Let me start by saying I might be a tad biased towards this book as well as the rest in the series. I grew up playing the Myst games so often that they now account for a good portion of my earliest memories. The soundtracks, the atmospheres, the mysteries, the puzzles, the beautiful and bizarre worlds; I give a lot of credit to it all for inspiring and molding my own creative pursuits even as an adult. Something about these stories and these worlds has stuck with me, so I’ll do what I can to put this enchantment I’ve had since I was a kid into words.
I’ll have to do some separate video game reviews of these sometime, but for now, I’ll stick to The Book Of Atrus.
“Gehn’s bootprints lay heavy around the tiny pool, the lush, well-tended green churned to mud. At one end of the garden, beneath a narrow out-crop, he had dug a shallow grave. Now, as the dawn’s light slowly crept over the sands to touch the cleft wall twenty feet above, he covered over the young girl’s body, his pale cream desert clothes smeared with her blood and with the dark earth of the cleft.”
-Prologue Opening Paragraph
Atrus is our main character, a boy that’s abandoned by his father, Gehn, to the care of his grandmother, Anna, after his mother dies during childbirth. He is raised in the Cleft, which is little more than a sandy crevasse at the foot of a dormant volcano. As he lives a humble life being the helping hand to his grandmother and as he learns of the secrets of his D’ni ancestry, and also of their downfall, he develops a sharp mind and thoughtful demeanor.
When his father unexpectedly returns to seek out his son, Atrus must remember the lessons bestowed to him by Anna as his father attempts to reshape him in his own image. Gehn is a fiercely intelligent man, but he is also arrogant and consumed by an obsession to rebuild D’ni through the art of Writing; a D’ni technique that allows for the creation of entirely new worlds with the Writer as their god, or so Gehn believes. Atrus and Gehn are the last of the D’ni, and so it is their blood right and duty to bring life back to the ancient underground ruins of their people.
Together, Atrus and Gehn write and link to worlds, also called “Ages”, of their own design as Gehn prepares them for godhood, but Atrus has his doubts. What if they weren’t creating worlds, but were instead building bridges to worlds that already existed in an infinite universe? What if they are not gods, but invaders? The struggle between these ideas is the focus of the story, though neither the view of creator nor bridge builder seems to perfectly explain the results of Kortee’nea magic.
By the end, the fate of an age and its inhabitants, as well as the future of a young woman whom both Atrus and Gehn have fallen for, hangs in the balance. Atrus must decide what his heritage means, and how it ought to be handled in light of his grandmother’s wisdom, his father’s knowledge, and his own unique insights.
One of my favorite things about this book is the analogy it makes for fiction writers. Whether this analogy was intentional or not, I’m not sure, but it still paints an interesting picture to consider. The D’ni art of Writing consists of the Writer diligently constructing words and phrases that don’t simply describe the world to which the Writer wishes to travel, but weaves the very spirit of the place into the paper with the ink and pen like a needle and thread through cloth. Even one phrase being changed, let alone erased, could unravel the entire tapestry; and this is displayed several times in the book, notably when Gehn accidentally destroys an entire world simply by crossing out a handful of words about water temperature.
The importance not only of the imagination, but of the diligence in executing that imaginative vision in the Writing, is a perfect mirror to works of fiction. In order to create a story and construct sound world-building, you must have a mix of creativity and diligence, especially diligence, if you want them to carry the beauty you hoped they would. And even then, it will never turn out exactly as you’d imagined it. When a Writer writes a world, there are always unexpected developments in the landscape, or the flowers, or the animals that they hadn’t intended. The craft can never be perfect, and that’s part of what gives it its mystique and the sense that perhaps it is not a place that was made by the author, but rather one that was discovered after a blind leap into the darkness.
Even poets are included in this to a degree as Katran (the young woman that’s the story’s love interest) writes ages in a highly unorthodox, freeform way that by all logic should be impossible, creating mind-bending contortions of matter and reality brought into existence by her more metaphoric and dream-like descriptions.
I think the part that stuck with me the most the first time I read this book in my teens was Anna’s description of “The Whole”.
Atrus had looked down, gazing at the sleeping kitten. Now he looked up again. “The *Whole*?”
-The Myst Reader, Book Of Atrus, pg. 26
She laughed softly. “It’s something my father used to say to me. What I mean by it, is that you’ve looked at the problem from many angles and considered how the pieces fit together. You’ve asked all the questions that needed to be asked and come up with the answers. And now you have an understanding of it.” She smiled and reached out again, letting her hand rest lightly on his shoulder. “It may seem a small thing, Atrus – after all, a dune is but a dune – but the principle’s a sound one and will stand you in good stead whatever you do, and however complex the system is you’re looking at. Always consider the Whole, Atrus. Always look at the interrelatedness of things, and remember that the ‘whole’ of one thing is always just a part of something else, something larger.””
The concept of one whole in all its many layers and details always being but part of a larger whole – and that, part of an even larger whole – really stuck with me, and it remains one of my favorite aspects of Anna’s teachings. It’s also utilized so well in the story as Atrus decodes the art of writing ages, and it saves him when details and plans nested within plans are the difference between life and death.
The Book Of Atrus has been and will always be one of my all-time favorite books. From the messages to the descriptive flourishes in the text, and the D’ni to the beautifully creative worlds held within. I would highly recommend this book to people of all ages. It’s a fantastic and thoughtful story that captures the awe and beauty of the small things, and how they manifest in large ways, in a manner that other books just don’t manage. And just to top it all off, there are just over a dozen charcoal sketches from Atrus’ journal scattered throughout the pages. [At least in the Myst Reader version. I don’t own this individual book.]
