Review: Dark Age by Pierce Brown

Blurb:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Thebestselling author of Morning Star returns to the Red Rising universe with the thrilling sequel to Iron Gold.

He broke the chains. Then he broke the world….
 
A decade ago Darrow led a revolution, and laid the foundations for a new world. Now he’s an outlaw.
 
Cast out of the very Republic he founded, with half his fleet destroyed, he wages a rogue war on Mercury. Outnumbered and outgunned, is he still the hero who broke the chains? Or will he become the very evil he fought to destroy?
 
In his darkening shadow, a new hero rises. 
 
Lysander au Lune, the displaced heir to the old empire, has returned to bridge the divide between the Golds of the Rim and Core. If united, their combined might may prove fatal to the fledgling Republic. 
 
On Luna, the embattled Sovereign of the Republic, Virginia au Augustus, fights to preserve her precious demokracy and her exiled husband. But one may cost her the other, and her son is not yet returned.
 
Abducted by enemy agents, Pax au Augustus must trust in a Gray thief, Ephraim, for his salvation. 
 
Far across the void, Lyria, a Red refugee accused of treason, makes a desperate bid for freedom with the help of two unlikely new allies.
 
Fear dims the hopes of the Rising, and as power is seized, lost, and reclaimed, the worlds spin on and on toward a new Dark Age.

Don’t miss any of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga:
RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE • LIGHT BRINGER

Review:

AMaybe the real dark age was the friends we made along the way. I just wish those friends could be found here.

Dark Age, the fifth book in the Red Rising series, is a tricky one. After how floored I was with the series’ return in Iron Gold, I was excited to see where Pierce Brown was going to go next. And from the jump, Dark Age starts off as an explosive force. But what follows can ultimately amount to doing both too much and too little, and the result is a suffocating experience that, when permitting the reader to breathe is a great ride, but can just as easily bog it down while the reader is gasping for air.

The stage is set from the end of Iron Gold. Darrow had once laid the foundations for a new world, but he is now cast out from it. As he wages an insurgent war against the Society dictator Atalantia on Mercury, he faces a crossroads between being the hero he once was, and becoming the monster he fought to destroy. But from that shadow of war, a new hero strives to take up the mantle in the form of Lysander au Lune, the exile heir to the old empire, whose actions may crumble the very foundations that Darrow laid down. Elsewhere, other players seek to navigate the impending dark age to come. Virginia au Augustus will stop at nothing to preserve the republic’s democracy, whatever the price may be. The thief Ephraim finds himself among violent Obsidian agents, and a horror that lurks among their ranks. And Lyria, survivor of a purge of Reds, must survive under the worst of circumstances in the hands of dangerous mercenaries. The shadow has risen, and it threatens to blanket all the light that was cast at the end of the Red Rising.

Dark Age begins with a bang. The first section of the book is essentially one long succession of battles as the point of view shifts between Darrow and Lysander. The battle on Mercury is a hell of an opener, shocking and violent with no detail spared and a constant pulse-pounder throughout. Pierce Brown absolutely excels at descriptive and evocative action sequences, and the opening of Dark Age is him at his best. The first 150 pages or so are instant page-turner material, setting the stage for what should have been an epic continuation of the series.

But damn did it fall flat from here.

Hold on, let’s back up a bit.

This is not to say the remaining 600 pages or so are bad. There’s still plenty of good to go around here. What I liked about Iron Gold—a praise that continues in Dark Age—is how this is no longer solely Darrow’s story. While the Red Reaper still has some moments of prominence (during the beginning and end of the book especially), Dark Age is more about the other players on the board. Virginia and Ephraim take much of the center stage through the middle sections of the book, and the different approaches to how they tackle a darkening world help the plot points feel refreshing, even when they remain coated in violence. Lyria—even though her quantity of chapters is far fewer than the rest of the cast—is the star here. Her chapters were among the most evocative and heartbreaking in the series, and her character growth has been the best part of this new arc of the series thus far. And this rise-and-fall approach to Darrow’s story that Brown has embarked upon—with Lysander acting as a perfect foil to Darrow—keeps the Reaper from being a stale character across such a big series.

With all that being said, though, Dark Age still remained an uneven experience for me. The first thing to note is that this book is bleak. Yeah, yeah, it’s implied by the title of the book, but while the series had its roots in dystopian themes, Dark Age is full-on grimdark. I mentioned previously that now detail was spared, and while that can be a good thing, it can be done to excess here. Those with weak stomachs should be well aware of what they may be getting into here. There’s plenty of gore to go around, but some of the grimmer details I could have done without. Genocide, torture, dismemberment, rape, and even baby murder is on the table here.

And I should note that I have no issue with grimdark. Joe Abercrombie is one of my favorite authors. But there is an issue of restraint here. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s meant to be uncomfortable, but there are several moments where I couldn’t help but think that just because Brown could have written certain scenes the way they are, it doesn’t mean he should have.

The uneven pacing exacerbates this a bit more as well. It’s a strange balance here of there being a lot going on but also not enough, where several plot threads spread out in tandem with one another but few of them get their time to fully shine and develop. Lyria’s arc, for example, was the strongest of the book, and she doesn’t even get her first chapter until about 250-300 pages into the book, and even then she hardly gets the same attention as characters like Virginia and Ephraim. But for the characters we do get to spend a lot of time with, it’s a combination of there being so much happening that it doesn’t get the time it needs to bake, and the slower moments that could be used for proper development felt a bit wasted. Ultimately, this book could have been trimmed back 100 or 200 pages and it wouldn’t have suffered for it.

Was I disappointed with Dark Age? Yes. Do I think it’s a bad book? Definitely not. The writing is still good, the characters are still strong, and this overarching plot across the series still has me hooked enough to continue with Light Bringer next. But it ends up feeling like a foundational book for a following entry, which is a tough sell for the fifth book in a long series, even if it is still a series I fully intend to continue with.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go try and pry a little bit of George R.R. Martin’s soul out of Pierce Brown.