What does hope mean to you? I ask this question after re-reading the Mistborn trilogy. Well, I say “read” but I mostly skimmed the first book. Skipping swaths of dialogue, whole chapters, jumping from paragraph to paragraph through (painfully violent) fight scenes. It was the book closest to me, that’s why I had picked it up. And it was interesting after all, so I kept at it. But, honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention until I started the second book.

I don’t think I have ever been so amazed at my ability to forget.

Now might be a good time to mention that there are going to be major spoilers, so if you are the kind of person who enjoys how the story unfolds you ought to stop reading here (and, really, Sanderson’s story is so well crafted from beginning to end that it’s a shame to not try to solve the mystery yourself as you read it. There are places that made me stop and wonder, “did he retroactively make that decision?” What an intricate attention to seemingly decorative but ultimately plot-vital detail).

 

But I digress. Memory. I had forgotten so much. The ONLY thing I remembered of the second book was . . . . well, actually, nothing. Not one thing. Marsh – I distinctly had the impression that he sacrificed himself in book one. So I was completely puzzled when he, you know, was still alive at the end of that book. I remember really liking him, and yet I had managed to block out two books worth of his actions. And the kandra. I had forgotten literally everything about them. I mean, I knew what they could do, but I didn’t remember anything else. The Kolosses too, it didn’t even occur to me to ask how they were made when they were introduced in book two. I knew Vin and Elend would gain control of them and be uncomfortable about it . . . . but I had (probably on purpose, because it really is too wretched to fully realize) forgotten how they were made. And the siege – you know, the thing that takes up two-thirds of the third book? – completely new to me. I remembered who the final hero of the ages was, but nothing about the final battle. I had even somehow managed to be surprised when it became obvious what Ruin was looking for and why. In fact, when you look at the hundreds of things that happen in the last two books, the only four that I really remembered was the infallibility of metal, the earring, the purpose behind the mists (only, for some reason I thought they had affected Elend? And that the discovery of the purpose had been almost immediate?), and Elend and Vin crashing a ball. That last one I remember so vividly I assumed it happened a lot. And, because I didn’t remember anything about Elend being king (much less emperor), I thought it happened in book 2.

All of these things point to only one explanation: I must have stayed up late reading these books, and I must have, in my desire to Find Out What Happened Next, skimmed pretty badly. I didn’t think I did that (at such scale) with unknown books but how else do you account for such a vast lack of recollection?

Of course, there is another theory too, and that is that I was dissatisfied with the ending and so forgot everything else in disgust. Well, yes, I have been known to do such things for far less provocation. For one thing, the book’s concept of godhood is bizarre – which is actually my main point in writing this. But, probably more to the heart, it killed off its main couple at the end. Tragic.

Reading it this second time, braced as it were for the inevitable (ha! I did remember that much!), their deaths didn’t bother me. Their world was, after all dying, and if they didn’t die in saving the world they would have died, and everyone one else with them, in loosing it. And also, they knew they had won when they died, which is quite a lot, and the whole second and third books actually, when you look at them together, had been specifically cultivating them to feel their lives were not their own to live anyway. So that’s all good then. Not that I approve of people killing off their characters willy-nilly, but I’ll concede that these deaths made sense both for realism and the narrative.

 

And, looking at it as a chance to sandbox – and after all, what else is fiction really for? –  the god thing is fascinating. Actually, it was book two when it became fascinating, book two and its cult of the Survivor. And that, ultimately, is what made me keep reading, to see what faith would mean in this universe. Because, for a depressingly significant percentage of books two and three, the only hope offered is the hope of surviving. That’s it. The characters’ goal was literally “everyone not dying.” Not in the sense of saving everyone, but in the sense of at least saving someone. And it made me think, almost instantly, of something I’d read in a book recently. The author said that, when you looked at what some people believed, all it boiled down to really was surviving. They were only living for life – success, health, happiness, contentment. Even when talking in general of people focused on love and service, even just talking about regular people, so many of us on this planet live our lives as if this is all there is. We’re just trying to get by, as the saying goes. And you can really see, pretty quickly, how this kind of thinking can corrupt even the most well-intentioned of people. There is no pay-off for being altruistic, especially if the world is ending. It is what causes Vin to overthrow Elend’s carefully crafted dreams of the perfect legal system, and what leads Elend to lay siege on a more or less innocent city. Because when your only hope is to survive, when survival itself becomes your goal, you no longer have the option of failure. The option of being the better person, of turning the check, of dying for your principles. Death is the only evil, and you must stave it off at all costs to win.

In this sense, it is perfectly fitting that when Elend finally realized his hope is not in survival but in renewal – in new life – he was able to choose the right way instead of the necessary way. And too, when Vin fully understood that Ruin was afraid, and that his fear indicated he could be, not just survived, but defeated, she took her life-risking gamble. And won, by loosing. In effect, she chose too die, chose to not survive, so that the earth could be a place of life and not death.

 That still seems a bit depressing, really. Sweet, but still . . . . very, very final. But then that is the other oddity that bugged me. The other side of the “just survive” mantra: the finality of death. Not one of the religions mentioned in the trilogy, and there were a few, were known for their afterlives. For a hope that existed beyond death. There was no Hell, no Heaven. No, what, nirvana? This just seems statistically unlikely. Oh sure, someone raised the possibility of ghosts at some point, so certainly there must have been superstitions about the soul, but the only “ghosts” we Readers see are phonys or illusions. This rather puts a damper on the whole dying thing. For all the deaths that occur throughout the books, the only person who we see struggling with the Death of the Soul question actually becomes an atheist because of it.

And yet, despite this perfectly finite notion of the soul that is built up in all three books, the trilogy ends with a note from the new god stating that Vin and Elend are perfectly happy where they are, and, hey, that guy who died in book one says “good job.” So . . . . there apparently is an afterlife after all? But, and I’m going off on a particularly unstable limb here, I suspect it’s not one run by the same forces that created the world. It’s not the kind of thing Ruin could have sanctioned (being eternal preservation, as it were) nor, if it was under Preservation’s power, would there have been much of a point in saving the world. If this afterlife were Preservation’s domain, than he should have let Ruin have the world and taken all the souls to said “better place.”

But even more fundamentally, Ruin and Preservation were part of the world – not just active gods, but physically integrated as well –  and so how could they have made a place separate from it? No, there must be some other power who controls this place, a place none of the other religions mentioned because its existence was beyond the scope, the jurisdiction, of the world’s creators. Perhaps a force higher than Preservation and Ruin, one with different goals and a different nature. This would be an exciting story to read! After all, we still do not know if Preservation and Ruin were originally one. Nor do we know who (or how) they had previously possessed (that they were possessing other people is obvious in that, when they “died” they left behind human corpses). I can see these two being attributes of a greater power, shaved off and set loose. Evolving over time and association – with each other and with their own creation – personalities and desires distinct from their original abstract natures. How does this change the way we view their war? The suffering of their people?

 

But going back to hope: I’m in the middle of writing another post, about what actually decides me on a book, and it’s obvious when discussing Sanderson what is most precious to me is his complete inability to accept despair. Feel it, see, it, taste it: yes. But accept it? Never. Even if his world isn’t set up in a way that seems to encourage hope, humility, or sacrifice, his characters embody it anyway. This is most beautifully (and dramatically) illustrated in the bridge runner portions of his The Way of Kings novel, but you can clearly see it here too. After all, isn’t his idea of trust, freely given, as the best basis for all relationships, and therefore societies, defiantly reliant on hope? Of expecting, even assuming, the best out of people even if people don’t always show you their best? It’s not surprising that I ate Mistborn up the first time I read it, or that I found it still engaging all these years later. Hope is a story I will never tire of hearing.