We Shall See Face to Face
The five-volume Lightbringer Series is in many ways a typical modern fantasy—but it weaves in a consistently compelling depiction of the life of faith.
Review by Sara Holston
Sometimes people talk like all the great Christian fantasy has already been written. And while it’s true that Tolkien and Lewis will always have a place in my heart, they aren’t the only fantasy writers who deal with the reality and experience of faith. Take, for example, Brent Weeks’s Lightbringer series. When I began reading the first installment of the five book series, I was caught up in the characters and the world and the magic. Where candles take a physical substance and turn it into light, magic-wielders called “drafters” can take light and turn it into a physical substance: luxin. The societal structure reflects the value of these individuals; in a reversal of our world, for example, those who do the calculations to design complex structure enjoy significantly less status than the drafters who actually build them. Against this backdrop, Weeks spins a seemingly standard fantasy story, beginning with a destroyed village that forces a young boy on a journey to reckon with his newfound power and the discovery that his previously-unknown father is actually the Prism—the emperor, the most powerful drafter, and, in this theocratic society, the symbolic manifestation of God in the world. Your typical fantasy opening.
Then it really got interesting. Power in fantasy novels—as in life—always comes at a cost. All drafters but the Prism reach a point in their lives when they begin to lose themselves to the power, becoming a wight, something less than human. So, before they lose themselves entirely and become a kind of monster that may pose a danger to others, drafters undergo a ritualized killing called the Freeing. The Prism, a strikingly papal figure, hears their confessions and offers forgiveness, before driving a knife through their hearts. It’s a chilling scene, when Weeks finally reveals the nature of the Freeing, but amidst the horror something else caught my attention: at the end of his absolution and blessing, the Prism says, “Well done, true and faithful servant.” It’s a small, somewhat innocuous phrase, but one that any Christian would recognize. It comes from one of Jesus’s parables and is something Christians believe we will hear Him say to each of us when we depart this life and finally meet Him face to face. The insertion of this line added a whole new layer of complication to my reading not only of an already haunting scene, but of the entire book.
On its own, the fact that the theocratic society clearly drew inspiration from the Catholic Church hadn’t pinged me as anything unusual. Many stories have religious themes or take place in religious settings without getting too deep in the question that logically follows: is the thing in which these characters believe true? This fundamental question of faith, however, is at the center of Weeks’s story—but subtly so. In the pantheon of Christian fantasy, where C.S. Lewis’s allegory focuses on God and J.R.R. Tolkien’s rich and sweeping epic plays with His creation, Weeks’s modern fantasy series explores what it’s like to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that doesn’t provide concrete answers. After all, faith is “the essence of things hoped for, and the knowledge of things unseen.” As in our world, everything in Weeks’s hints at divinity, always there in the corner of your eye, but when you try to grasp it too firmly, to dwell on it too long, other explanations (more scientific, more realistic) start to jockey for space. It could have been God’s guiding hand, or it could have just been the good sense of an experienced general. Or coincidence. Or luck.
And as a reader, the delicacy with which Weeks straddled the line kept me guessing, too. Was Weeks writing a story of faith, or a secular tale that borrowed the trappings of Christianity? Like Lewis’s beam of light in his essay “Meditations in a Toolshed,” it felt like either—or, paradoxically, both—could be true, depending on whether I chose to look at or along the beam. The characters wrestled with God and with their doubts in a way that made me realize I’ve met each and every one of them—in my work, in my classes, or in myself. Can I still have faith, despite the things I’ve done? Can I still have faith, despite the things the church has done? Can I still have faith, after everything I have lost?
It wasn’t just the religious myth that echoed at every turn, it was also the story of faith.
Brent Weeks sits in this tension for four books, ending the penultimate novel with a hell of a cliffhanger: the protagonist, the now powerless and forsaken Prism, is sent on a quest to kill God. I found myself wondering often, as I waited the final book’s release, whether Weeks had written himself into a corner. Four books of ambiguity, and now he’d forced his own hand. He would have to answer the question: is it true? Weeks’s series was so unlike other Christian fantasy I’d read—nuanced and frustratingly elusive where most of the genre is unambiguous to a fault—that I confess to feeling prematurely disappointed. I was fairly certain he was going to cop out with some vague but #deep symbolism, or even go all-in on the cynical conclusion that God is just a convenient idea to shape a good society.
And, for a moment, it seemed I would be right. About halfway through the final book, the protagonist finally makes it to the top of the tower where he is to find God, and… it’s empty. Weeks lets us stew in that discovery just long enough to realize, along with the protagonist, that we are angry to find God was never there at all. And then, God reveals Himself in the person of the humble slave who had accompanied our protagonist on the last leg of his journey. The confrontation that follows takes up a significant chunk of the rest of the book: the broken, human protagonist having a face-to-face conversation with God.
Weeks’s readers were practically rabid with fury. In the online forums, at least, accusations flew that he had ruined a perfectly good series just because he found religion, or that he had lulled everyone into a false sense of security just to try to convert us en masse. But I found myself thinking, if we didn’t realize this was always where this was going, we weren’t really reading these books. It was always there in those words, “Well done, true and faithful servant.” It whispered in one of the series’ central conflicts, which arises with a movement of discontents who argue that becoming a wight may mean losing your humanity but doesn’t have to mean losing yourself. Maybe, they say, you can safely transform into a different (read: superior) kind of being—surely you won’t really die, says the serpent in the Garden; you’ll just become like gods yourselves. It wasn’t just the religious myth that echoed at every turn, it was also the story of faith.
All of this isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate some of the frustration. There was something poignant and deeply true about the uncertainty in Weeks’s books. There was something cathartic about seeing in these pages a reflection of the journey I’ve been on for almost 30 years—to remain steadfast in the knowledge of things unseen, despite the persistent questions and the creeping what ifs. From a literary perspective, there was something elegant about the way he captured the dual nature of that beam of light—maybe it can be both the wise general’s good judgment and the hand of God at work.
But there was something beautiful and cathartic about the ending we got, too. I can’t express in a short review what it felt like read that conversation between the protagonist and God, except to say I suspect many of us have wondered what we might ask or say to Him if we had the chance, and after thousands of pages of build-up, Weeks’s version does not disappoint. I can tell you that I reveled in my surprise and delight at the way Weeks’s sheer glee practically leaps off the page. The latter half of the book is at times so playful that the unrestrained joy is infectious. And while it may “resolve” a lot of the plot conflicts that had seemed so central with a literal deus ex machina, perhaps ending the series by dwelling in that conversation with God was the only possible resolution to the conflicts that really mattered.
Sara Holston is a student at HLS, and the current Managing Editor of Fare Forward.
The Lightbringer Series was published by Orbit Books between 2010 and 2019. You can find all five books available from the publisher here.
