Senlin Ascends Is a Towering Achievement in Weird Fantasy

The story follows Thomas Senlin, an awkwardly rigid headmaster, and his new wife, Marya, on their honeymoon. Senlin has been a sold a bright, utopic vision of their destination by his guidebook, The Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel. His reliance on that book, and the portrait it paints, will be familiar to every Type-A traveler, though ss you might guess, reality diverges from that rosy picture rather quickly.
Senlin and Marya intend to work their way up through the Tower’s various Ringdoms—fully autonomous, diverse levels—to reach The Baths, where they’ll spend their newlywed days lounging in its spa-like Steampunk setting.
They don’t get there, however, or at least, they don’t get there together: Marya vanishes in the chaotic bazaar at the foot of the Tower, where reunions of separated parties are about as likely as an accurate tourism brochure.
So begins Senlin’s quest—first to find his wife and then, gradually, to uncover the Tower’s seemingly endless secrets.
Those familiar with the biblical story can imagine the disorienting and confounding journey that follows. Bancroft has taken the notion of communication and miscommunication at the heart of that story and applied it to the Ringdoms. While ostensibly—we’re never explicitly told otherwise—the Tower’s inhabitants and visitors speak largely the same language, or the same set of languages, each Ringdom does offer a completely unique experience, with its own center of power, its own villains, its own rules, and its own punishments, meted out for distinct indiscretions.

Here is where Senlin Ascends truly shines, with worldbuilding that manages the tricky work of being both fully imagined and truly strange. After working through the constantly shifting marketplace and into the Tower, we first come to The Basement, its dingy atmosphere dotted by thousands of giant snails clinging to the pipes overhead. Here, Senlin learns the ways of the Tower, in the land of common thieves. He’s robbed of more than his money; The Basement also steals his enchantment with the Tower, and (some of) his naiveté.
Atop The Basement sits The Parlor, an elaborate realm of stagecraft in which you can never be quite sure who’s the actor who’s the audience. The Baths are ruled by a severe and capricious cabal, in juxtaposition of its touted serenity. As Senlin navigates each new world, he must himself evolve and adapt. By the end of the novel, the cunning, street-smart survivor looks almost nothing like the prudish schoolteacher who began the journey.
You might ask, what of Marya? In the present tense, she has very little presence in this first novel, though we get several glimpses of her character through her husband’s flashbacks and hallucinations. Bancroft has promised to give us her side of the story in future novels (volume two, Arm of the Sphinx, arrives in March, and a third in the fall; a concluding volume is planned for 2019). It seems assured the woman we meet in the sequels will likewise look far different from the one we lost at the foot of the Tower.
The Tower changes all who enter it, a fact we’re reminded of again and again by the lives of the misfit acquaintances Senlin makes on his journey. The word “acquaintances” is deliberate; true, undeniable friends are hard to come by in a place where the call of survival is louder than that of loyalty. Even Senlin concedes to doing things in the hopes of finding Marya would have horrified him months before. Yet though Senlin changes considerably in demeanor, expectations, and behavior, he doesn’t lose himself entirely. Gritty, grimdark fantasy has its merits, but on occasion, it’s nice to find a protagonist who doesn’t bend to his amoral surroundings.
Of course, there’s still much more of the Tower to explore, and to survive. The upper layers lay shrouded in fog and in mystery, though it seems assured we’ll see them up close and personal as the series continues. For now, I’m content to dwell on the lush, enigmatic, and slippery worlds Bancroft has already given us.
Senlin Ascends is available January 16.