A coup 'd what?

A coup d'etat also known as a Coup, a putsch, or an overthrow is a sudden attempt by a small group of people to take over the government usually through violence. A coup is called successful when the small group of usurpers is able to take power and establish their dominance, but when a coup does not fail completely, as in when a member of the original continues on, nor succeeds a civil war usually is the consequence. A coup usually is one of three forms and can be typed according to how the coup occurs and holds power, or the military rank of the lead usurper in situation.

In the novel The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks, Weeks establishes that a major problem that is occurring in the plot is the impending coup of the current royal family and the fact that this coup will allow an invading empire to come in and assume power in the resulting chaos.  The coup that occurs in the book is “successful” in the storyline allowing the invading empire to come in and take over without a large hassle. The coup that Weeks has in his book is a good coup that has requirements of what makes a coup into a coup, but it falls short of truly being a coup because of the way that  Weeks writes his story, which causes the coup to only be partially complete. The coup was on the path of success but it is technically a failure because the small group did not take power over the government and it instead was a stepping stone into an invasion by another country “Khalidor ment to take the castle tonight” (Weeks, 476).  

One of the largest parts of the definition of a coup is that it is performed by a somewhat small group of people with the desire to overthrow the current government. The coup in The Way of Shadows meets this requirement somewhat easily with the group totaling around five members who are working separately towards the same goal. A coup is also characterized for its use of violence in order to cause the change in power to occur, there are bloodless coups but they are not what is being used as criteria for what makes it a coup. Weeks meets this requirement as the book goes on by having almost every event that is related to the coup be bloody, for example in the book one of the member of the group that is performing the coup ,Lady Jadwin, violently murders the next heir to the throne “He was being stabbed to death. By a woman. It was embarrassing, really. He was the prince” (Weeks, 341).

The Encyclopedia Britannica states that the chief prerequisite of a coup is that part or all of the armed forces, the police, and or other military elements are controlled and this is because the control of the armed forces would help in the take over, one example of this being the military coup that occurred in Niger in 2010 “A military coup in Niger led by Maj. Salou Djibo ousted the elected government of Pres. Mamadou Tandja on Feb. 18, 2010” (“Niger in 2010”, Encyclopedia britannica) . The coup in the book seems to both meet and miss this part of what makes a coup a coup, The group of people who are causing the coup do not really have control over armed forces like Maj. Djibo , but they are opening the path for allied forces to come in and take over soon after the coup has occurred.

Week’s coup meets the requirements of a good coup well especially in the violence department , “ Roth believed he would take over the castle quickly, and he wanted to be able to personally decide whom to kill and whom to add to his own government” (Weeks, 509). Weeks attention to detail about the coup with mentions that the people in town have not noticed that is occurring shows that this coup has been written well and is being executed the way that it should be in the book, showing that it is a good coup. The fact that it is a good coup does not change that fact that the author holds all the power in their novel, so the coup does show what happens if a coup is mostly successful by having most of the noble houses wiped out, but some of the old government survives leading to resistance that will bloom into war. Weeks wrote a good coup that only failed because he wanted it to for the sake of his story, otherwise the coup was so well executed that it would have held up in the real world if the magic was not involved.