Monday, February 12, 2018

The Night Angel Trilogy: Disgust and Hope


Several themes appear and reappear throughout Brent Weeks’ dark fantasy trilogy, The Night Angel, that resonate within characters and story beats: loss, faith, greed, monsters and men, and destiny are just a few. Characters rarely exemplify a single theme or trait; most are molded by many of the themes that cross their paths. As the story allows for several character interactions to take place at any given time, sometimes a single interaction or moment will change the course of a character thematically. However, if there are two themes that are common throughout every single character in the series, it’s the themes of disgust and of hope.

                For those unaware, The Night Angel trilogy is a series of books set in a secondary world on the continent of Midcyru, where several kings rule and power is everything. Political maneuverings are made by an underground organization known as the Sa’kagè, whose main form of muscle comes with wetboys, who are a step above assassins. The story follows a young wetboy, Kylar Stern, who is under tutelage under the greatest wetboy of all time, Durzo Blint, as he learns the dark truths of the world. Kylar, though, can’t seem to stay out of the light, as he becomes lifelong friends with Logan Gyre, a powerful lordling who has a destiny within the royal family of Cenaria, their country.
                Kylar and Logan’s stories are the two through-lines for the entire trilogy, even if Logan’s story doesn’t begin to become relevant until the latter parts of Shadow’s Edge, the second book of the trilogy. While Weeks takes advantage of multiple points of view (sometimes jumping into characters for just a single chapter to reveal a major event about to happen), it’s Kylar and Logan that we return to the most.
                The two boys exemplify the themes of disgust and hope in ways that form the main crux of the story: there’s no difference between kings and monsters if the goal is survival. We see this prominently in Shadow’s Edge, during Logan’s plight for survival as it heavily begins to mirror Kylar’s early life in the Warrens, although Logan is pushed to a much greater edge than Kylar had ever been.
                What’s truly interesting here is that their themes and stories rarely intersect where both can look each other in the eye and come to a true understanding at a specific point in time. When Logan is first introduced to the story, Kylar isn’t even an apprentice wetboy and is still some smelly little kid, while Logan is a lordling. By Shadow’s Edge, Kylar is prepared to leave the life of darkness behind while Logan has just jumped straight into the heart of darkness. Even in Beyond the Shadows, the final book of the trilogy, their stories come close, but never truly intersect.
                The theme of disgust comes often in a literal form, but also an emotional form as well, and, oddly, this theme comes from Vi Sovari, the most beautiful woman in the world, who cannot seem to find happiness anywhere even when the opportunity for it is gifted to her. Logan, on the other hand, a man who had nothing but the world in his hands, can often struggle to find hope as the world of darkness continues to creep up. Kylar is the ultimate combination of the two, living in a world of filth while holding the ultimate hope that one day he can fulfill promises he made to people he loved.
                Beyond the Shadows heavily lays into characters being unsatisfied with the things they wanted to have all their lives. Dorian, the mad prophet, took decades from his life away to find his wife, but when he gets the girl, the world is ending and she doesn’t love him. Solon is the same way. Vi escapes the call of her master and the Godking and finally finds love but it’s a hopeless situation, and she had to do the unspeakable to finally realize her feelings. Each of these characters, and then some, resonate with Kylar and Logan’s trials throughout this final journey in Midcyru, as both come to realize that as much as they are the monster or the king, both have a part to play in saving the world.
                This majorly comes to a head when Kylar is thrown to prison in Beyond the Shadows and Logan meets with the ambassadors before the torture wheel, where Kylar is slowly being tortured and cannot seem to die, thanks to his immortality. In that instance, Logan uses the darkness from within his heart to steel himself and knows that this isn’t the worst it can get, this isn’t what hell itself feels like. Logan uses the filth that he lived through, the absolute horrors he witnessed in the Hole, to show that he’s truly King of both the light and the dark. In that way, he conquers a Kylar who, up until this point, had been unable to walk the tightrope.
                It creates this one interesting intersection between the two, and makes you wonder, if their situations were reversed, if Kylar would do the same to Logan. Kylar willingly disobeyed his friend, his best friend, in order to save his life. It’s unknown whether or not the plots against Logan would ever have succeeded, but Kylar decided to become the monster to save his friend, to give his country hope. In a similar way, Logan tortures and puts his best friend to death in order to show ferocity in front of potential enemies, which does give his enemies something to fear and his troops something to look up to.
                As much as Kylar himself exemplifies both ideas of disgust and hope, he does so mostly in a physical sense. Kylar lives in the dark, always bathing in the black ka’kari to give him power in order to either murder someone or plot against them. While, yes, he does do this to kill the Godking, he also has to use the ka’kari against his master and eventually against the love of his life. The one time it’s used for purely selfless reasons, beyond killing the Godking—which he was hired out to do—is when he has to save Logan. In this way, he uses his physical darkness to find the physical hope for the world: Logan.
                In a more emotional sense, Vi Sovari is what one would look for to thematically capture disgust and hope. The themes are flipped over between Shadow’s Edge and Beyond the Shadows, as, in an interesting thematic twist, Vi’s hopes are what lead to her eventual disgust with what she’s done and the fate she has become resigned to. She hopes, prays, does everything she can to please the Godking so that she can one day be free of him, and then her master. When she learns of her master’s ultimate demise, her hope soars like never before. It’s probably the highest she gets before reality itself comes crashing down in the climactic struggle against the Godking, where she faces the fate of her lineage.
                After this, though, Vi’s quality of life improves while her overall outlook on the world darkens. She becomes a powerful mage, loses her wetboy-like tendencies, commands an army, and gains the respect of Logan of all people, and yet she is riddled with hatred for the crimes committed against Kylar. It creates a fascinating conflict within her character that, even by the end of Beyond the Shadows, isn’t entirely settled.
                Interestingly, there are some characters that show little bursts of the clashing themes of disgust and hope throughout the story. Natassa Graesin sees the horrors around her, but sacrifices herself in order to escape the fate of the Godking, yet shows the brief glimmer of hope that Logan will survive and never forget her. Terah Graesin never gives any amount of hope and is a rather disgusting character, and continues the idea that outer beauty can never truly mar inner ugliness.
                Perhaps the two characters that show the most contained conflict of these ideas are Momma K and Lantano Garuwashi, who are both resolved in their goals and compromise only if it pays off in the long term. Momma K is the ultimate gambler in the story, as we see her exposed and open to Kylar in Way of Shadows and then putting all of her chips on a tenuous relationship with Logan Gyre. Lantano should have been a typical glory-hoarder for the story but instead came at an interesting moment in the story for him to show that the qualities of darkness our characters have accrued over the last few months (in-story) have actually helped strengthen them and will go a long way to resolving the hope in the world they should have.
                It’s these tent-poles of marred themes that keep Kylar and Logan grounded in some sort of reality. While it’d be easy to think that Durzo is the character with the most conflict or thematic clashes, Beyond the Shadows reveals that Durzo just wants to die or make up with Momma K and see Ulyssandra. That’s all he wants after his death at Kylar’s hands. His themes in the first book are only relevant as they contrast with Elene or Count Drake, who are staunch believers in the God and place their faith in the good of others.
                Durzo stands, initially, as the final stage that Kylar can achieve, though it’s implied that Kylar has done some things that even Durzo wouldn’t consider, like willingly getting himself killed for the sake of others, which, therefore, will kill someone Kylar loves. He is the greatest of the wetboys, the thing that any wetboy would want to become. Hu Gibbett is too much of a monster and Scarred Wrabble is far too old and loses a bit of respect when Durzo rises to power.
                Count Drake, though, is the fate that Kylar could never be, but will always cling to. It can be inferred when he sends the little girl, Blue, to Count Drake near the end of Beyond the Shadows that this is way of sending a child to the fate that he always wanted, that he could just stay with Count Drake and avoid staying in the darkness that the world has to offer, but Kylar places hope in himself and others that he can forge his own path. What’s interesting, though, is that while Kylar turns away from Count Drake when he calls out to him one last time, he still acknowledges it. Weeks doesn’t just paraphrase, he actively wants the readers to know that Kylar still feels some semblance of warmth or love coming from Count Drake.
                The Night Angel isn’t a story about simple goods or evils. The final entity that they fight can be implied to be magic itself, not a true goddess, and that the beings that hold it just become corrupted by the power. The Godking and Neph Dada are natural evils, yes, but they are counterbalanced by Elene or Count Drake. Characters progressively find themselves down the line of where they stand until we reached Kylar and Logan, who do stand on opposite sides of the spectrum but there are moments where they can come dangerously close to intersecting.
                We get a disgusting view of Midcyru from the get-go and it only gets worse from there, even as Weeks pulls the readers through some of the shinier parts of town. Recall that some of the darkest parts of Way of Shadows come in the gleaming castle, and some of the most hopeful spots of Beyond the Shadows take place in Khalidor, which is basically Mordor. These themes and ideas crop up again in his new epic-fantasy, Lightbringer, but they don’t stand at such staunch contrasts and then sudden intersections as they do here.
                I look forward to if Weeks should return to Midcyru. There was a teaser chapter at the end of Perfect Shadow that showed a Kylar slipping into the darkness of the black ka’kari, though it probably won’t make it into the story, which can really escalate these themes and ideas to a new level, and maybe introduce a few more that this series just skimmed over. If not, though, we have a brilliant example of how disgust and hope can stand so far apart and then come together in a way that makes characters shine, or turn them to true monsters right at the moment where the world needs them most.


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