What can you say about a book full of well-known and likeable characters, a book which is the last installment of a trilogy? You may try to sum it up somehow, to see how it fits into the previous ones.
In The City of Sorcery, though, I can see only a good science fantasy novel full of travel, adventure and mysteries. This time, when Jaelle and Magda already have children, girls-toddlers, and work with the Forbidden Tower, they are called to Thendara. The Terrans and the Renunciates have formed the so-called Bridge Society, a cooperation between two worlds. And now a Terran agent and a Renunciate are missing deep in the mountains. And so Magda, Jaelle, Cholayna and Camilla begin a journey to find them, and to discover a secret of a mysterious group and a mysterious city. There’ll be a lot descriptions of perilous mountains, a lot of unexpected discoveries, and a very shattering conclusion to the whole trilogy.
I didn’t find this novel controversial, but I didn’t find it stirring any important social questions, either. It’s a good adventure novel about characters you know, and if you’ve read The Mists of Avalon, too, you’ll be able to recognize some tropes, probably: a secret society far from the world cultivating believing in a Goddess. And the premise of it, and the very discovery of the lost ancient city deep in the mountains, was interesting, but it didn’t fill my expectations entrirely.
Let’s say, what do the characters mean when they say that the city was built before humans’ coming on Darkover, that is a remnant of a very ancient civilization? Knowing the canon, you may think that it must have been built by the elvin-like chieri, but that is never confirmed. And of course when you do your world-building, sometimes explicit explanation can be crude, but this time, I hoped for the mystery resolved. It wasn’t resolved, though. Instead, we got a sudden violence unleashing, and a big loss which left some characters staying in the city and some returning to the Domains with the feeling that nothing would be the same again. And for itself, it’s a good poignant ending. It’s like a circle, the end of a beautiful love-and-friednship story. But on the broader scale, we needed some answers about the very Darkover and its society. And we weren’t given them.
The trilogy about the Renunciates is all like this: convincing and moving at some points while irritating and unconcluded at others. As for the 1970’s and 1980’s it must have been ground-breaking in its focus on women and bonds between them. But many things in these books have aged in a problematic ways, and let’s not deny it: the orientalist descriptions of the Dry Towns, the strange honour code of the Renunciates, people of colour being treated like a literal rarity. Also, the question of class was raised but never fully explored and developed. Still, there are many valid and interesting observations in this sub-cycle of Darkover series, and the books are just deft, readable, and thought-provoking at once. Many other books on Darkover have aged more poorly, and The Saga of the Renunciates remains a sequence which, to me at least, was the most pleasant to read. We were given some food for thought. We were presented with issues usually silenced on Darkover. We were given female characters who are simply human beings.
There are many novels about Darkover I judged harshly because of their exclusionary whiteness, because of their silence on class issues, because of their reinforcement of binary gender roles. But The Saga of the Renunciates is different from them and more thoughtful on the topics Bradley otherwise often neglected. This sequence is never as grim and problematic as the books about the Ages of Chaos, or as simplistic about social questions as many Darkover novels about Terran and Darkovan relations tended to be. It’s closer to the incredible works of Ursula LeGuin than anywhere else in Bradley’s writings. And if I wrtie “closer”, I can’t write “similar”; because LeGuin would have never written a book using Orientalist tropes or justyfying victim blaming.
Left Hand of Fiction 