Book Review | Morning Star by Pierce Brown

I rise into darkness, away from the garden they watered with the blood of my friends. The Golden man who killed my wife lies dead beside me on the cold metal deck, life snuffed out by his own son’s hand.

Autumn wind whips my hair. The ship rumbles beneath. In the distance, friction flames shred the night with brilliant orange. The Telemanuses descending from orbit to rescue me. Better that they do not. Better to let the darkness have me and allow the vultures to squabble over my paralyzed body.

My enemy’s voices echo behind me. Towering demons with the faces of angels. The smallest of them bends. Stroking my head as he looks down at his dead father.

“This is always how the story would end,” he says to me. “Not with your screams. Not with your rage. But with your silence.”

***

Pierce Brown has several times cited Star Wars—specifically the original trilogy—as a influence of no small significance on the fan-favourite series Morning Star completes, and it's fair to say the pair share a double helix here and a structural strand there.

Like A New Hope before it, Red Rising introduced an almost recognisable galaxy ruled by an evil empire; an evil empire whose merciless machinations gave the saga's protagonist—here, the Helldiver Darrow—a very personal reason to rebel against said. It was a bloody good book, to be sure, but as nothing next to Golden Son, which scaled up the conflict and the cast of characters introduced in Red Rising marvelously, in much the same way The Empire Strikes Back improved in every conceivable sense on its predecessor. It also ended with a catastrophic cliffhanger... which we'll get back to.

In short, it shouldn't be such a surprise that the pattern which held true in books one and two of Brown's breakthrough also applies to the conclusion. For better or for worse, Morning Star is this trilogy's Return of the Jedi—though there are, thankfully, no Ewok equivalents in evidence.

The end begins with Darrow locked in a box.

Time, to wit, has lost all meaning to the Reaper, but he's been in this almost-but-not-quite-carbonite contraption for nearly a year. In the process the young man who freed Mars has lost much of his mind, and all of the carefully-carved body that helped him pass for a Gold in the colour-coordinated caste hierarchy of the sinister Society. He's so far gone, in fact, that he's seriously considering killing himself when a duo of deeply-embedded rebels finally spring him from the Jackal's base of operations.

Darrow may be back in play from this point on, but Brown is smart not to simply dismiss Golden Son's devastating denouement. The Reaper, returned, is no longer a leader. He has to be carved all over again, and retrained as if here were a new recruit to the cause. "Like a prisoner who spend his whole life digging through the wall, only to break through and find he's dug into another cell," (p.70) he feels beaten, defeated—which is understandable, because he was.

Book Review | Golden Son by Pierce Brown

As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he was building for his descendants. But the Society he faithfully served was built on lies. Darrow’s kind have been betrayed and denied by their elitist masters, the Golds—and their only path to liberation is revolution. And so Darrow sacrifices himself in the name of the greater good for which Eo, his true love and inspiration, laid down her own life. He becomes a Gold, infiltrating their privileged realm so that he can destroy it from within.

A lamb among wolves in a cruel world, Darrow finds friendship, respect, and even love—but also the wrath of powerful rivals. To wage and win the war that will change humankind’s destiny, Darrow must confront the treachery arrayed against him, overcome his all-too-human desire for retribution—and strive not for violent revolt but a hopeful rebirth. Though the road ahead is fraught with danger and deceit, Darrow must choose to follow Eo’s principles of love and justice to free his people.

He must live for more.

***

Pierce Brown reached for the stars in Red Rising—a non-stop sprawl of story about striving and surviving as a slave to the lies of society that reminded readers of Katniss Everdeen's plight in Panem—and almost hit that monumental mark. In Golden Son he gorydamn does. It's a far superior sequel, in fact: one of the rare breed of reads that improves upon its predecessor in every conceivable category.

In the first instance, this is a bigger book, with still bigger ambitions, played out across a markedly larger and more elaborate canvas—which is to say we are no longer stuck in the Institute, where the games our carved protagonist Darrow had to play to prove his worth to the masters of Mars took place. Rather, the central Red—a rebel determined to unseat the same Society that hung his young lover for daring to sing a song—has already risen.

But that which rises must also fall.

Golden Son, so forth, starts by taking Darrow down a peg or ten. In the hands of a less accomplished author, I dare say his undoing could come off as a contrivance—a retreat to the reboot button instead of an attempt to solve the underlying problem—but Brown uses this opportunity to meaningfully re-engineer his hero: to introduce conflict in him as opposed to absolving him of the dark deeds Darrow has done in service of the terrorists—yes terrorists—he represents.

He gives every indication that being defeated doesn't bother him; that the true tragedy at the top of the novel is the death of thousands—not by his hand but absolutely because of it. Alas, he can't even convince himself of this:

And there's guilt for caring about that when so many lives should demand all my sorrow. Before today, victory made me full, because with every victory I've come closer to making Eo's dream real. Now defeat has robbed me of that. I failed her today. (p.20)

And before today, in truth. Darrow knows Eo would not have approved of his treacherous tactics in the Institute, but to realise her dream—of freedom for all—he must endear himself to the enemy; to gut the Golds from the inside out, he must behave like the best of them: the strongest and smartest and most merciless.

These are not his words, but they might as well be:

I am not a despot. But a father must cuff the ears of his children if they make attempt to set fire to his house; if I must kill a few thousand for the greater good [...] and for the citizens of this planet to live in a world untorn by war, then so be it. (pp.31-32)

Thus Darrow the suicide bomber is born.

Book Review | Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Darrow is a Red: a member of the lowest caste in the colour-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow — and Reds like him — are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity’s overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society’s ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

***

Incredibly, man has been fascinated with Mars for millennia. For more than four thousand years, we've wondered what might be out there, up there. Now we know: some rocks, some regolith, and the occasional frozen lake.

The drab reality of the red planet might pale in comparison to all the otherworldly wonders we've imagined in our science and science fiction, but that hasn't stopped us from dispatching exploratory probes and planning manned missions. More than that: we've considered colonising its canyons—overcoming the challenges of its harsh environment and making Mars a home away from home—though those days are a fair ways away, I'm afraid.

Part the first of an ambitious trilogy by Pierce Brown, Red Rising takes place in a future where these distant dreams have been realised... not that the Golds who live the high life here have elected to tell the Reds whose blood, sweat and tears made man's occupation of Mars viable. Rather, the Reds are perpetually mislead: they labour away in craters and caves under the impression that they will be rewarded for their hard work one day, when others come.

But others are already here. They have been for hundreds of years; hundreds of years during which generations of Reds have dug and danced and died none the wiser, including our protagonist Darrow's dad.