In Morning Star, the conclusion of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Trilogy, we get another wild tale of war, revenge,
politics, duplicitous humans, and more death and destruction than you can shake
a leg at.
“Darrow would have lived in peace, but his
enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his
wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking
everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to
survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society's mightiest warriors,
climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will
tear the hierarchy apart from within. Finally, the time has come. But the devotion
to honor and hunger, for vengeance, runs deep on both sides. Darrow and his
comrades-in-arms face powerful enemies without scruple or mercy. Among them are
some that Darrow once considered friends. To win, Darrow will need to inspire
those shackled in darkness to break their chains, unmake the world their cruel
masters have built, and claim a destiny too long denied - and too glorious to
surrender.”
There is a lot at stake here, and
the novel runs faster, harder, and more headlong than the previous two novels
(mostly because there is a lot of stuff to cover in its 518 pages) combined.
There is little time for sitting and talking, which is good…and bad. While the
relentless works, it also takes on a sense that while many will pay the price
for this war, you know the ending. Brown gives us a few surprises though, and
brings forward Servo to give the series the dark, sarcastic humor it has
lacked, but the ending was never in doubt.
While the first person narrative
worked for the first two books, here I feel that book could’ve been stronger
had we seen other perspectives. Being in Darrow’s head all the time made the
book go over so much of the same ground the previous books did. I have no doubt
he loved Eo, but it becomes redundant when we cover his guilt feelings for her
death and those of his extended family again and again.
When I read the first book back
in 2014, I was curious if the author was going to explain how, some 700 hundred
years in the future, we humans became the way these folks did, where a society
is based on color codes, where the Roman Empire somehow came again. But either
it was not important, or something else, but we never get a glimpse on how this
happened, even as Morning Star does
make more references to Earth, to the Romans of yesteryear. I mean the works of
Homer and
Sophocles survived, but apparently Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire did not, which I find curious (I also ruminated on the
oddness of Darrow’s name that came up in Red
Rising, that the name was unusual, but again, this story thread was
dropped).
Unlike James S.A. Corey’s The
Expanse series, which went out of its way to explain space travel, Pierce
Brown forgoes all of this, which then leads me to believe this whole series
really is a space opera in the vein of Star
Wars or Star Trek, with a lot of
gory elements borrowed from George R.R. Martin.
This was not, as it may seem, a
horrible series. I enjoyed it and look forward to seeing where Pierce Brown
goes from here. It’s just I’m not a huge fan of ultra sadistic books, where
human life is tossed away like a forgotten toy. I go numb from the horrible
ways in which people die, even these fictional characters. That is part of the
reason I gave up on Game of Thrones.
I grew weary of so much death, and the blurring of the line between moving the
story forward and torture porn.
As I said, I’m curious as where
Pierce Brown will go from here. A nice hard-core science fiction novel or even
a good fantasy novel would be nice. I hate to see him stuck producing just this
style of space opera over the next decade.
But we’ll see.
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