A review by thereadingrambler
The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed

challenging dark emotional slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
On the surface, The Siege of Burning Grass is about a twentieth-century-esque war set in a secondary world focusing on Alefret, one of the founding members of the Pact, a pacifist organization, after his own countrymen bomb him, take him prisoner, and then torture him in the name of pursuing peace. That description makes it sound like this is a high-octane kind of book, but it is anything but. The book is a carefully considered romp through some of the most difficult philosophical questions about violence, war, and peace. When does pacifism become passivity and complicity? When (if ever) is violence necessary? When (if ever) is violence the answer? And to what question? I had to put this book down multiple times just to think over what I had just read. I’ve been struggling lately with the fact violence is often The Solution in a lot of fantasy novels. This belief is that if you just kill the right people, then the day/country/world will be saved. And that’s part of the fantasy we want: That if we just figure out the Right Thing, then all of the problems in our world will be fixed. Everything would be so much easier that way. But that’s not how it works. For the biggest problems in the world, there is no straightforward or simple solution. All of the solutions require work—a lot of work—and demand significant sacrifice and struggle. This is what this book is about: Complicated questions with no easy answers. No, not even no easy answers, no real answers, just decisions that must be made, and every choice will come with costs and people who will have to suffer, but we cannot stagnate and hope the problems will go away. This is the best kind of work that speculative fiction can do: bring us out of our own world and into another one where we can examine these questions through different lenses that present us with things sideways and upside down.

Mohamed’s writing style is elegant and engrossing. She seamlessly blends plot and character development with philosophical meditation; the reading experience doesn’t feel weighted too much one way or the other—at least for my reading tastes. This is a book that does hold you at a little bit of a distance from the narrator/main character. While you are in Alefret’s head, this isn’t a story about him as much as about the moral conflicts he is struggling with. We are not precisely watching Alefret’s character develop or change in response to the new situations he is put in—really, he doesn’t change that much as a character at all; the final conflict is resolved through his commitment to his principles—but rather how those principles are tested and tried. They are shown to be difficult, complex, faulty, and inconsistent—but also something he holds dear and sees as more right than any of the other options presented to him through the book.

While I never felt a closeness to Alefret, I did feel a deep and burning hatred toward Qhudur. He is Alefret’s companion (”minder”) through this adventure and his greatest enemy. From the beginning of the book, Alefret calmly rests on the knowledge that Qhudur is going to kill him eventually. Alefret and Qhudur are philosophically extreme opposites to the point that Qhudur calls Alefret a monster for his refusal to fight. Qhudur is the one primarily poking holes into Alaefret’s philosophy. Alefret initially dismisses a lot of Qhudur says—he is worn down by the war and the torture and is not exactly happy about being on this adventure—but some of Qhudur’s actions and rationales begin to seep into Alefret’s mind, turning the antagonistic relationship into more of one between two foils.

There are a few action sequences—I don’t want to give the impression that this is a group of people sitting around discussing philosophy; in fact, people are pretty rarely just sitting around at all. This is a book about praxis. What will you believe when you are forced to confront the actions those beliefs require and the consequences coming from them in the most intense way: war? If you like the writing style and the speculative philosophy of Ursula Le Guin, I would definitely recommend The Siege of Burning Grass.
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