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Danger Awaits in The Kingdom of Copper, by S.A. Chakraborty
The City of Brass is the title of the first in book in S.A. Chakraborty’s intricate, Middle Eastern-inspired fantasy trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty, yet much of the action takes place outside its copper walls. Still, the capital city of Daevabad pulls on the characters like gravity, drawing them in and holding them, almost bound, until, in the final, horrible moments of the novel, they are cast out to wander in the wilderness.
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As The Kingdom of Copper begins, five years have passed, and though still scattered, they remain subject to the city’s inexorable pull. It is no accident that both novels are named for these glittering, magical places, as the djinn city and its subject domains are both canvas and conflict for the series: who controls the past, and who will decide the future.
The first book followed three characters: the devout prince Ali, who chaffs at his father’s occupational rule; Nahri, street thief and lost scion of a family of magical healers; and Dara, Nahri’s Daeva, or djinn, bodyguard, and a figure of legend. When Dara finds Nahri living as a human in 18th Century Cairo, he coaxes, cajoles, and coerces her to Daevabad, the djinn city ruled by the Geziri—Ali’s family, whose ancestors overthrew Nahri’s an age ago. Ali is full of the piety of youth, a teenager in a court where people live for centuries, if not millennia, and profoundly out of his depth. Ali, Nahri, and Dara orbit one another with more and more heat and friction, their relationships spinning like an orrery of duty and bloody history, family, and empire.
The Kingdom of Copper finds the trio living in various states of exile and alienation. Ali was banished to the desert by his father, the king, a death sentence in everything but name. Due to his strange thrall to water creatures called the marid and his Geziri birthright, he survives this assassination attempt and the dozens that follow. He is more pauper than prince. Dara was resurrected by Nahri’s mother, a woman presumed dead by the empire, but that reanimation has altered him in ways he can’t accept. Nahri was boxed in quite expertly by Ali’s father, married off to the crown prince and forced into a position of complete subjugation; any false move will result in her people’s slaughter.
Ali is first to return the city of Daevabad, the prodigal prince reappearing less with fanfare and more under duress. His return destabilizes the fragile détente between the Gaziri and the Daeva. He is not well liked, emblematic of a kind of pious arrogance, and his reentry into the royal family’s residence doesn’t sit well with the powers that be. But Ali is not the boy he was five years ago; he may be the most changed character in the intervening years, tempered by exile and regret (though still often dangerously naïve). He has also been magically altered by the marid, and the full effects have not yet manifested.
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Nahri, too, has grown up. As a Cairo street kid, she was well-schooled in the thieving and the short con; this proved to be not the best education for running what is functionally an entire government agency. She has thrown herself into her work, but the rigidity of her life chaffs against her. Ali’s return upsets her delicate equilibrium. She’s been forced to marry his brother, the crown prince, and they are constitutionally unsuited to one another; it is a political marriage, filled with little warmth. She and Ali were something like friends before everything fell apart. Though she is still furiously angry with him, the ghost of their rapport makes her relationship with her husband look comparably shabby indeed. Meanwhile, Ali’s father, the king, has only grown harder and crueler, both as father and ruler.
Dara lingers longest in exile, allied with a force that plots both liberation and slaughter. He circles the city as Ali and Nahri circle each other, and all the other intricately moving pieces pull closer to their inevitable collisions. As these characters recollect themselves in The Kingdom of Copper, the reunions prove to be sparking, dangerous things. The djinn are creatures of fire after all, and the djinn city is packed with smoldering resentments: personal, political, and historical.