![]() Gehn says their people were worshiped as gods, and rightly so, for they can create worlds and life from nothing but words and the powers of their imaginations! In the past years, he has been studying the ruins of D’ni-their ancestral underground home, utterly destroyed thirty years ago-in order to master the magic Art of Writing that had enabled the D’ni to rule an empire of thousands of self-created worlds for sixty thousand years, all from their subterranean city. Gehn is a hard and bitter man, blaming his mother Anna for many unsaid things, and he intends to undo the “harm” that her upbringing of love, thoughtfulness, and patience has supposedly done to his son. The story proper begins when Gehn, Atrus’ father, returns to take charge of him. Nor do we know anything about the world beyond the desert, but that there is a market for the paintings Anna produces from the plant dyes she grows. How they started their life in the Cleft, we do not know, but we note the interesting fact that both Anna and Atrus always wear special goggles whose lenses can be adjusted for opacity-like sunglasses of varying strengths-or to magnify images like a telescope or microscope. We gather this information by watching events, by listening to brief conversations, and by being patient. They are periodically visited by traders from afar and with their surplus buy certain tools, foodstuffs, and few luxuries-enough to forge a comfortable existence. His grandmother, Anna, raises him in a cleft in the side of a volcano, in the middle of a vast desert, where water gathers in a pool and allows them to grow enough food to survive in terrace gardens filled with fertile volcanic soil. ![]() The boy Atrus’ mother died giving him birth and his father subsequently abandoned him in anger and emotional pain. Atrus’ situation at the start is outwardly simple and settled-meaning the reader does not have untangle a web of happenings by jumping in media res-and the fact that he knows very little about his history and the D’ni means that, for the most part, we are learning alongside him. And, fortunately, while the book was certainly written with the games’ fans in mind, the Millers and Wingrove also constructed it so that the uninitiated will not have undue trouble. As a result, I had the joy of discovering its world and story wholly through page-by-page exploration, my mind alert for telling details and glimpses into its makeup. I even overlooked the synopsis (copied above) on the back cover. Going into Myst: The book of Atrus, I knew nothing of its premise or its mythology. Dealing as it does with the art of writing itself, and even with the concept of subcreation (though without directly mentioning Tolkien’s term)… Recommendation: Yes! While it falls short of being a masterpiece, this is still a very good story nicely written, with an original (to me, at least!) premise. Stylistically, the fast pace and pleasing narrative style should make rereading easy.Īuthor Re-readability: Hard to say how much of this book is David Wingrove’s and how much is the work of the Millers, but I’m certainly going to check out the Books of Ti’ana and D’ni when I get a chance. Story Re-readability: Even after knowing the end, I think it would be interesting to read the book again, to catch more details that may have slipped by the first time. Also, the characters, while few, are pretty mature and multifaceted. The sense of discovery was palpable-I genuinely could not predict how the story would play out, and that excited me. Reason for Finishing: Fast-paced story with lots of really fascinating and pretty original ideas. ![]() Second, I found it at a library book sale. Reason for Beginning: First, I vaguely remembered a good friend recommending it to me years ago. Then his time came to explore the magnificent underground realm… The Book of Atrus is a tale of son against father of truth versus evil and of love and redemption.” (Back Cover) For most of his young life, Atrus thought the stories his grandmother told him were just strange legends. Spoiler-free Synopsis: “These pages are your link to the story of Atrus, son of Gehn, and the last of the race of D’ni-the masters of The Art, the craft of linking to other worlds through the descriptive art of writing. Series: followed by The Book of Ti’ana (a prequel) and The Book of D’ni based on the mythology of the Myst computer games.Īuthor: Rand and Robyn Miller, with David Wingrove
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