The City of Brass (Part 4)
STATS
Title: The City of Brass
Series: The Daevabad Trilogy (Book 1)
Author(s): S. A. Chakraborty
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: 2017
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Rating: 5/10 (Fantasy audiences), 7/10 (Muslim Young Adult audience)
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers will be necessary to properly break down this story. I will include “Heavy Spoilers” in the heading for any section where further detail is required. I will keep the first paragraph of these sections as spoiler-free as possible in case you want to read the book for yourself before coming back for the full analysis.
CHARACTERS
The characters of The City of Brass had potential. None of them are terrible in concept. All of them are functional within their narrative roles. While the core cast is small, Chakraborty made them into nuanced individuals. She took this to the point that they read very differently depending on the POV and situation through which they are viewed.
It is this last point that causes issues. These different facets of the characters are taken too far. At their best, these characters are inconsistent, with traits being neglected for extended stretches of the text or else leaning entirely on informed characterization. At their worst, they are so contradictory as to be multiple individuals sharing one body.
Nahri
As indicated by the premise, Nahri is the protagonist of The City of Brass. She begins the story as a young woman living on the streets of Cairo in the 18th Century. Born with an innate ability to sense illness and infirmity in others, a healing factor on par with Wolverine (not that she is ever forced to test it to the same degree), and both the innate understanding of the Daeva language and the ability to quickly learn any human language she hears (despite being illiterate, so she can’t study it as easily as we could today), Nahri works hard to provide for herself and save up for a medical education in Istanbul. She does this by scamming rich hypochondriacs and poor immigrants with mentally ill relatives. During one of the latter scams, she accidentally summons Dara, an ancient and legendary Daeva warrior, to serve her. This exposes her as a scion of the Nahids. Now hunted by vengeful ifrit, Nahri must flee to Daevabad.
Young Adult Protagonist
Nahri’s characterization is not the only factor that tipped me off to this book being written for a Young Adult audience. However, it was the first one I noticed. Familiar tropes are folded into her. Even before she summoned her smoldering Bad Boy Love Interest, she was established as the axis for the book’s Protagonist-Centered Morality.
In her very first scene, Nahri scams two rich Turks. She justifies her confidence scheme by reasoning that her victims are rich enough that they won’t even notice how much she steals from them. I really like this scene as a characterization moment, but I can’t help but notice that Chakraborty is supporting Nahri’s actions by making a big deal about the wealth of the Turks, how one of them was rude to Nahri, and how the other was old and had bad breath (and also a marrying a woman who was younger than him). There is a plain attempt to assert that these men deserved what Nahri was doing to them. This sort of framing is used across many genres, but it works especially well when establishing simplistic morality for Young Adult audiences.
Then Nahri scams poor immigrants by pretending that she can heal a mentally ill girl, claiming that she can exorcize the ifrit that the immigrants believe to have possessed the girl. This is something she is explicitly established to have done multiple times before. She realized that exorcists make a fair bit of money off donations from the community, so she learned the ritual and puts on a show to scam these immigrants with limited resources.
This second confidence scheme is only a couple scenes after she robs the rich men. None of the justifications from that first event apply here, yet the audience is expected to side with Nahri because … she needs the money for her fancy education. Not to survive - she makes more than enough for that. It’s all about chasing her desires. By the book’s own standards of morality, Nahri is the villain here, but we are supposed to focus solely upon her emotions and motivations over the facts. This is something that works better in Young Adult, where the audience is more concerned about the why of Nahri’s actions than the how. It is somewhat insulting to be asked to overlook this as an adult.
(It turns out that the girl in this scene is possessed by an ifrit. This does not justify what Nahri does in that scene. She explicitly believes that the exorcisms don’t do anything and that the girl is just mentally ill.)
Furthermore, Nahri is a Mary Sue.
I know that this is a very charged term. I really did not want to use it. While reading the book, I merely thought Nahri was an overpowered wish-fulfillment character. I had started to formulate a defense for how, despite being overpowered, she wasn’t a Mary Sue. It wasn’t until I started to type up said defense that I realized how wrong my original position was.
Nahri does not truly struggle. The plot, the world, and the characters bend to accommodate her. Multiple magical gifts are just dropped in her lap. The Bad Boy Love Interest is handed to her. Her royal bloodline, with the Chosen One status it grants her in Daevabad, is gift-wrapped. The only thing that Nahri earns is literacy, but even then, we don’t see her struggle for it. She learns to read, off-screen, in just a few scenes. The narrative also goes out of its way to validate her. We’ve already touched upon the way her narcissism and the sexual assault are glossed over, but there is also the matter of her being praised for being intelligent and cunning enough to out-maneuver nobles whom have studied for their whole lives. She’s treated like the next Grand Admiral Thrawn, but the scenes where she would demonstrate this are conveniently omitted.
Recent history has shown that Young Adult audiences are more lenient towards Mary Sues. They are accepted as a form of wish-fulfillment. It is story-breaking overkill in adult Fantasy.
Overall Impressions
We know that I despise this character. We have covered her as a Young Adult protagonist. The question is, though: from an objective literary perspective, is she well-written?
Nahri has a strong start. Chakraborty effectively establishes her cunning, ruthless pragmatism, and unrelenting dedication. She also has a compassionate streak, as she felt some genuine sympathy for the possessed girl during the scene where she robbed the girl’s family. Had this characterization continued throughout the book, I’d say that Nahri is an incredibly engaging protagonist. Your mileage may vary for how likeable she is, but she is interesting. In concept, she should be the perfect character to introduce into the political powder keg that is Daevabad.
Unfortunately, problems start as soon as she and Dara get on the road to Daevabad. She is reduced to a very generic Young Adult Romance protagonist. There are no chances to showcase her cunning. Her interactions with Dara reveal that her supposed pragmatism and dedication are, in reality, narcissism and an utter lack of moral standards. On my first read, I chalked this up to her being out of her element and hoped that things would improve when they arrived in Daevabad.
Things didn’t improve. Nahri stops showcasing the traits that made her engaging and just stumbles through the rest of the book while complaining about being in an unfamiliar environment. She can’t pick up on subtext, and all the manipulations that she supposedly employs occur off-screen. The most we get is her talking about treating other characters as marks.
At the end of the book, Chakraborty tries to set up that Nahri is ready to be the Chosen One for her people, prepared to outwit the King of Daevabad with her cunning. There is a callback to her confidence scheme with the two Turks. And … it’s laughable. If I had skipped from the beginning of this book to the end, I’d have assumed the story in between was this epic political thriller to rival A Song of Ice and Fire. Having read that story, I have no idea how Nahri could possibly be capable of outwitting a king.
In short, Nahri’s problems boil down to inconsistent characterization. Who she is at the start of the story is fantastic. Even with the Protagonist-Centered Morality and her flaws, she is engaging. The engagement falls apart by the end. The qualities that make her great are ignored for too long.
Ali
Prince Alizayd al Qahtani is the second son of the King of Daevabad. He is a devout Muslim, for which he is demonized as a zealot. His faith pushes him to help the shafit by funding the Tanzeem. For his entire life, he has also trained to be the Qaid (a Hand of the King-type position) to his older brother Muntadhir. He is thus far more comfortable among soldiers than the court.
Ali is the secondary POV character of this story. Note that I said “POV character”, not “protagonist” (which would technically make him a deuteragonist). Ali does not really have his own story. He facilitates Nahri's story. In particular, he is a means for us to learn about the political situation in Daevabad before Nahri’s arrival.
So I’ve Been Told
Ali is the most consistently written out of the core cast of this story. He is also not assassinated by either the Protagonist-Centered Morality or any ripple effects from the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, he suffers worse than Nahri from the book’s insistence to tell us about important character moments rather than showing us his struggle.
This is most evident is Ali’s faith and the perception others have of him for it. The accusation that Ali is a zealot is thrown around a few scenes before any attempt is made to justify the accusation. The evidence that we eventually get is extremely weak and circumstantial.
He refers to Daevas as “fire-worshippers”. This is not established as a slur until after the halfway point of the book. So many djinn and shafit use it that we can’t really conclude anything about his characterization from the slur alone. (Plus, it’s not like he has any other name by which to refer to their faith.)
He gets offended when the wazir sends prostitutes to his room. This is not an extreme reaction. Imagine if someone you didn’t like sent you pornographic imagery, and you knew they were deliberately doing it to cause you sexual discomfort and spite your personal values. You’d probably show less restraint than Ali does in this situation.
He verbally reprimands the owner of a brothel for the nature of her business. He does this because he has legitimate reason to suspect (or, at least, be concerned) that one of the shafit girls there is victim of shafit trafficking. In other words, he is trying to help a sex slave. Again, imagine how you would react in this situation.
There are hints that Ali reviews Daevas as morally degenerate. This had potential, but the narrative doesn’t explore it. We don’t know what standards Ali is using (and I’m taking about the specifics, not merely the fact that he’s Muslim). Also, given that he has already seen that Daevas are involved in shafit trafficking by the time this reveal happens, it’s not clear how much of this is purely a matter of his religious beliefs versus a reaction to the suffering he’s witnessed.
He does not want to spend time alone with Nahri due to the potential sexual temptation. Not only is this not enough to mark him him as a zealot in isolation (consider the time, place, and culture), but the way the book frames it, he comes across more as an incredibly awkward young man who’s unused to spending time with women.
This doesn’t work no matter how Chakraborty wanted us to interpret the character. If the goal was to establish that Ali is indeed a zealot, she failed to provide evidence to support the characterization. If the goal is to establish that Ali is the victim of stereotyping and persecution (and I suspect this was her actual intent, given her stated motives for writing this book), it still doesn’t work, as we are not given enough information to understand Ali’s true conduct as a Muslim.
That poor religious worldbuilding rears its ugly head here. Chakraborty needed to establish how Ali’s behavior contrasted with the rear of Daevabad and what specific behaviors or actions made others perceive him as an extremist. This is another example of how the lack of Islamic worldbuilding goes beyond the issue of whether a reader is Muslim. The contrast between a character and the culture in which he lives needs to be demonstrated in order for this sort of story to work.
Telling rather than showing is also abused to rush Ali’s plot along. Key beats of his story are skipped over, with us cutting directly to the aftermath. This is, I suspect, an effort to maintain a fast pace that Young Adult audiences would enjoy, but it makes the character feel very hollow.
The most glaring example of this comes right before Nahri arrives in Daevabad. Ali is made the temporary Qaid of Daevabad as a test of his abilities. The first command his father gives him is to execute a crackdown on the shafit, with the intent being to force the Tanzeem out into the open. We get multiple scenes after this: Ali attending court, Ali doing his duties in the city, the scene at the brothel, Ali meeting with the Tanzeem and telling them that he needs to cut their funding, and Ali doing paperwork. Then his father summons him to discipline him for not cracking down on the shafit.
The problem? Ali has not had the opportunity to fail in this task. If anything, we have been shown, repeatedly, that he attends to his duties as best as he is able. Not being shown the crackdown is not an acceptable substitute for showing a deliberate decision to not execute the crackdown, especially not if this is meant to factor into a character conflict. The only thing we get is a predicate phrase - not even a whole sentence - during the Tanzeem meeting about “quietly delaying the harsher measures” that his father ordered for the crackdown. This is buried inside an expositional blurb. What’s more, the outcome of that Tanzeem scene is him declaring that he will stand by his father’s will. The King berating him for failure therefore comes across as nonsense.
Passive Observer
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Ali is his lack of agency.
I cannot name a single decision that Ali makes that both impacts the story and was not made because someone or something twisted his arm. The closest he comes is the decision to hold off on prosecuting the shafit crackdown, but the scene where he makes that decision is not included within the story. He is the embodiment of a character who reacts rather than acting, and even then, his reactions achieve very little.
Ultimately, Ali is a periscope. He allows Chakraborty to develop Daevabad as a setting before Nahri arrives. Once Nahri is in the city, he’s used to feed the audience information that Nahri can’t learn on her own and to give Nahri someone to interact with when Dara is not around. He did but need to be devoid of agency to fulfill this role. Chakraborty chose to go out of her way to deny it to him.
This gets really insulting in the climax. We'll get to that next week. Just understand that Chakraborty had a chance to let him make a meaningful decision there, and instead, she chose to rip even that away from him.
Dara
Darayavahoush e-Afshin is a legendary (or notorious, depending on the faction) Daeva who was the Nahids’ champion prior to being made into a djinn slave by the ifrit. He spent a millennium as a slave, going through hundreds of masters, destroying entire cities in said masters’ names before finding a means to kill each one of them. When Nahri inadvertently summons him during an ifrit exorcism, he is unwilling to help her at first, but his honor and devotion to the Nahid bloodline drives him to ensure the best possible future for her.
Dara’s function in the story is to be the smoldering Bad Boy Love Interest who physically arouses Nahri and who can be fixed by her love. This function is transparent as soon as their third scene together. That being said, effort was made to give him genuine depth and nuance. This isn’t an Edward Cullen clone who whines about being a monster despite never being shown to do anything that the audience might object to. Dara is a hardened warrior who did terrible things to end a war efficiently and to suppress future conflicts. Abhorrent through his methods were (and the story does acknowledge this), he is presented in a way that makes his decisions understandable. Additionally, his trauma over his time as a djinn slave is neither overdone nor unrelatable. Being made into a slave was not a consequence of his past actions (at least, this book does not establish that), so we aren’t being asked to pity a character for a mess he created.
Two-Faced
Chakraborty tried to capture the gulf between how Nahri and the Daevas perceive Dara versus the djinn who currently control Daevabad perceive him. I applaud her for attempting this, but the final result was overdone. It produced character inconsistency is so severe that it become character assassination.
Prior to arriving in Daevabad, Dara makes no secret of the fact that the current rulers will see him as a criminal. Only his honor and loyalty force him to keep going. When he arrives in Daevabad, the King of Daevabad surprised him. Rather than execute Dara, the King tries to win him over as an ally in the name of preserving the social balance. The King deploys soldiers, led by Muntadhir, to join Dara on a hunt for the ifrit who pursued Nahri. While this was partly a means to get Dara out of the way so that Nahri would be isolated in the King’s court, this was also a show of trust. The King of Daevabad was effectively handing Dara his heir as a hostage to show that he would not dare harm Nahri. Dara promises Nahri that he will return once the threat the ifrit pose to her has been eliminated, then set forth on his hunt.
The Dara rematerializes in Daevabad.
I phrase it that way because “returns” fails to convey how abrupt this is. He just walks into one of Ali’s POV chapters, gives an handwaved excuse for why he returned without Muntadhir, and proceeds to be the poster boy for the stereotypical alpha male while thrashing Ali in a practice duel. The change is personality was so drastic that I assumed that this was an ifrit that had shapeshifted into Dara’s likeness to get close to Nahri. (Shapeshifting had been established as an aspect of the magic system at an earlier point in the story.)
Except, no. This is the real Dara. Muntadhir later returns as well and confirms that Dara ditched the ifrit hunting party. We also see Dara revert to his original characterization in his next scene with Nahri.
It gets worse. Dara rapidly evolves into a toxic, controlling boyfriend who wants to dictate Nahri’s entire life. (This goes beyond just the Protagonist-Centered Morality.) The climax of this book happens because Dara tries to abduct Nahri in a sequence that reads like a mask-off moment from an abuser. The fact that Nahri acts as though she still loves him at the end, despite being obviously terrified of him during the abduction attempt, reads as an abused lover who is too conditioned to be able to accept the reality of her situation.
Ghassan
King Ghassan ibn Khader al Qahtani is Ali’s father and the ruler of Daevabad. He is one of the two main antagonists of The City of Brass, and the one that is most relevant (since the ifrit collectively serve as the other antagonist, but they fade into the background once Nahri enters Daevabad). As the man in charge of keeping the peace within the city, he stands in opposition to both Ali (who represents the shafit) and Nahri (whose mere presence threatens to trigger a Daeva uprising).
Chakraborty successfully establishes Ghassan as a man made cruel by necessity. Yes, he wants the shafit to be persecuted and culled, but only because he needs to mollify the Daevas. Yes, he tries to control Nahri so that he can control the Daevas through her, but only because the fallout of a Daeva uprising would be horrific for all factions involved. He would have no qualms about executing Ali if it came to it, yet Ali himself recognizes that this would only happen if Ghassan believed that doing so would keep the peace. Duty comes first for this man.
I believe that Ghassan is the best-written character overall. However, he is also a victim of inconsistent writing. Chakraborty’s efforts to give him nuance resulted in a very different problem from Dara. Rather than changing characterization from scene to scene, Ghassan will flip between personalities within a single scene.
In Ghassan’s introductory scene, he is initially characterized as a tyrant who is so cartoonishly, moustache-twirlingly evil that he revels at the thought of the shafit rioting in response to a crackdown, since that would give him an excuse to kill more of them. He does this in front of his advisors. When he is alone with Ali, he fades back to being a harsh authority figure who at least has understandable reasons for the choices he makes. I’m sure that the summary I just gave makes it sound like Ghassan adjusts his personality based upon the people around him, but on the page, it reads like two entirely different people. It also makes little sense that Ghassan acts like a maniac in front of the people who are effectively his professional colleagues but then dons the mask of rationality when alone with family. It seems like it should be the other way around.
These are just two of Ghassan’s personalities. When all his scenes are considered, he becomes at least four different people. Each of these characters surfaces as necessary to advance the plot and then vanishes when his role has been fulfilled.
Other
This novel has a sizeable supporting cast, including Ghassan’s Daeva wazir, Muntadhir, Muntadhir’s two lovers (the wazir’s son and the brothel matron whom Ali reprimands), Nahri’s mentor on healing magic once she gets to Daevabad, and Ali’s various Tanzeem associates. I don’t have any meaningful praise or criticisms for either of them. They are functional yet unremarkable. They also appear to be immune to the inconsistent characterization, though this may be because they just didn’t get the focus and nuance needed for inconsistencies to be noticeable.
Lessons Learned
Nuanced characters are wonderful. I applaud Chakraborty for the lengths that she went to reflect the complexities that people possess. It’s just that The City of Brass overdid it. Characters in a fictional narrative benefit from a consistent through line that will help the audience to anticipate how they will behave in a given situation. Ignoring traits, or having characters radically change characterization at a moment’s notice, erodes that consistency.
QUEST FOR A PLOT
Next week, we will conclude this series with an analysis of the plot of The City of Brass. Much like Blood Heir, this book struggles with a formulaic story and twists that are either incredibly predictable or lacking in anything resembling logical consistency with the rest of the story. It wouldn't have been remarkable in the Young Adult genre, but this book is not marketed as Young Adult.
At the same time, there is a single twist that works really well. This element is worthy of both praise and exploration.
We'll get into it all next week. I hope to see you then. Have a good week, everyone.
