting, felt ever-so-slightly out of place for me. Which wasn’t helped by some confusing POV structuring. It started to feel a little Marvel at points (including the addition of more goons), and if you’ll allow me to butcher that comparison, I was hoping for something more WandaVision than Endgame.
I should emphasise at this point that these nit-picks did nothing to stop me loving the time I got to spend with probably my favourite character cast in fiction. If anything, I love some of them even more after finishing. Both Marya and Reddleman get more time to shine in this final volume, and I found some of their dialogue to feel at once feel incredibly poignant, and very effective at establishing their characters. To give an (admittedly ironic) example:
“My piano moved from the pub to the opera house and everything changed. I started thinking about my technique, my posture, whether I had the ability to play with any real affettuoso. My fans raved over my worst blunders; my critics jeered my best efforts. The thing I had once gone to the piano for—the escape, the community—became my public function. I was the people’s piano, a thing to be banged on and knocked out of tune. That’s what I think about now when I sit down at the keys.”
Of course, we also learn a lot more of the Tower’s secrets. Not all of them, mind. But enough. The Sphinx, The Bricklayer, The hods, The purpose of the Tower… all of that is explored.
I said earlier that I feel like I’m grieving now that this series is done. That might be some slightly hyperbolic language, sure, but… again, I don’t know how to convey the depth of my feelings towards these books. This is a story that will always, always stay with me. It has got me through some hard times, and it will do again. I wore a quote from this series pinned to my chest for my wedding day. What more can I say?
If you haven’t read it yet, please do.
We received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Orbit UK for the review copy!
The Fall of Babel is available to purchase in ebook today, or from 11th November in paperback!
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