The Burning God By RF Kaung

 The Burning God

By RF Kaung

There's always a bit of satisfaction when I complete a book series for this review. Especially one as powerful and fascinating as this one. Since it's been two years since the first book let's catch up with just who Ms. Kaung is.  Ms. Kuang was born in Guangzhou, China on May 29th, 1996. In the year 2000 her father - a former student who was at Tiananmen Square (I will resist the temptation.) - took his family to Dallas Texas where Ms. Kuang grew up. She graduated from the Greenhill school in 2013 and, attracted by the debate team, attended Georgetown University. She took a gap year in China working as a debate coach and like many newly liberated students found herself feeling strange without the specter of homework hanging over her every moment (I sympathize with this since I started this book review series when I finished my own time in college). So she decided to write a book. She was nineteen. The book was published when she was twenty-two, in 2018. The Poppy Wars was a big hit, being nominated for the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for best novel. The fans of the novel would award their own somewhat tongue in cheek nickname for her of Grimdark's Darkest Daughter. The sequel The Dragon Republic was released in 2019 and earned a spot on Time magazine's list of 100 best fantasy novels. Meanwhile, Ms. Kaung had headed off to Cambridge having gained a Marshall Scholarship and earned a Masters of Philosophy in Chinese Studies. In 2019 she attended Oxford and earned a Masters of Science in Contemporary Chinese Studies. In the fall of 2020, she returned to the United States, to pursue a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literature. To say she's an expert on China and Chinese culture and history is one way of putting it, another way is if you're reading this review odds are you're not qualified to explain Chinese history to her (I await the neckbeards…). That said, let's turn to the Burning God!

At the end of the last book Fang Runin, known as Rin to her vanishingly small circle of friends, had realized that her biggest problem facing her nation of Nikara wasn't the remaining Mugenese soldiers who were trapped in Nikara or the feuding factions of Nikarans who were turning on each other for power as the nation fell apart around them. It was in fact the imperialist Hesperians (Good.), the Hesperians are a coalition of powers united by a single monotheist religion and a drive to unite the world under a single world order (Fuck that shit, in all its forms!). Now, they're not looking to formally conquer Nikara and turn them into an imperial possession like the Mugenese were, before Rin kinda... Exploded their country using the power of her Shamanistic connection to the god of destruction to commit genocide. Instead, they're looking to turn Nikara into a puppet state that they can exploit for cheap labor and natural resources to maintain prosperity in their own home nations (Gee!  Where on earth have we seen this before? {Pretty much everywhere humans developed societies honestly}). While this is theoretically less brutal in that the guys being sent to work the mines and factories are at least being paid, we're still looking at a lot of people being oppressed and suffering under a boot, if not just outright worked to death for pennies. There was, however, a seductiveness there because unlike the Mugenese, the Hesperians would bring medicine, food, superior technology that would again in theory at least improve the lives of the average Nikarans. As long as they converted to the Hesperian religion, adopted Hesperian practices, and learned Hesperian languages anyway. Of course, Rin only realized this after helping the Hesperians chosen puppet, the House of Yin crush most of the organized resistance to their rule (Ugh.). It doesn't help that the Hesperians loathe her personally. Let me explain. 

The Hesperians are monotheists who believe in a god of order they call the Divine Architect. As such they don't believe that Rin is touching the Divine at all through her Shaman powers but is instead a conduit for Chaos and therefore is anathema to everything good and decent in life. Now Rin is a chaos bringer and burning bundle of destruction but to be honest she didn't need Shamen powers for that. Her own natural gifts and complete and total inability to make good decisions while naturally being thrust into the right time and place for her decisions to matter are more than enough (Ouch!  But there is no lie in this statement.). Although I'll admit her kill count would be millions less without those powers. That being said the Hesperians want her, personally, to study to find a way to suppress and/or turn off her powers. The thing is, I can kind of see why. I mean the Cike, the small elite group of Shamen that were used by the Nikara Empire and later the Nikara Republic was not only able to bring about mass destruction but all of them were doomed to slide into insanity and be taken over by the god they were connected to. This would turn them into engines of mass destruction that would keep going until killed (I can certainly see the point in at least learning to control that shit, but then again, if the imperialists want me to do something, I am unlikely to say yes.). The only other way is to imprison the Shamen in a prison of enchanted stone in a specific sacred mountain, where they will remain alive and screaming in a tomb of stone... Forever. Becoming a Shamen means embracing a short, terrifying life that will end in insanity and pain... If you're lucky (Reminds  me of the rise of the Great Old Ones.{While I don’t think the gods of the Nikarans could be directly compared to the Great Old Ones, they are elemental forces older than the universe that simply do not give a shit about us, our morality or our delusions of grandeur}). Of course, the Hesperians are also incredibly vile racists who barely see the Nikarans as human and want to force them to live under Hesperian rules. So they're not doing this out of any desire to make Rin or her countrymen's lives better but to remove something they can't understand or control from the world. This also leads to them using the cruelest and most questionable of methods because why bother with a drop of kindness if you're dealing with subhuman beasts goes their reasoning. 

To combat this Rin has fled to the south to rally the reviled masses of her nation. You see Nikara itself isn't free of bigotry. The northern part of Nikara has long considered itself more advanced, more sophisticated, and just outright better than the south. As a result, southerners are looked down on as bumbling hicks at best, natural serfs at worse. This has built up a lot of resentment that Rin intends to weaponize and point at the northern-based Nikaran Republic and their Hesperian backers. Of course, she'll have to deal with the elites of the South, their factional politics, and the thousands of Mugenese soldiers still in Nikara with nowhere else to go (Sounds like a lot of hard work…). Assuming she can keep the leaders of the south from selling her out to the North. She then has to organize the people of the South into being able to effectively resist a power that can strike them from the air with impunity but Rin might have her own weapons that will bring terror and destruction on a scale even the Hesperians can't match. Assuming those weapons don't doom her first. Even then, it's not over because in the last book we learned that Rin's rival from her military academy days, Yin Nezha, is himself a Shamen of the Dragon, an elemental force that could be considered the equal opposite of her own patron the Phoenix. This means the House of Yin is basically trying to have it both ways. In this, however, she at least has something of an advantage as she is much more practiced with her powers than Nezha but is that enough of an advantage when Nezha not only has a better supplied and more advanced force but a more unified one? 

Now as you can guess the Poppy Wars series owes a lot to the experience of China in the opening decades of the 20th century. In a lot of ways, Ms. Kuang is pulling from the story of her own family, not just the story of China. If you have even a passing familiarity with the history of China in the 20th century then you can see a lot of the same beats and broad characterizations. The Empress Daji and the House of Yin despite being at odds with one another both take on characteristics of the Nationalist Chinese forces. The Mugenese are very close analogs to the Japanese(Including the nuking!). The Hesperians are basically all the western powers (the US included folks[And how!]) eager to get at the wealth and labor of Nikara and not caring about the damage they cause while getting it. I've run into some people asking if all the atrocities in these books were present in the real history and I'm just gonna say that Ms. Kaung actually misses a couple of the smaller ones that I'm aware of, which I assume is a combination of a lack of space and the fact that she needed to stay focused on the characters here. So if you found the fantasy series upsetting wait until you actually look at the history it's sourced from (Can confirm). That said this is not a one-to-one copy of the Chinese experience in WWII or the 1930s and 20s, for one thing, Ms. Kaung is more creative than that and for another she allows the characters to have a big enough impact on the world around them to change things. For one thing, having been to Japan I can confirm it was not reduced to ash choked wasteland forever with every last living thing burnt to death or buried under magma and ash (Which is good.  Though Unit 731 needed to be shot, not paperclipped.). 

Ms. Kaung's focus on the characters is a major strength in this series and she keeps it up in the last book. She also remains utterly and completely committed to the theme of Rin making bad decisions. Make no mistake here, while Rin's story is a tragedy, it's one entirely of her own making as she spurns chance after chance to choose something else. There are mitigating factors of course, but Rin at every step sacrificed everything else to pursue the fastest route to power. At every step she encountered resistance she moved to greater and greater savagery until we've reached the point where it could be argued that she has done as much damage to Nikara as anyone else. Which does a marvelous example of displaying the limits of raw power in the story. Now she's not alone in this, the elite classes of Nikara were more than happy to put their own struggles for power and position over the wellbeing of their nation or people. Those who were outright collaborating with foreign invaders were more than happy to knife each other for scraps. For that matter within Rin's own social circle, we have the genius Kitay who basically enables Rin in all her bad decisions even when he knows it's a bad idea. Nezha himself is often in the position of pouring gas on this fire given his weird relationship of hate-lust with Rin where they barrel from near romance to literal knives in the back. At every step of the way, Ms. Kaung fully embraces the implications of the character dynamics and their decisions and writes the consequences believably, vividly, and mercilessly. This whole series has been a screaming train ride towards a single end and in this final book, Ms. Kaung gives us that final train crash in all it's you-can't-look-away horror and glory. Now that said, she also knows how to avoid going overboard and embracing darkness for darkness sake. Throughout the book, there are humanizing moments of friendship, family, and willingness to sacrifice for the right thing that keeps this book from turning into an unbearable slog through suffering. There's also the underlying idea that none of this is pointless, that something better might eventually arise, and that at some point the killing can stop and the healing slowly start. This is important because without those humanizing elements and the sense that something else is possible then the books lose their emotional impact and Ms. Kaung displays that she is fully aware of that. More so than some veterans of the craft. That said if dark fantasy isn't your cup of tea, you may want to try something else but if you can stand some darkness then you should definitely get on Rin's wild ride. Just don't pretend you're surprised by how it ends. I'm giving The Burning God by RF Kaung an A and I encourage everyone to give this series a try. 

    I hope you enjoyed this week's review and had a Happy Thanksgivings folks. Next week's review as chosen by our ever wise patrons is Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. If you'd like a vote on upcoming reviews, themes, or even a look at other projects coming up... Join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Until then stay safe, happy holidays and as always Keep Reading!

The red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

The rest of the text is your reviewer Garvin Anders