[Book Review] The Failures (The Wanderlands 1) — Benjamin Liar
Only in the Deepest Dark can we truly Dream of Light!
The desperation of seeking of light in the darkest parts of the world is the central premise of The Failures, the debut novel from Benjamin Liar, and kicks of The Wanderlands series.
The Failures is set in the titled Wanderlands, a monolithic structure shrouded in perennial darkness after the magic of the lights is stolen in a war among the great powers that be, in the age prior to the events of this series. The tale follows various factions in their own subworlds of The Wanderlands, as they tackle their own subplots, all working towards bringing the long lost light back to the dark world. To reclaim the light, our factions, both good and evil, must collect The Book, The Sword, and The Key, to free a boss-tier giant. And away we go…
The factions center around our major POV characters, ranging from The Killers headed by our “protagonist” Sophie Vesachai. Sophie is a child-hero of the great prologue war but is haunted by it, as she leads her ragtag group of heist-caper companions as they navigate a plot to forestall various antagonists from stealing The Book, which is in Vesachai’s possession. The next of the major subplotlines follows Jackie Aimes and Gunnar Anderson, two teenagers following Gunnar’s dream of adventure after he dreams of bringing light back to the dark world, which portals them into the dark Wanderlands. They have to fight their way out with nothing but each other, and Gunnars trusty sword, yes it is The Sword. But unbeknownst to them, and the readers at first glance, they are actually titanic creatures known as the Behemoth, creatures of super-strength and near impervious durability. The last of the major plot factions deals with the brothers Chris and James D’ellan. The younger, James is also visited by the dreams of light, bestowed by the Mother, and takes it upon himself to find The Key to the portal to the land of light. Their tale follows the complex relationship between the brawny simplistic James, and the hyper-intelligent, cunning, and crafty Chris as they navigate betrayals from within and without in search of The Key.
Two additional minor plotlines follow the Cabal, a group of older beings also making moves towards the demigod Giant for their own, seemingly nefarious ends. It is the Cabal that kicks off the narrative in The Failures though we do not check back with them till the third act of the book. The last minor plotline follows the Deadsmith, a near-immortal killer being on the hunt of his Prey as he tracks the latter through various portals of the Wanderlands, exploring the depths of his own psyche as the Prey tests his mental and physical resolve.
The Failures, and by extension The Wanderlands series is a curious blend of genres, drawing from various corners of the SFF space. It is difficult to pin down a genre that would touch the majority of the tropes in this book, but the closest I could reach for was Dark Steampunk. There are clear influences drawn from various other works and their authors. Many of the major characters here are representative of archetypes popularized by other works, and unfortunately fail to live up to their progenitors. The Killers arc veers too closely to every other caper story, ranging from the YA efforts of Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo) to the new standard of heist fantasy, The Gentlemen Bastards series (Scott Lynch). Sophie is a less charismatic, while ramping up the snarky-but-broken protagonist that modern fantasy, especially overflowing in the darker YA spaces. Lady Winter feels like a discount-bin Bayaz (First Law series by Joe Abercrombie). Her presence in the narrative does not elicit nearly as much menace as Bayaz, and her snippy smug dialog style is a pale imitation of Bayaz’s self-confirmed transcendent attitude towards the petty squabbles of mortal plotting. The Deadsmith plotline did nearly nothing for me, and looking at other reviews of this book, seems like a popular opinion. His journey through malicious and miserable self-discovery was not as deep or rewarding as Liar probably intended it to be, especially to someone as buried in GrimDark lore.
In fact, it is this overly snarky one-upmanship of the prose, and specifically the dialog between characters that quickly becomes grating while reading through The Failures. The issue with having several competing competent characters is that they quickly devolve into a tiring bog of “look how smart I am” and “this was my plan all along!” which is one of my least favorite aspects of YA fantasy, and will keep The Wanderlands series nestled in the no-mans land between YA and Adult Dark Fantasy. When all your characters are snippy and quippy with every single line, even in the darker moments of the narrative, it fails the story on two counts. First, it detracts from the gravitas of the moment, diluting the stakes. Secondly, it blends all the voices of the characters into one self-congratulatory effort by the author and becomes an exercise in the author trying to convince his readers about how smart he is with his plotlines.
The Failures had things going for it as well. The setting felt unique enough, even though the monolithic mountain of the Wanderlands hearkens to Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel series. Dark Steampunk is not a genre often explored, steampunk being a gritty but ultimately optimistic promise of progress with their gears and oily aesthetic. Liar does a great job of integrating familiar steampunk elements into his Silver-powered automatons and devices throughout the book, giving him enough leeway to create new technologies on the fly to further his plot. James’ character felt like a breath of fresh air because he was one of the few, if not only characters that did not fall into the smug dialog trope in this story. His internal struggles of reconciling his own ambitions and his limitations of being more brawn than brain, especially when contrasted with the more influential Chris, was refreshingly deep with enough grit to keep me invested.
The your-mileage-may-vary aspect of The Failures is its narrative structure. The various plots following the various factions feel disjointed at first and seemingly bear no connection to each other. Benjamin Liar spends no time attempting to hold the readers hand through the plot structure, elements, locations, or timelines, beyond subdividing the chapters into The Cabal, The Killers, The Monsters, The Lost Boys, and The Deadsmith to guide your way. My rating of The Failures was surprisingly sensitive to this aspect. I started off strong with the introductory chapters, but felt myself lowering points towards the second and early-third acts where the plots felt severely disconnected. It isnt towards the last quarter of the book, that the plotlines begin to converge and your internal compass and plotclock coalesces and you begin to appreciate what Liar was trying to achieve. Some may consider this to be a genius move by the author. The severe non-linear plotting of The Failures is something that none by the most brave tend to dip their toes in, and Liar does a formidable job diverging and then converging the plotlines.
However, and this is a big however, many of the converging checkpoints and aha! moments came off as a little too neat and hence a little too forced. It only added (when coupled with the dialog style) to the self-congratulatory nature of Liar’s writing and felt like an ode to his own intelligence rather than a natural progression of the sensibilities of the characters. The casual name-drop reveals of characters from different factions appearing in different chapters felt too on-the-nose at times, and towards the end I found myself rolling my eyes more often than feeling rewarded for sticking with the divergent trajectory of the middle chapters.
Overall, The Failures is a strong debut that explores a unique blend of tropes and archetypes from various spec-fic subgenres to tell a solid tale of power and betrayal. However, several aspects such as the tiresome dialog and homogenous characterization, along with few stylistic and plot design choices mar this book from fully crawling out of the dark and reaching its own light!
