When the emperor and his three eldest sons die in a mysterious airship crash, young Maia, the exiled half-goblin fourth son, is crowned. Woefully out of his element, an unschooled goblin in the Elflands, Maia must navigate the burdens and politics of the office that shunned him, all the while investigating his father’s untimely death between attempts on his own life.
Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (Tor Books, 2014) is grand fantasy, abounding in beautiful names and oneiric language, but at its heart is a boy struggling to find a single friend amongst the vast vested interests of the Untheileneise Court. His attendants and courtiers rob him of privacy, but his station robs him of any hope for real personal relationships. Naïve, much too trusting, and starved for someone to talk to, he is caught in a web of etiquette and veiled motives he can barely understand, let alone master.
The Goblin Emperor is rife with exasperation and grief, but the wide and hostile halls of the Untheileian are made less lonely by Maia’s inherent likability. He is empathetic and fundamentally honest, and just wants to make those around him happy; the novel’s sorrows and elations are more intense, more real, beside Maia’s good-natured character.
In his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien argues that at the core of all fantasy is a eucatastrophe, “a sudden and miraculous grace, never to be counted on to recur… It denies, in the face of much evidence, universal final defeat,” he writes, “giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” At this, The Goblin Emperor unequivocally succeeds. Addison makes clear the full breadth of Maia’s experience, and in each fleeting, miraculous eucatastrophe, the distant Elflands don’t feel so distant after all.
