Senlin Ascends
by Josiah Bancroft
2019
Senlin Ascends is the first book in a quartet that I first became interested in reading after seeing a positive review several years ago, but was prevented from checking out from any library by my own misspelling of the main character's name.
Thomas Senlin is a naive and fastidious schoolmaster from a rural fishing village, who's just gotten married, and takes his new wife to the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. The Tower resembles a vertical London. The couple is almost immediately separated in the crowd, and we follow Senlin as he climbs the levels of the Tower (called 'ringdoms') in search of his wife.
Senlin passes through the raucous working-class Basement, the stage-play-imitating-manor-life Parlours, and hopes to run into Marya in the tourist spas of the Baths. Eventually, he realizes that he won't accomplish anything by acting like a tourist or following the rules.
The people who make the rules (and their employees) are the primary source of danger, and tourists are their easiest targets. There is no government to appeal to for help, the 'governors' are essentially mobsters who style themselves as aristocrats - they're the people you'd want protection from.
So the first half of the book shows Senlin slowly reaching this realization as he loses hope and hits bottom. In the second half he rallies and begins a much more proactive plan to find his wife and rescue her, and the pace and excitement of the story dramatically increases.
I really enjoyed this one, and I'll be reading the rest of the series over time.
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