Senlin Ascends

By: Josiah Bancroft

Narrated by: John Banks

The first book in the word-of-mouth phenomenon debut fantasy series about one man's dangerous journey through a labyrinthine world.

"One of my favorite books of all time" (Mark Lawrence)

The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel in the world. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of luxury and menace, of unusual animals and mysterious machines. Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants.

Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the illusions of the Tower. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure. This quiet man of letters must become a man of action.

©2017 Josiah Bancroft (P)2018 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"Senlin Ascends crosses the everyday strangeness and lyrical prose of Borges and Gogol with all the action and adventure of high fantasy. I loved it, and grabbed the next one as soon as I turned the last page." (Django Wexler, author of The Thousand Names)

"Josiah Bancroft is a magician. His books are that rare alchemy: gracefully written, deliriously imaginative, action-packed, warm, witty, and thought-provoking. I can't wait for more." (Madeline Miller, author of Circe)

"Senlin is a man worth rooting for, and his strengthening resolve and character is as marvelous and sprawling as the tower he climbs." (The Washington Post)

Bizzare and absolutely excellent

Bizarre and absolutely excellent. Came in not knowing what to expect. Left the first book extremely pleased with the characters and plot. Can't wait for book 2.

My new favorite book

This is officially my new favorite book. The transformation of Mr Thomas Senlin is inspiring and the performance of the narrator is only outshined by the story line it self. I can’t give it 5 stars fast enough!

The Scribblings Review of Senlin Ascends

Newly-weds Thomas and Marya Senlin have decided to spend their honeymoon at the Tower of Babel. But when Marya vanishes shortly after their arrival, Thomas must make his way through various levels of the tower in search of his missing wife. Some levels are strange, some are peaceful but each has its own unique dangers.

Shortly after I first finished Senlin Ascends, I commented that it was the sort of book that both impressed and depressed me in equal measure. That might sound like a back-handed compliment but that wasn’t how I intended it. I was looking at it through the dual eyes of both reader and writer. The writer in me was depressed because it made me wonder if I could ever be that good. The reader in me was impressed because it is that good.

The interior of the tower is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. Each level is virtually a city-state, with its own laws and customs, government, people and pitfalls. Each of these is described with loving care and detail, enough that even the most unusual of them can be clearly visualized. Only a fraction of these ‘ringdoms‘ are explored during this installment which leaves plenty of ground for further books.

The other fascinating part of the novel is the character of its protagonist, Thomas Senlin. Beginning as a man who could be described almost as a bystander to his own life, he gets a rude awakening when Marya disappears. As he climbs the tower in search of her, he has to force himself to adapt from the shy intellectual headmaster and become at times an actor, a conman & thief, a businessman and an insurrectionist. And yet, despite the changes he goes through, the core character is written so strongly that none of these new careers seems that great a step for him.

Senlin Ascends is a wonderful read; vibrant, imaginative and stunningly well written. The prose is beautiful in and of itself, but when combined with the creativeness of the settings it becomes truly a work of art. I don’t think I can give it a higher recommendation than that.

A classic story with an excellent performance

This had such a classical whimsical style like the The Turf-Cutter's Donkey yet the subject matter was very much more adult. Great story of personsonal growth that wasn't a coming of age story. This is a story of someone who thought they already knew who they were realizing they didn't.

Good book club choice

Everyone in the group liked it for a different reason. I recommend for 12+ age group.

JUST DO IT!!

Amazing story, beautiful work. Can't wait for book 2. You won't be disappointed. Senlin is just the type of character you want to cheer for but laugh at the same time. I'm so happy I found this.

I can't wait to continue the series

A totally engaging steampunk adventure story. It's not about the biblical tower, but nevertheless provides food for thought for anyone who heard that story in Sunday school. The protagonist grows from timid and naive into a heroic figure as he resists the urge to submit to a system built on corruption and oppression.

Two Worthwhile Books in One

This turns out to be, in effect, two books: one is interesting without quite being that much fun, and the other is a lot of fun while being less interesting. Either way, this weird novel seems to me worth a good bit of the hype it seems suddenly to be getting.

This starts out as a 21st Century Kafka-esque fantasy. An unprepared scholarly newlywed loses his wife on his honeymoon in a fantastically imagined construct. The tower of Babel is so vast that no one seems to know its boundaries let along its details. He’s overwhelmed by his every encounter, and we get a variety of implied questions: what does it mean to be an individual in a world where life is so cheap? How can we establish friendships when all life is a contested negotiation? And What does it mean to have an identity in a place where we’re all defined transactionally?

As I read the first half of this, I felt as if I were reading a fantasy that reflected the world of the internet. I don’t mean that the tower represents the internet; rather, I feel as if this is the kind of twisting and endless world that the internet might be if it were made physical. No one knows who built the tower, yet it goes on forever. It gives us the capacity to perform as others, and it gives us opportunity to interact on intimate terms with strangers, but it seems never to change anything. It’s a book that makes us ask questions about our changed world.

Bancroft does a great job of setting all that up, but things move pretty slowly to start. The teeming market scenes are striking, but there are a lot them. And the extended sequence where Senlin falls into a living-theater experience, where he has to perform an ad-libbed role alongside others doing the same, is largely brilliant. It just doesn’t seem to end with the clarity I expected; I can’t tell whether it’s all a performance within a performance or whether it’s a genuine accident within the well-oiled mechanism of the theater.

But then [SPOILER] this becomes a very different novel. The clearest sign of that change comes in Bancroft’s switch from his default epigraphs to start each chapter – instead of quotes from a goofy and ignorant guidebook, they come from Senlin’s future autobiography. That change reflects a reversal of the narrative position we began with: what was a confused and ill-suited protagonist becomes very quickly a canny leader. He goes, in other words, from Joseph K in The Trial to Spartacus in the Kirk Douglas film.

With that change, the slow-developed philosophical challenge of the beginning fades away. We learn, for instance, [DOUBLE SPOILER] that everything Senlin experienced on the lower levels was part of a test to determine whether he’d be a good employee on the fourth level. Rather than giving the bewildering and beguiling experience of the internet, of happenstance informing so much of the avatar-defining choices we make, we get a more conventional fantasy. There are good guys and bad guys. Senlin’s wife didn’t just happen to take a step away from him; she’s now the object of desire by a powerful figure of the tower. The young man who helped and then betrayed him didn’t happen along; he was a plant, part of the test.

I’m sorry to see that fallen ambition because I do believe the original effect of the novel (which may have been Bancroft’s original intent) had the chance to be deeply memorable…especially if it could be tightened and shortened.

At the same time, I confess that this becomes, by the end, a rollicking adventure. [MORE SPOILER] By the very end, Senlin has declared all-out war on the tower. He’s stolen an airship, acquired a crew of dangerous and effective fighters, and set out to take his wife back by force.

I can’t help feeling that Bancroft changed horses halfway through here, and I think this would be a stronger book and a stronger series if he’d gone back and made things more consistent. Still, there’s a lot to like about each half. I’m curious about where this is going next, and – especially now that this seems to have found its adventurous tone – I may just buy in for volume two.

A story I always wanted someone to write.

This is one of the few book series that can aggressively get my attention and keep it. It is also a fine example of the quality that returns to storytelling when the author is free to tell the story the way they want. Bancroft has a talent for combining both traditional story structure and modern character development in a way that feels like a refreshing punch in the face. The Babel series pulls you in before the first chapter and assaults you with the hard and awful truth about humanity, the cruelty we are capable of, and the soul-crushing societies that it builds. While the story holds up a heavy mirror to the human race, it also does an excellent job of reminding the reader that while someone can do terrible things, they might also be someone who got lost in the madness of trying to survive, and they just might be someone in need of forgiveness and a hand up. The only reason not to read Senlin Ascends is if you're like most of the inhabitants of the Tower of Babel who are too busy trying to make it to the next level on the back of someone else and don't like having their conscience pricked.

A story of a man climbing a tower and so much more

Plot
This was not the book I expected it to be. I expected a fantasy action novel that was at its core a dungeon crawl, but what I got was so much better. The plot of Senlin Ascends is literally the title; Senlin ascends the tower. The pacing was steady and the end had a climactic ending that left it perfectly set up for the next book in the series. Josiah did a phenomenal job in peppering the story with mystery so that you cannot help, but try to figure out what's truly going on.

Characters
Senlin is an unconventional hero. Starting off he's a fairly unpresuming headmaster from a small village school. He's very mild-mannered individual and references his guidebook to the tower frequently. I think this was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. Josiah created Senlin remarkably. The other characters I have a hard time judging. They have plenty of exposure, but one thing Josiah shows you quite well is that every one on the Tower of Babel has secrets.

Narration
This is the first book I've heard narrated by John Banks. His voicing for Senlin was superb and other male characters were just as outstanding. The only thing I think he fell flat on were voicing female characters. His tone and enunciation were stunning, as was his ability to put emotion in his voice.