4 Stars
The Hero of Ages is the conclusion to Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, following The Final Empire and The Well of Ascension. Of the three volumes, The Hero of Ages is the weakest, though it serves as a decent conclusion to an excellent trilogy.
At the end of The Well of Ascension, the young Mistborn Vin was tricked into freeing the malevolent godlike being known as Ruin. True to its name, Ruin has been busy spreading death, destruction and despair with gleeful abandon in the year since, while Vin and her husband, Emperor Elend Venture, desperately seek some way to stop it. They are following a series of clues and secret supply caches built by the old Lord Ruler, who was killed by Vin in The Final Empire. The Lord Ruler had struggled with Ruin for a thousand years, and hid these resources for his followers to use in the event of his death. Other surviving members of Kelsier's crew have split up to confront the most powerful remaining warlords, hoping to convince them to join with Elend and try to deal with the ever-present mists and choking rains of ash that Ruin is using to destroy the world.
The conflict with Ruin, the associated backstory involving Ruin's counterpart Preservation, and the apocalyptic situation all give The Hero of Ages a much more mythological and cosmological atmosphere than The Final Empire and The Well of Ascension. The wide-ranging conflict, which scatters groups of characters to distant locations, also contrasts with the earlier books' focus on relatively few characters in a single city. Sanderson seems more comfortable writing stories with cozier settings, and the broader scope also weakens what character development he attempts, which focuses on Sazed and Spook. The story culminates in a conclusion that is far too "deus" for my tastes, and toes the line of what I can stand.
At the same time, The Hero of Ages also lacks the compelling hooks that help make the other Mistborn books more interesting than standard fantasy fare. The Final Empire has the "heist story" framework as well as the backstory of a world in which the Dark Lord had (apparently) defeated the hero of prophesy. The Well of Ascension considers what exactly happens after tyranny is overthrown and victory declared. In contrast, The Hero of Ages may be Sanderson's most conventional fantasy yet: the world is threatened by a powerful destructive force that the heroes must outwit and overcome.
Even Sanderson's elaborate magic system becomes problematic as the ever-expanding details of the tripartite allomancy-feruchemy-hemalurgy construction multiply to a somewhat unwieldy size. Many of the blurbs that introduce each chapter, which were used to great effect in the other volumes, now need to be omniscient explanations of just what exactly is going on.
The Hero of Ages is a decent conclusion to an excellent trilogy, which manages to tie together all three books, and even hints at yet "another secret" lurking beneath the surface. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite rise to the level of its predecessors, the level we've come to expect from Sanderson. I hope the chapter-by-chapter annotations that Sanderson is currently posting on his Web site will shed some light on the reasons why.
(26 July 2009)
