When the center no longer holds: The Kingdom of Copper, by S.A. Chakraborty (with apologies to William Butler Yeats and John Candy)

 Several weeks ago, I wrote about S.A. Chakraborty's first novel in The Daevabad Trilogy, The City of Brass.  I lauded the book's nuanced characters and moral complexity, along with Chakraborty's world-building.  She started somewhat mechanically, but narratively found her way to a city of understandably flawed characters in constrained situations making bad but comprehensible choices.  Turning to the sequel, I will start with the minor observation that Chakraborty is one of those rare authors who starts dull and finishes strongly.  She writes slow burners that ratchet up the tension, and you have to stick with the book through some set-up in order to get to the payoff.  One might call it a flaw, or one might simply appreciate an impressive payoff.  At this point, I'll just read her books and trust that she's going somewhere interesting.  For now, if you haven't started The Daevabad Trilogy, my 2/3 verdict is that this series is very good.

Quick recap.  We are in late 18th/early 19th Century North Africa/Middle East/South Asia.  Djinn are real, and they are fire elementals, as opposed to the peri (air elementals), marid (water elementals), and humans, being of the Earth.  Long ago, djinn were fucking around with humans, metaphorically and literally, and that led to too much magic and chaos in the human world, so Suleiman came along and cursed the djinn, leading to their removal from the human world, mostly to the city of Daevabad.  Or at least, that's the story told in the first book.  It's a little more complicated, as we learn in the second book.

Anyway, when djinn and humans mate, the offspring (now forbidden) are "shafit," who often have various magical powers, sometimes close to that of the djinn themselves.  Daevabad was founded by a tribe of djinn called the Daeva, who are very strict on the whole "no miscegenation" thing, and yes, obviously the whole premise is a race metaphor, but better for being a metaphor, the way sci-fi/fantasy used to be rather than what happens when you remove all elegance.

This is how you do it, kids.

Anyway, the Daeva are oppressive, but not mindlessly so.  They are trying to avoid another prophet coming along to curse everyone.  They are still brutal, and another tribe-- the Geziri-- come along and overthrow the Daeva to be at least somewhat less oppressive to the shafit, even if they aren't exactly egalitarian.

Book 1 gets started in Cairo, when a shafit named Nahri gets tangled up in some magical shit, and accidentally summons an ancient, dead, formerly "enslaved" (think genie in a lamp) Daeva warrior named Dara.  He sees what she is, takes her to Daevabad, and crazy politics ensue.  Since she is part Daeva and has the healing powers of their leaders, the Nahids, King Ghassan al Qahtani tells everyone that she's a pureblood and marries her off to his eldest son as a peacemaking deal.  The first book is really about Ghassan's attempts to keep the city of Daevabad from descending into tribal warfare, and the kinds of shit he'll pull in his attempts.  At least, that's how I liked to read it, despite the focus on Nahri, Dara, and Ghassan's youngest son.

In my post on The City of Brass, I wrote about Ghassan's perspective, which I found fascinating.  He is hardly a hero, but neither is he just some villainous tyrant out to preserve his own power for the sake of his own power.  Rather, his goal really is keeping a group of potentially warring djinn from converting that potential warfare into kinetic warfare.  That requires some questionable choices, including in some cases the deaths of innocents, or at least, so he thinks.  In contrast, his idealistic younger son, Alizayd may be morally admirable, but it is not clear that his decisions would lead to the best outcomes.

The book closes out with Dara trying to take Nahri out of Daevabad, Alizayd kidnapped in tow, only to run into an ambush on the cursed lake on which Daevabad sits.  A battle ensues, Dara kills fuckloads, and the only thing that stops him is when he kills Ali, Ali falls into the lake, the marid claim him, and the marid, through Ali, kill Dara.  Brutal, explosive end, leaving Nahri trapped with Ghassan, Ali in some weird, semi-possessed state, Dara dead, again (until resurrected again), and Daevabad ever closer to coming apart.  Fucking awesome.

Did that count as a quick recap?  Whatever.  I'm just typin' here.  Anyway, this takes us to The Kingdom of Copper.  Ghassan's rule is still in place, but the battle at the end of the first book did him no favors.  The central problem for Ghassan was the tension between the tribes, and how that relates to the place of the shafit.  Because of the difficulties Alizayd has created for Ghassan, he has exiled his youngest son, but the death of Dara inflamed tensions between the Daeva and the Geziri.  The shafit had a defender of sorts with Alizayd, and the problems between the shafit and the Daeva are getting worse while Ghassan has to figure out who gets the shit end of the stick, and in order to tamp down the conflict between the Geziri and the Daeva, it's the shafit again.

While Ghassan cracks down on the shafit and the Daeva in the aftermath of the messy battle at the end of The City of Brass, it turns out, totally unsurprisingly, that Nahri's mother is actually alive.  She resurrects Dara, makes him even more terrifying, cuts some deals with some ifrit, and starts planning an attack to retake Daevabad.

In the first book, Ghassan is hardly a good guy, but it is easier to see his perspective because he is mostly keeping the peace.  Having dramatically failed to keep the peace, what happens?  His goals are the same:  peace and stability, but the path to those goals gets harder and more fraught.  He becomes even more willing to let shafit die in large numbers, potentially even through means more nefarious than negligence.  The Daeva?  If the Daeva and shafit kill each other, as long as it doesn't spill over into other tribes, that's not Ghassan's problem.  His goal post has moved, making his actions harder to defend.  Yet on the other side is Nahri's mother as she prepares what amounts to a biological weapon that would take out all Geziri.  Even Dara recoils, and his nickname is "The Scourge."

Alizayd eventually comes around to the notion of deposing Ghassan, just as everything is coming to a head, with the challenge being convincing his siblings to see the necessity.

So, Ghassan wants to keep the peace.  Can he?  Or has that ship sailed?  The actions he takes in a morally fraught attempt do not in any way justify Nahri's mother, nor the terrorist attacks of the shafit, but that's rather the point.  This is a city coming a part, with animosities built up over more than a millennium.

Ghassan arguably just suppressed and tamped down the conflicts for a period of time.  The question raised is whether or not Daevabad could have been held together.

It is not clear, and that's the most interesting part.

Within Daevabad, there is one flat-out oppressed group, the shafit.  Alizayd, Nahri and a few others try to help, but when the civilization of Daevabad is so fundamentally opposed to anything like equal rights, or even the improved conditions for which the Geziri supposedly overthrew the Daeva in the first place, it is not clear what path there is to that outcome.  Then you have the Daeva who still nurse the grudge that they were overthrown over a millennium ago, but beyond that, by the time you get to The Kingdom of Copper, attacks on Daeva go unpunished.  So there's that, creating pressure on the Daeva to seek redress.  Ghassan thinks that if he loosens his grip, all hell breaks loose, and having seen the breaking loose of said hell, he has some empirical basis for that belief, and Alizayd can observe that Ghassan is far from the principles under which the Geziri came to rule, while unleashing so much blood that why bother?

Can we say, powderkeg?

Is it necessarily true that one can put everyone at a table together and negotiate a peace in which everyone just lives together?  If not, what are the conditions in which that is not true?  Are those initial conditions, or do they come about by problems going unaddressed for too long?

Political science has no answers to those questions.  I have none.  Answering these questions in any specific context requires considering the counterfactual in which we go back in time, possibly far back in time, make a change, and see if we produce a negotiated settlement when there had been war prior to our time meddling.  This entire subfield of political science is bullshit.  In some specific circumstances, we can point to one leader-- almost always an autocrat-- who invades another country or quashes an internal [whatever], just for the fucking hell of it.  Use your time machine to kill baby Hitler, or baby Putin, or pick your baby autocrat, and you can stop that invasion, or some specific, egregious act.

But when tension builds over years, or centuries?  We got nothin'.

Could Ghassan, or some previous ruler, have done something to reduce the temperature and bring not just this thing I have called "peace and stability," but a long-term stable peace?  An equilibrium?  That is in no way clear, and if that was not possible, then the center could not hold, and the thing of Daevabad was bound to fall apart.  Metaphors of centripetal and centrifugal force are poor guides for politics, however tempting they may be, but for whatever else Daevabad is, it is the capital of a nation of tribes in conflict with each other.  If the conflicts are not resolved, they will recur.  In the context of the nation of the djinn, it is not clear how, or if these conflicts could be resolved, in which case it is a matter of suppressing or moving from bandaid to bandaid.

The more generalized political point is the question of what happens when you see conflicts going unresolved.  In Daevabad, as in reality, the biggest problem is that addressing one conflict may mean exacerbating another, in which case Yeats wins.  Yet suppressing those conflicts in a bid for time still gives inevitable victory to Yeats, if perhaps a few years later.

If a center can hold, the only way it does so is attempting to resolve a conflict.  When there is no good faith attempt, it's Yeats-ville, baby.  Is that Bethlehem?  Lemme slouch over towards my bookshelf to figure it out.  In any case, Ghassan's way, however intentioned, does not work in the long-term, but really neither does Alizayd.  That's why Daevabad falls.

You can take these ideas to any conflict you choose.  Were the Daeva and the Geziri going to agree to settle their disagreement?  Not through an enforced rule by Ghassan, nor any Geziri king.  And none of this was going to turn out well for the shafit.  The point of democracy, really, is peaceful resolution and peaceful transfer of power, and when that breaks down, you're fucked, but the idea is that stability comes from that resolution process.  Absent that, then what?

Without some agreement even on a path to resolution, no center will hold.

I suppose I will merely say that if an adversary makes an offer for a process, with any semblance of good faith, you are honor-bound to take it.  You are also honor-bound to offer it.  Those who refuse cannot be redeemed, and can at best be managed like human toxic waste.  Always offer a hand, and accept one when offered.

Beyond that, the rational move is self-protection.  Alas, not all conflicts can be resolved because a resolution is necessarily mutual.

Not all centers can hold.

Fucking awesome book.  Chakraborty essentially blew up everything by the end of The Kingdom of Copper, though, so I am more than a little nervous about Empire of Gold.  I'll read it, of course, but dude.  To quote another great poet (John Candy), she blow'd it up real good.

Frank Zappa, "Excentrifugal Forz," from Apostrophe.