Review of "A Desolation Called Peace" by Arkady Martine

Disclaimer: I received an advance copy from Tor in exchange for an honest review.

A Memory Called Empire was one of my favorite books of 2019, so I was thrilled to get an early look at A Desolation Called Peace. Without hesitation, I can say that Arkady Martine has built on an amazing debut novel and delivered an excellent follow-up. Even though Memory worked well as a stand-alone, Desolation is very much a second book. It takes the characters and setting that we are already comfortable with and uses it to dig deeper into the questions of cultural imperialism and autonomy that were central to Memory, while making full use of the rich sci-fi setting and using the truly alien in a much more direct way. For anyone who enjoyed the rich prose, tense atmosphere, and intricate political maneuvers of the first book, this one will not disappoint. For anyone who wanted a closer look into the emotional lives of the main characters (especially Three Seagrass, who was held at some remove until the end of Memory), this book is for you as well.

Now that the “review” part is covered, a few looser thoughts. These will be full of spoilers, so read no further if you want to remain un-spoiled (and I do recommend that you do, if only for the experience of seeing the book unspool for the first time). Memory was a book that featured a core set of characters. Initially it was only Mahit and Three Seagrass; in the middle section, Twelve Azalea joined the cast. Other characters, like Emperor Six Direction, Nineteen Adze, and the surgeon who fixes Mahit’s imago, swirl around that core, entering and exiting the narrative according to the gravity of our main cast. While Desolation has more “main characters”—in particular, Eight Antidote, Nine Hibiscus, and Twenty Cicada join Mahit and Three Seagrass—its central unit is the dyad. Martine pairs characters who balance each other like two strands of a helix; rather than being in opposition, they highlight each other’s facets and draw parallels. Early in the novel, Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada dance around issues of what it means to be a “perfect Teixcalaanlitzim.” Twenty Cicada is explicitly described as the very model of a second-in-command, but of course his beliefs about homeostasis eventually make him the perfect bridge to a wholly alien way of thinking as well. Nine Hibiscus, the beloved yaotlek, is deeply unorthodox and politically problematic, but in an entirely different way. Equally as compelling are the discussions between Eight Antidote and Nineteen Adze. The former is compellingly written as an intelligent, well-shepherded child, but a child nonetheless, while the latter walks the line between cool political operator (never has “the edgeshine of a knife” been more appropriate than when she recounts her wartime decisions) and something much more fragile.

Nineteen Adze is a character that stands out to me in this novel, and the series as a whole. She invites comparison to the protagonist of another favorite series of mine, Seth Dickinson’s Masquerade. Like the titular Baru Cormorant of those novels, Nineteen Adze does not shy away from hard choices; indeed, she seems to believe that some choices must be hard. Both on the personal level (consenting to Yskandr’s murder; almost allowing Mahit to die) and on the galactic one (wiping out one planet and countenancing xenocide) she is reminiscent of Baru’s belief that there is no way out. But where Baru is clearly a protagonist, and the audience is placed in her head and behind her eyes as she looks out on the world and acts, our perspective on Nineteen Adze is reversed. In Memory, she is an antagonist we come to understand and warm to—though she keeps Mahit prisoner at first, we are shown her reasons, and her willingness to step back from the precipice of her previous choices. In Desolation, the “good side” of Nineteen Adze comes through mostly in the chapter epigrams, which reveal a woman alone and adrift without the anchors she had built her life around—Yskandr and Six Direction. However, our main view of her is through Eight Antidote’s eyes, where she plays the role of a slightly more benevolent Big Brother. When Eight Antidote confronts her about the decision to bomb the aliens, we are squarely on his side, mirroring all the times we are on Baru’s side as she re-breaks what is left of her heart by condemning another principle to destruction. Our feelings about Nineteen Adze as readers are like Mahit’s—driven more by memory and understanding of who she was (in other moments, set apart from the text) than the experience of her in the moment.

Going back to dyads, Mahit and Three Seagrass are still the core of the novel, even if they are less central in terms of time “on screen.” While we spent a good amount of time in Mahit’s head, Three Seagrass was a mystery for almost the entirety of Memory, as alluring and inscrutable as Teixcalaan itself. Well, wonder no longer! Secrets laid bare! Emotional fruit picked! We get to experience the full range of Three Seagrass, from her satisfied confidence as she once again puts herself in the center of the action, to the sharpness, confusion, and anger of not knowing what she has done wrong, to the love that she is able to find and admit for Mahit and for people beyond Teixcalaan. The emotional content in Memory was mostly introspective—there was a lot to say about one’s place in the world, and the experience of watching oneself change, but not much in the way of interpersonal interactions. Of course, any book built on dyads cannot shy away from the feelings two people have for each other, and Martine does wonderfully in writing a rich variety of emotional scenes between our two leads. The fight between Mahit and Three Seagrass is a gut-punch, a chapter that leaves you with the sick feeling of having lost something vital and not knowing how to get it back (it was the last chapter I read before pausing for the night when I first got the book, and what a decision that was). Their slow journey back to mutual understanding, to a willingness to move forward as a couple but also to recognize each other as individuals, is a joy to read. This is not Baru’s world, where even if love is not doomed it hardly has the space to flourish until hundreds of pages of pain have been passed through and inscribed on the characters’ flesh. It is a world where, even within the space of a single novel, there is room to find, admit, and face one’s flaws, and to get a second chance not in the abstract but with the very person you had wronged in the beginning. The story of Mahit and Three Seagrass is a story of first contact gone right; of a fatal attraction that was able to overcome its fatality; of the complicated, messy, challenging, ever-present work of navigating another person’s world.

Finally, a note on plot. In Chapter Two, we are told how Nine Hibiscus won a battle by doing nothing and trusting that her enemy was in fact her friend. We don’t know it at the time, but Martine has just given away the ending of the book! Twenty Cicada, Nine Hbiscus’s most trusted ally, “infiltrates” the “enemy,” and when the aliens are poised to attack they are revealed to be allies. Crisis is averted, and the ultimate price need not be paid. This is a wonderful bit of parallelism, and something it took me two readings to pick up on. As well, the ending for Mahit, in which she once again turns down the opportunity to parlay her triumph into prestige and inclusion in the heart of Teixcalaan, is of course a direct parallel to the ending of Memory. However, the valence has changed. The ending of Memory was on the bitter side of bittersweet. Even if Mahit had kept Lsel safe, she—and we as readers—had learned that there is no home to go back to. Mahit was not the person she was at the start of the book; she was not a person at all, in the eyes of the people she most ardently admired; she was too corrupted to be believed, in the eyes of those she had trusted without question. Mahit turned down Texicalaan because if she didn’t, then there would be nothing left of her. Now, at the end of Desolation, Mahit’s refusal is because she sees a better option, a way to preserve herself and to continue the journey that she can now imagine. She doesn’t refuse Teixcalaan because she’s not good enough, or would not be seen as good enough. She doesn’t refuse for fear of what she might become. She refuses because she knows what she might become, and wants to leave space for that personal growth, rather than taking the path that she now understands will still be there for her in the future.

I haven’t even said anything about the concept of self and how it is explored through the aliens, Shardsight, or Yskandr’s growing presence in Mahit’s head (and the parallels that has to Ninefox Gambit, as was the case in Memory). I haven’t said anything about poetry, which plays a subtler role here. I haven’t drawn out the Baru Cormorant parallel and talked about Nine Hibiscus and Sixteen Moonrise as two facets of my favorite minor character from that series, the doomed Traitor-Admiral Juris Ormsment (oh! what a terrible thing, to be bound to duty, to stand before an unfair world and be unable to make it right). I haven’t even pulled all of the fantastic quotes that show how Martine’s command of prose has grown, how she continues to balance rich descriptions with cutting phrases, how her spaceship names are a perfect metonymy for the civilization she’s built. There’s just too much for me to say about this book, and some of it inevitably has to wait for another day. The preview chapters of this book that have been released online are a tour de force; the rest of the novel takes that outstanding beginning and runs with it. I hope this review has convinced you to read it again, to read both of these books again, to read everything I have mentioned again, because it really is a joy to be able to experience a writer like this at the peak of her craft.

Five out of five stars, three out of three seagrasses, eight out of eight antidotes.