[Book review] The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card

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Mythology has provided lively fodder for fantasy fiction.  Greek and Egyptian gods have made frequent appearances, but writers are delving into the vast mine of Norse myths, Native American myths, and many others.  Orson Scott Card has posited why the major mythologies and their pantheons came about in The Lost Gate.

Danny North is a drekka, a boy without magic in a family where magic is everything.  His siblings and cousins can perform wonderful feats, but Danny can’t do anything.  At least, that’s what everyone thinks.  In reality, Danny is realizing that he’s a gatemage, a forbidden power that can get him killed if he reveals it.

When circumstances threaten to betray his secret, Danny flees his family home on the start of a quest to find out how to use his powers and how to control them.  The last great gatemage was Loki, who closed the gates to the world of Westil, where the mages originally came from.  Because of his actions, gate magic carries a death sentence.  But Danny is determined not only to master his growing power, but to harness it to finally find a way home.

As is common in Card’s novels, the main character is a young person.  His characters are invariably smarter than those around them and more mentally mature, although they lack the life experience to fully utilize their advantages over others.  Danny’s deficiencies in this regard stick out more than others, because he’s literally never interacted with anybody but his family, nor has he ever been in contact with the common aspects of modern everyday life.  It’s hard to imagine how someone would react to being in that situation, but I think Card plays it off well, showing Danny as a curious boy, willing to roll with what life throws at him without getting too overwhelmed.

The downside to such characters is that they often come across as somewhat arrogant, either because they truly are smarter than the older children and adults that they interact with, or because they have a chip on their shoulder due to their youth.  Danny is a mixture of both, with the added complication of being magically gifted where normal humans aren’t.  Occasionally, Danny comes across as somewhat morally ambiguous because he views the world far differently than we would.  One the one hand, I give kudos to Card for getting that “alien” feeling across to readers, but on the other hand, it makes it hard to empathize with Danny.

I did, however, enjoy the system of magic that Card sets up and the background of how mages came to our world.  According to the afterward, Card’s been dreaming of this world for many years, to the point that two of his earlier short stories are set in the same world.  There’s a compelling backstory to the presence of the gods and the stories that cropped up around them, and it does tie a lot of things together.  Card didn’t get to explore that too much in this book, because he needed to use this novel to sketch out Danny’s character and establish some basic ground rules, but I hope to see more in future volumes.

What the author also establishes is some of the actions taking place in the land of Westil.  There are actually two plotlines in this book: Danny’s struggle to find and control his power, and a boy named Wad growing up in the palace of Iceway.  The stories do have some parallels: Danny learns how to interact as a “normal human”, while Wad learns to navigate palace politics—both treacherous in their own ways—and each boy must learn some lessons about the consequences of their actions.  In some ways, I found Wad’s story more compelling, as I felt that Wad had more at stake.  Danny fights to do something that will benefit all of the mages eventually, but Wad gets closely involved with the doings of Iceway’s royal family.  Perhaps it’s that closer association that made me more interested in Wad. 

In the end, I like just about everything that Card writes.  He has a way of taking precocious young people and turning them into struggling, flawed heroes who must learn things the hard way, just like the rest of us.  Their greater power or intelligence isn’t a barrier to readers in the long run, although it does challenge readers to examine their own perceptions of why they may not take an immediate liking to Card’s characters.  Nobody likes to be looked down on, but readers here can hopefully get a glimmer of what it’s like to have a supposedly superior person need help and succor. 

With a wildly creative backstory, memorable characters, and an action-packed plot, The Lost Gate ranks as one of Card’s best novels to date.  I look forward to more tales from this intriguing universe.

This book was provided by the publisher.