Empire of Grass by Tad Williams is an Almost Perfect Sequel

Just finished Empire of Grass a week or so ago, the latest book in The Last King of Osten Ard, Tad Williams's sequel trilogy to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. MST has long been one of my favorite fantasy series, and I've re-read the books several times, always with great enjoyment. Indeed, my paperback copies are jealously hoarded, especially now that I've had Tad himself sign almost all of the volumes, each at a different author event where I met him.

I always appreciated the conversation that MST tried to have with JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - a conversation it has more successfully than other series like Terry Brooks's Shannara or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Like many of those books MST is based on the search for a magical maguffin, this time in the shape of three powerful swords - though I've always loved the unexpected way he approached that trope.

Last King of Osten Ard looks like it's aiming to have that same conversation, but with its own predecessor trilogy. Instead of the happy(ish) ending holding through, we see how the actual governance of the realm has panned out in the thirty years since To Green Angel Tower ended. A lot of the reviews I've read of the books so far laud this aspect, how Simon's turned out to be not actually that good a ruler after all, and I have to agree it makes for good drama.

But I think my favorite part of this new trilogy is how it expands on the concepts we saw in the earlier books, especially the culture of the Norns. Beginning in the prequel novella The Heart of What Was Lost, Williams fleshed their culture out beyond the "evil elves" we saw in MST, depicting a culture of casual cruelty, rigid caste and paranoia at every level. In some ways it reminds me of his depiction of Hell in the Bobby Dollar series, where life was a daily grind of ever-more horrible things being done by whoever was in power to whoever was below them.

Norn culture is a little less chaotic than that, but it feels like a continuation of the same ideas, especially the casual way the Norns treat human and non-human life.

This is why in my title I call it "almost perfect" - it doesn't ignore what happened before, doesn't retcon it, but rather fills in the gaps very well. Another example is his description of the Tinukeda'ya, the delvers and niskies of MST: here they're depicted as a race so malleable that we realize we've been seeing versions of them in previous stories that we didn't even recognize as such. The giants, kilpa and ghants of MST turn out to be Tinukeda'ya as well, which is a neat idea.

I do have a small criticism. Certain threads and storylines verge on the predictable, like Miriamele's time in the snake pit of Nabban, where you can tell that there's going to be a tragedy of some kind. When it climaxes it's different than expected, but there's still a lingering frustration that the characters haven't cottoned on to what's going on when it's so clear to us, the readers.

Another example is the storyline of Unver, and the coming war of his grasslander tribes against the settled peoples of Osten Ard - though there it's more a feeling of suspense at knowing where Williams has placed all this characters and wanting to see how things play out.

But if you can tell where broad strokes of the story are going, Williams still manages to surprise in the particulars. For example he resolves the question of where Prince Josua's children, Derra and Deornoth, are in the first volume, The Witchwood Crown, and does so in very satisfying ways. He doesn't resolve the question of Josua's whereabouts in this volume, but the search illuminates the intervening span of years between trilogies in interesting ways.

Another example is the way he resolves the storyline in Nabban, which sets up a greater tragedy to befall the characters in the next volume - and after all, over the whole trilogy hangs that name, the "last" king of Osten Ard. You sense that it's all building to a crescendo that won't be as happy or neatly tied up as Memory, Sorrow and Thorn - but I trust Tad Williams enough that I know it'll be entertaining.