Book Review: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

Hello, dear reader! This is my first blog entry on my website, and this is a great book to feature in a first blog entry. I hope you enjoy my thoughts on Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace and return for more of the blog content I have planned.

Now that the brief introduction is out of the way, we can get to the meat and potatoes. Or, in the case of A Desolation Called Peace, the poetry and Lsel Station graphics. A Desolation Called Peace is Martine's highly anticipated (especially by me) sequel to her award-wining debut novel, A Memory Called Empire. Martine’s new novel finds the principal cast of characters trying to find a peaceful solution not just to an intergalactic war with an unknown alien army, but solutions to the untranslatable hopes and fears that we all spend our lives attempting to get others to understand. The first book in the Teixcalaan duology is one of my favorite books of all time. So, is A Desolation Called Peace as good as its predecessor? No—but that doesn't mean it isn't a darn good book.

In her Acknowledgements pages, Martine herself says that sequels are hard. I don't think A Desolation Called Peace ever quite hits the highs of Martine's first book, but it is still a tremendous novel. Despite being set in the same universe and dealing with the same set of characters, A Desolation Called Peace is a very different type of book than A Memory Called Empire. A Desolation Called Peace, instead of just focusing on Lsel Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, rotates its point of view between four characters—Mahit, as well as Information envoy Three Seagrass, Imperial Heir Eight Antidote, and a new character, yaotlek Nine Hibiscus. I think broadening the point of view of the novel was the right idea, but I just couldn't help myself from craving the closeness I felt from Mahit while reading the first book. Mahit and her imago, the memories of her predecessor Yskandr Aghavn—two different versions of him, to be exact—stored within a device in her brain, are my favorite characters in the duology, so I do believe I have a bit of bias in wanting to spend more and more time in the heads of the trio of characters in one mind.

That isn’t to say any of the other characters aren’t interesting. In fact, it is quite the opposite! Three Seagrass was another loveable and complex character from A Memory Called Empire and it is fascinating and entertaining to read the internal humor of her mind and to understand her views on her and Mahit’s different societies of origins. Nine Hibiscus, a cunning military leader who is leading a war against non-language speaking aliens, is another interesting character. Nine Hibiscus’s friendship with her adjutant, Twenty Cicada, provides an emotional center for the novel. I particularly loved Martine’s choice to make Eight Antidote a main character, however. Eight Antidote is heir to the throne of Teixcalaan and a 90% clone of the former emperor Six Direction who *SPOILERS committed ritualistic suicide in A Memory Called Empire *SPOILERS*. Eight Antidote, now an 11-year-old, was not in A Memory Called Empire very much but he did feature in one of my favorite scenes in the whole book, a scene in which a drunken Mahit talked with him about caged hummingbirds in the imperial palace gardens. Eight Antidote is given a plethora of pages to shine even more in A Desolation Called Peace, as we see this 11-year-old grapple with the realities of his future as leader of an intergalactic empire. The boy is a tragic figure, robbed of his childhood and *SPOILERS* nearly robbed of his identity by his ancestor Six Direction, who intended to use Lsel’s imago machines to continue his long-life SPOILERS*, and seeing Eight Antidote persevere through these tragedies and through the politics of the Teixcalaan court is a treat.

I do have a theory that Nineteen Adze, lover of the former Emperor Six Direction and the former Lsel Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn, complicit murderer of Yskandr Aghavn, and acting Emperor of Teixcalaan, is the donator of the unknown 10% of Eight Antidote’s DNA. Nineteen Adze is protective of Eight Antidote throughout A Desolation Called Peace but in a way that feels intertwined with sadness (the scenes between Nineteen Adze and Eight Antidote are also a pleasure) and maybe even longing. Nineteen Adze was complicit in the murder of one of her lovers and best friends, Yskandr Aghavn, to make sure that Eight Antidote got to stay Eight Antidote. If you read these brilliant books, please do let me know if you think that Nineteen Adze might be, essentially, Eight Antidote’s mother.

As you can see, the characters of A Desolation Called Peace are where the novel excels. The transformation of Mahit and the two Yskandr Aghavn’s into one person is fascinating to read—made only more so by Martine’s subtle attention to detail, such as Mahit’s gender pronouns sometimes switching between male and female when the lines between her and Yskandr begin to blur. Mahit’s budding relationship with Three Seagrass was believable and complex development in Martine’s first book and there is plenty of exploration of the possibilities of their relationship in A Desolation Called Peace. The novel explores Three Seagrass’s fetishization of Mahit’s identity as a non-Teixacalaanlitzlim, and if that respect born out of curiosity and wonder can facilitate an equitable relationship between the two.

One of the greatest strengths of A Memory Called Empire was Martine’s exploration of complex and difficult topics. Reading Martine’s first novel, which dealt with immigration, xenophobia, and growing unrest and debate over who should lead a nation felt very pertinent amid last year’s protests over racial injustice and the heated election. A Desolation Called Peace also has its fingers on the pulse of modern politics, an impressive feat for a science-fiction novel that features spaceships, aliens, and cybernetic implants. In A Desolation Called Peace, Martine continues to explore xenophobia and the many ways, it can manifest. The mysterious alien race discovered at the end of A Memory Called Empire are the adversaries in a war that the Teixcalaanli Empire is waging. The aliens don’t seem to think, speak, or act in any remotely human type of way, but our protagonists endeavor to find a way to communicate with these truly alien aliens. A Desolation Called Peace shows why empathy over aggression is always the best policy. Every single character in the novel is trying to understand the cultural differences between one another, a task that is hard but rewarding. The novel, in its wonderful space-opera context, explains why it is better to extend a hand instead of a gun.

The subject of immigration and assimilation is also further explored in the novel. Mahit—a non-Teixcalaanlitzlim who always dreamed of being a member of Teixcalaan—feels outcast by both her own Lsel Station and the Teixcalaan Empire. She is a woman whose identity is divided between two nationalities, divided between two nations who don’t see her as pure. A Desolation Called Peace picks up where A Memory Called Empire left off in exploring whether an individual can ever fully assimilate into another culture—or if they even should.

“How wide is the concept of concept of you?” was my favorite line from A Memory Called Empire, and this line becomes one of the central themes of A Desolation Called Peace, much to my delight. This new novel and its predecessor explore just where one person ends and another person begins, where one person ends and their nation begins, and even where one nation ends and another one begins. The characters and plot all feed into this central theme, never offering an answer but simply different perspectives. Martine expertly analyzes how loyalty and love between peoples and nations develop, and how those relationships can become more and more complex. It is amazing how seamlessly the plot feeds into this theme and I can’t commend Martine enough for that feat.

Martine’s prose is also stellar here. Her worldbuilding is thought out on every level, all the way down to her descriptions and comparisons, which creates an all-encompassing and believable science-fiction setting. A Desolation Called Peace is filled with beautiful sentences that hum in the brain like the engines on one of Teixcalaan’s warships. Martine cleverly plays with science-fiction conventions by allowing the reader’s imagination to do a lot of work for her. She doesn’t try to overexplain what the hallways of a spaceship look like because she knows that almost all her readers have either read or watched other works of science-fiction. The identities behind the architecture of the different civilizations present in the novel are so fleshed out that the reader can make the distinction between a Lsel spaceship or a Teixcalaanli one for themselves.

The plot of A Desolation Called Peace, while great and compelling, is not as strong as the plot in A Memory Called Empire. The novel has a bit of a slow start—never even approaching dangerous levels of boredom, but the novel does take some time to get all the characters into truly interesting plot movement. There are some great plot twists, but the plot still feels a bit more structured. There was an unpredictability to the plot of A Memory Called Empire that kept the book thrilling. In A Desolation Called Peace, while you might not be able to guess the specifics of what will happen a few chapters ahead, it still feels a bit easy to sort of guess the general shape of the story ahead.

Overall, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace is a topical, masterfully written, character-driven science-fiction novel that is not quite as good as the book that came before it, but it is still a very great book. I would highly recommend checking out both A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace if you are looking for books in which science-fiction politics are done right.

-- Logan M. Cole

"A Desolation Called Peace" by Arkady Martine is available from this Amazon link or wherever books are sold.