Warbreaker - The Color of Magic

I didn’t make it all the way through Warbreaker. Novels with elaborate fantasy worlds, like the one created in Warbreaker, are difficult for me to get interested in because learning all these rules and terms of the world, along with the unusual names, is like learning a new language. By the time the distinction from a Hedwig and a Hagrid, or a Vasher and a Vahr has sunk in the book is nearly over. Maybe that’s why fantasy tends to be so long; so we don’t feel cheated for having learned all this new information.

The story becomes that much more difficult for me if it involves kingdoms and princesses, only because they seem a bit banal. But Biochromatic Breath is an interesting idea, and I enjoyed the use of color in the story. Color is life and life is magic. The fear of color that is portrayed in the novel seems like a fear of living out of the concern that the life and color will only fall prey to those who take it away.

It made me think about the connection of color to magic in other works of fantasy. I don’t know if it is particularly common in this sub-genre of fantasy but there’s an obvious one in The Color of Magic, even though, apart from the title, I couldn’t make out anything outstandingly significant about magic having its own color in the TV show. It’s not until the second episode when Rincewind mentions it and even the spells that various wizards cast were shown to have different colors of light – as in Harry Potter. Each color in Harry Potter more or less represents a unique power, and while it maintains to be true in Warbreaker that every color has its own property, color in general represents a power as opposed to colorlessness.

Despite the feudalism structure there’s a lot of political commentary in Warbreaker that is relevant to today. The story starts with a Cold War feel to it, and all the complexities of foreign affairs are dramatized nicely. It’s perfect how the king of Idris, being the commander in chief he is, is essentially willing to sacrifice his least favorite daughter not to prevent war, but to knowingly delay it so he would have a better chance at victory. His leadership isn’t really looking for the most humane solution but the most strategic. I think that’s a fairly accurate depiction of the types of world leaders in the real world.