The Toll

I think this wrapped up the series pretty well. I do feel like, at times, it was almost more of a kind of description of a possible ideal (with a big asterisk) future than a novel, and it almost left the characters behind as it did that. And I’m not actually sure I think the eventual state of affairs on Earth is any kind of improvement, all things considered. But it was internally consistent and thought-provoking. As I’ve said with the whole series, it takes some pretty interesting ideas and applies a kind of layer of cartoonishness to it all, but again, I think it stuck the landing for what it was well enough.

It was interesting that at a certain point, I started wondering if the book was going to wrap up as an appeal to faith. There was a part of the book that very much felt like it was trying to draw parallels (beyond, obviously, the Tonists more explicitly) between The Thunderhead and some kind of deity—not just within the novels’ universe, which happened a lot, but more as a meta-narrative. In the end I don’t think it went that way.

I do kind of wish we learned more about the world Citra and Rowan ended up building—we learned a bit about the Tonists through the theological interludes (and, disappointingly, learned how much information was clearly lost), but we only got a brief look at Citra waking up at the very end.

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