You can always count on RJB to write a stunningly original work of fantasy that’s precisely and cunningly crafted to leave its reader feeling bereft aYou can always count on RJB to write a stunningly original work of fantasy that’s precisely and cunningly crafted to leave its reader feeling bereft and abandoned and craving a sequel like an ember craves air. This was so good. 10/10. Would read again in a heartbeat.
There is so much to sing about here, but what I loved most about this book is how it roots so hard for its neurodivergent protagonists who have to actively and painstakingly manifest worth and recognition in a world that gives them so readily and abundantly to everyone else. This is in many ways a story about being confronted with systems of power that make no allowance for difference, where difference is in fact recorded as suspect, and differently abled bodies become the locus of aberrance even as they are exploited, manipulated, and remade for the use, whims, and fantasies of the rich and powerful. It’s a story about transgressing, defying, redressing and resisting this dominant order, sometimes at world-destroying costs. You will find so many resonances here with the overlapping crises of our contemporary moment, and it might just make you afraid.
If you’re a fan of the unique dynamic of Sherlock and Watson, the eccentric flare of Benoit Blanc in Knives Out (2019), and/or like your fantasy with more than a dash of murder, mystery, and existential threat—this is for you. Heck, if you’re just a fan of a good time, you do not wanna miss this book! Read it for yourself, and let it bedazzle your brain....more
From its first pages, Senlin Ascends pulled me back to the feeling of fantasy with a sudden, incoherent longing: the pure joy of disappearing into theFrom its first pages, Senlin Ascends pulled me back to the feeling of fantasy with a sudden, incoherent longing: the pure joy of disappearing into the fictive spell of an unfamiliar world and the journey of an individual on a quest. I can’t help but feel like I paid some desperate price for a story like this, one that combines intrigue, adventure, and romance with gorgeous writing, deep, layered world-building, and smart, kneading thematic exploration.
Senlin Ascends follows, in the simplest terms, the story of a man who travels with his new bride to the Tower of Babel, said to be a place of enlightenment and incomparable wonders, and loses her there. What follows is Senlin’s fiercely determined (literal) ascent toward his missing wife amidst the constant threat of dissolution and demise.
Through Senlin’s eyes, Bancroft exposes the violence hiding beneath the shiny surfaces of “civilization” to drive home how capitalism operates by concealing its own traces. Anticipating civilization, Senlin instead finds a world mired in misery, dysfunction, and self-destruction, designed to suck the blood, vitality, and life from everyone in it. There are wonders in the Tower, but they are small and few, and the people who can appreciate them are emptied out of everything but a cold, mean core of desperation for survival. In his search for his wife, what Senlin is ultimately up against is a fantasy—the fantasy of the Tower as “the lighthouse of civilization”, “the great refuge of learning,” and “the very seat of civilization”—and in order to survive, he must urgently define himself against it.
The change that Senlin undergoes in the novel is remarkable. Sara Ahmed writes: “When you sense the world out there as a danger, it is your relation to your own body that changes.” Reconstellated into the perilous shadow of the Tower, Senlin’s whole sense of self transforms. Senlin becomes estranged not only from the shape of his old life, but from the shape of his old body, his old self, and it is this very estrangement which sets him up on a path that leads him to a different consciousness of the world and of his place in it. In this way, the journey towards another—Senlin’s missing wife—becomes also a journey towards self.
Senlin Ascends is a deeply upsetting book, and my hands at times hurt from gripping it.It is about the search for identity in a world so senselessly obscene that, because of its myths, it is unable to recognize its own reality. It’s a novel about the freedom that comes from being involved in the world, as opposed to what James Baldwin calls the “moral apathy” that is the result of deadening yourself to the world. This is an involvement that nonetheless cannot be separated from an experience of violence. The novel does not shy away from the shattering realities of being in the world and how they can leave us vulnerable and fragile and exposed. The same violence that leads Senlin to believe in the heroic fantasy of the Tower is, ultimately, the same violence that wakes him from it.
But this is not a book without hope. In a capitalist society designed to make people feel less alive and less human, and which renders collectivity and community impossible, Senlin’s attempts to communicate, to participate in community, to find recognition, and to escape the isolation of his situation, become a mode of survival. In these moments of resistance, the linear narrative is interrupted with flashbacks that open Senlin’s past with memory; a past that reminds Senlin of his humanity, that helps him survive, heal, and catch the briefest glimpses of freedom.
In this way, Senlin Ascends represents an insistent refrain within speculative fiction that the root of every evil in the world is capitalism and that our only hope of survival—with our humanity intact—is through an urgent ethics of togetherness and community. I loved every inch of this book, and I think you will too....more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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