Review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been thinking recently – and this one has helped me crystallize some of my loose ideas – that there’s a distinction in what they call “high fantasy.” By definition such work imagines empire, imagines some idea of order that stands in contrast to the “low” chaos that some antagonist offers. (Never mind that most of the best recent fantasies – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Night Circus, The Vorrh, Jerusalem, Harry Potter, and even The Magicians – don’t deal with empire at all.)

In any case, I think there’s a line to draw between books that have a yearning for empire – as Tolkien taught all of us – and those that have a memory of empire. The distinction sets up much of the action of the novel, but I think it also establishes its politics. Books like The Lord of the Rings are, whether we realize it or not, fundamentally conservative. They want to restore that lost order and, even if they champion the capacity for characters to conceive of something new, that diminishes the potential of the individual outside the whole. Frodo is magnificent, of course, but he is so – as he only gradually learns – within the context of a great and lost kingdom of men. He can never be great by the standards of that empire; at best (and he is at best) he can be only a heroic commoner whom the great condescend to reward.

In books that have only a memory of empire, though – and that’s mostly the case with Game of Thrones – we get abiding skepticism about what came before. Empire isn’t lauded as a lost Eden; it’s seen as a persistent threat to the individual, to the character who has real and personal dreams.

I say all that because, while Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City has its flaws, it opens with a refreshing contempt for empire. Orhan is an engineer who finds himself accidentally the ranking officer in charge of defending a great city – think Rome or Byzantium – from an existential threat. He’s no fan of the empire; its clients wiped out his village when he was a child, and he has risen in its ranks even though his milk-colored skin marks him as an outsider and other.

Still, he takes on the task as if its another of the bridges he knows how to design. He’s drawn less by loyalty and ethics than by the simple engineering challenge of the operation.

That tells you much of the politics of this novel. In many ways, it has a deep cynicism toward everything. Orhan turns out to be more of a scoundrel than we might imagine. On top of that, Parker explores some of what it means to have an unreliable narrator recording his own deeds. Yes, Orhan makes one brilliant (or fortunate) decision after another, but he admits outright that it’s his story and he might, every so often, be exaggerating.

The primary fun of this is its focus on the problems of design. Orhan has to solve one crisis after another and, early on especially, it’s refreshing to get such nitty-gritty. This is an empire that turns not on the hoped-for return of the king but rather – literally – on a nail. Can they recover or fashion enough of them to repair and sustain the siege engines they need to resist the attackers?

I’ll confess that I think this gets weaker toward the end. [SPOILER:] I’m no fan of the plot twist that has the leader of the assembled army be Orhan’s long-lost childhood friend; as the two survivors of their village, they’ve both risen around the threat of the empire and its troops.

[Second SPOILER:] While I like the tone of the end of this when an accident alters the course of Orhan’s life and we’re shown how the siege looks to observers centuries later, it felt a bit as if Parker had run out of ideas. That’s not entirely a bad thing, though, since it largely reflects that he offered so many terrific and clever ideas in those early parts.

In the end, though, what redeems this from just a clever premise is its willingness to question the prevailing perspective of the genre. A little like Joe Abercrombie in The Blade Itself – but with a very different tone – it remembers what its world was like when an empire put everything into an order that gave little room for the self to blossom. It remembers empire, but it doesn’t yearn for it.



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