Review of The Burning God by R.F. Kuang

Finishing a whole trilogy in less than five months? Must be a new record for me. The Burning God is a hell of an epic conclusion to R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War saga. All I have to say is: George R.R. Martin, eat your fucking heart out. The Red Wedding? Bah. None of the gruesome acts in A Song of Ice and Fire come close to the mayhem and misery inflicted here. This book is dark, we’re talking Frank Miller Batman dark and then some…. It’s only after I finished reading this book that I realized it has been a long time since I had truly read tragic fantasy.

Spoilers for the first two books but not for this one.

Disillusioned by the shattered promises of the Dragon Republic, Rin finds herself fighting once again for a different master: the Southern Coalition. Anchored spiritually by Kitay, Rin now has all the powers of the Phoenix at her command. Yet she still chafes at serving beneath men (and they are always men) who seek to use her while also despising her. Rin soon finds the tables turning, again and again, as power changes hands: she’s up, she’s down, she’s allying herself with former enemies and fighting back against gods and monsters alike. Meanwhile, Nikan burns, and where it isn’t burning, it’s starving.

You know, fantasy fiction is often bloodless.

Seriously. Look at Lord of the Rings. Yes, it features epic battle sequences—against armies of orcs. And while many heroes fall, in the end those who remain get to go back to their quiet families, back to the Shire, or west over the ocean … and they live happily ever after. Or at least for a time. Good triumphs over evil. Right wins the day.

Kuang woke up and chose violence. Literally. This trilogy is the literal rejection of bloodless, clean, fairytale epic fantasy. As I quipped at the top of this review, however, it is also subverts the so-called grimdark tropes of fantasy as written by authors like GRRM. Whereas GRRM would say he writes suffering because it’s “realistic,” the suffering of most of his characters is more sensational and pornographic than it is a consequence of their situations and the world. In contrast, the characters in The Burning God suffer because … well … their lives suck. They’re living under an invasion and a rebellion at the same time, as well as a resurgence of shamanic powers. Every semblance of order and an ordinary life, such as it was even for the peasants, is gone.

I’m reading this book as, in the background of my privileged Canadian life, I bear witness to the genocide in Gaza. So much senseless violence and killing and dispossession of Indigenous land. So many excuses thrown about in our so-called civil discourse to obfuscate these simple facts. The parallels are stark and obvious. The Burning God is the climax of a story about genocide (multiple genocides, in fact) and colonialism. The Hesperians are inspired by Europe and the US, an imperalist and moralistic, missionary-obsessed nation convinced it knows it all. What makes Rin’s war so fantastically hard to prosecute is that she isn’t just fighting a physical army: she’s fighting on multiple fronts, some of them spiritual and geopolitical. And despite her minimal Sinegard training and having Kitay’s super-strategy brain on her side, she just … can’t. She can’t win.

The sheer pressure of the enormity of events, the cruelty at scale and the individual ignominy, is tolerable only because Rin is such a pathetic protagonist. She is so unlikeable, so bitter and prone to lashing out at everything and everyone. (Though, to be fair, almost everyone around her treats her terribly.) It’s not that she’s a bad person; she isn’t evil or villainous. She’s just heinously, almost cartoonishly inept and certainly shouldn’t be the heroine. You know that saying, “Not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed”? Yeah. Rin is neither of those.

Maybe everyone else realizes this from the first line of the first book, but it took me until now to realize Kuang is writing tragedy. Sorry for being so slow on the uptake. Like I said, I think I’ve been conditioned to see all my fantasy series as epic battles between good and evil where it will look bad for the good guys for a long while but good eventually prevails. I had forgotten—or maybe deliberately avoided—the whole tragic form. But in a way, despite her propensity for genre hopping, Kuang can’t seem to avoid writing tragedy, whether it’s postcolonial AUs or contemporary takedowns of literary fiction and publishing or fantastical reimaginings of twentieth-century China. Kuang seems quite fixated on losing conditions.

And I’m here for it. I’m here for it in a way I didn’t expect to be, because honestly I don’t really enjoy tragedies. I am a comedies gal. Here I am, though, finding pathos in the tragic figure of Fang Runin at the very end of this book because of course it ends exactly the way it should, Kuang giving us the perfect, most heartbreaking, only logical ending we could possibly get. It’s annoying, is what it is, her being this good at writing and choosing to tell us sad stories instead of happy ones. Goddamn her.

I’m getting emotional because an emotional response is the only correct response to The Burning God. This is an emotional, irrational book. It’s about the worst that humans can bring to bear on each other, the absolute failure mode of humanity. That the final moments of the book represent hope—a forlorn, distant, unimaginably bleak form of hope—is less ironic than it is a desperate plea to make all of this chaos and suffering mean something. But that is, in essence, the human condition, is it not? While I won’t go full Hobbes, I can’t help but look around me at the present state of affairs and conclude that a great amount of human experience is suffering at the hands of other humans, yet we keep building, keep talking, keep … going.

This is not a nice book. It has no happy ending. There is no triumph to be had here, only the bitter taste of ashes and defeat. This is a book about annihilation, about how conquest will happen either at the point of a sword (or butt of a gun) or through the arrival of famine-ending grain. But it will happen. The good guys don’t always win. Sometimes there aren’t any good guys; sometimes everyone sucks, but the people who suck slightly more still win. Sometimes your rebel with a cause and her pyromaniac Phoenix aren’t enough.

If you have read the first two books, you deserve to read this one. You owe it to yourself, and you have also brought it upon yourself. I’m not sorry. If you haven’t read the first two books, read them first. Just be prepared for it to get worse, in the best possible sense.