The book of Atrus is the first book in the Myst series by Rand Miller, Robyn Miller and David Wingrove, based on a game with the same name. The book was published by 1996 by Hyperion while I listened to the audio drama, narrated by a full cast. This is a fantasy, a pure one at that and a rather unique one. I cannot say that I have ever encountered something similar before. To be clear, I haven’t played the games but from what I can tell when I looked it up. This book is a prequel, telling the story of how Myst was created.
It follows the life of Atrus, a boy abandoned by his father, Gehn, raised by his mother Anna who teaches him about the world and all in it. We follow Atrus as he grows up to understand the fabric of the universe, as his father comes back to take him away. Showing Atrus about his origin as their people have the ability to create and control worlds, or ages, with their books of ages. Atrus slowly learn though that there was a reason why his father was abandoned by his grandmother as the power seem to bring corruption and madness to his father’s eyes.
The story is centered around Atrus, a boy growing up to learn about the world. He is kindhearted, believing in life and beauty. Being kind to the people he creates much unlike his father who sees the people and the world he has creates as lesser beings, playing gods with their life. We also have the two females in the story, one being the grandmother. The wise woman who raises Atrus to be kind. And his love interest, Katran, who Atrus calls Catherine for some reason. I’m not sure of her importance to be honest, she seems rather random in the book. Coming in at the end, being forced to marry Atrus father and Atrus suddenly being in love with her and wanting to escape to another world with her. I guess she is the motivation he needs to fight his father, but he seemed pretty determined to do so already so I can only assume she is there because she was in the game.
The romance is as you can tell, very lackluster, being used more as a tool for driving the story than actually being its own. I don’t mind that too much, since this is more focused on the fantasy aspect, but I did notice that it sticks out like a sore thumb. Mostly because it feels like it was jammed into the story as an afterthought.
I’m not going to lie though; the story is confusing. It takes a while to get into it and I often became confused at the beginning wondering what was going on and what I was to focus on. This story doesn’t hold your hand unlike classical fantasy like Lord of the Rings, where we are given at the start of the book the goal, bring the ring to Mordor. Here it takes half the story before we even get a hint of what the story might be. It is an interesting way of telling the story, very in line with the puzzle game genre the Myst series belong to. It’s more a mystery where you are supposed to search for the story, getting pieces until you see the whole. The problem with that in book form is that the pace is slow, maybe not interesting for those who wanted more action. I didn’t mind as the mysterious atmosphere and lore caught me, but I would say that it might be because of the audiobook I listened to that was accompanied with voice actors and music. It was also short, only just above 2 hours, which means that I would think they cut out a lot from the book that was around 400 pages. I could only imagine how slow the book was compared to the audiobook.
All in all, it was a very unique book with great atmosphere and story. I would give it a 9 out of 10, I liked it very much, only taking away one point for the flaws, but would like to point out that this book is hard to review. It is enough of its own thing to ensure that the rating comes down to if you like the slow pace and calm, atmosphere over grand epics with battles. If you prefer faster paces with battles, then you will most likely rate this one lower, but for me it was a marvelous book and I would recommend it for those who want a different fantasy from what they are used with.
Did you play the games, and if you did, how was the story in the games?
With Kind Regards
Senefer.
Read with Senefer 