The Navigator’s Children: If this is the end, it’s a fully satisfactory one

The Navigator’s Children by Tad Williams

A long, long time ago in a world far, far away (otherwise known as 1988), a younger me picked a heavy (like really heavy) book titled The Dragonbone Chair off the shelf in the bookstore. If you had told that younger, thinner, more-haired me that I’d still be reading about those characters almost 40 years later in 2024, I would have laughed at the absurdity. But here I am, just putting down The Navigator’s Children (2024), Tad Williams’ newest set in the world of Osten Ard, which is just as heavy (really heavy) and still as immersive, enjoyable, and moving. This being (perhaps) the concluding book in this lengthy series, there will be unavoidable spoilers for the earlier ones.

The plot picks up where the prior book ended, and follows the same various storylines though, this being (perhaps—more on that later) the concluding volume, as one might expect those disparate plot lines/characters narrow toward each other and then eventually converge. A not-complete list of characters/arc include:

• Queen Miriamele (who is not dead) attempts to capture the traitor Pasevalles, now holed up in a castle the Queen is besieging even as he mourns the news that her husband, King Simon, is dead
• King Simon (who is not dead) tries to get back to his kingdom to hold it together but gets entangled in the final battle in the Vale of Mists between the Norn and their kin the Sithi even as he mourns the news that his wife Miriamele is dead.
• Prince Morgan and a few others travel through the danger-filled valley of mists with the rogue Norn Nezuru, who find herself mysteriously pulled towards whatever awaits at the vale’s endpoint, while Morgan and Nezuru try in their own way to deal with their ever-deepening bond.
• Nezuru’s father Viyeki is tasked by the Norn Queen to engineer a path to help destroy the Sithi in the valley even as he struggles with his Queen’s intent and his role in all the violence. A struggle made sharper by his interaction with the slave Tinukeda’ya forced to work for him.
• Geloe (who was dead and now is only mostly-dead) tries to stop the Norn Queen’s mad attempts to kill everyone while also find to free her people, the Tinukeda’ya

As noted, this is only a partial list; a lot is going on here. While the first book of this new series had some issues with pacing and an overload of POVs and plot points, those problems got smoothed over in subsequent works and that holds here as well. The movement between POVs is fluid, the plot well-balanced for the most part (a few characters could probably have been dropped without harm to plot though it would affect the immersive nature of the story, and it all comes together well without feeling forced. There’s also a nice variety within the plot, with large-scale battle scenes, moments more small-scale tension than spectacle focused, interpersonal scenes, and individual introspective moments, each of them handled with equal skill and effectiveness.

Williams has always been an author who takes his time in all sorts of ways, whether its developing plot or character or filling in world details and The Navigator’s Children is no different. The best aspect of this is how fully fleshed out the characters become over the course of the series as well as the book. Changes happen fitfully, slowly, realistically. Viyeki has struggled with the Norn’s cruelty throughout and while he makes a choice at the end to turn against it, it has taken literally two thousand or so pages to arrive at that decision, meaning it truly was a struggle, and one the reader was never quite sure — though one could guess and one hoped — which side he would tip toward. Simon and Miriamele have been noting the pitfalls of the current governing system and of the dangers of any one person — a king, a queen, an emperor — holding so much power, but it takes them thousands of pages to devise some sort of alternative. And it is only “some sort”—because that sort of major shift in worldview takes time, as does figuring out how to execute that shift. Morgan was, as I noted in my review of the first book in the follow-up series, an incredibly annoying character — whiny, immature, a drunkard. He is no longer those things by the end, but it wasn’t thanks to a singular event, a sudden epiphany, a tragic consequence of his behavior. It was time that led to his changing. And one could go down the list of such transformations.

Change and the passage of time, the aging of and aging out of characters has been a running theme throughout the series, making for again, a more realistic story but also one laced throughout with melancholy, nostalgia, and bittersweetness. I can’t say if this is truly the end. Williams sneaks in a little backdoor moment that teases the potential for more stories set in the world amidst these characters. But if this is the end, it’s a fully satisfactory one, both sad and rewarding as any good ending should be.