The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Stories can be risky for someone like me” Like her multiple award-winning space opera Ancillary Justice (2013), Anne Leckie’s epic fantasy novel The Raven Tower (2019) does neat things with narrative voice and time. Both books begin disorientingly, because the narrators are not human beings and only gradually reveal their natures, and because Leckie alternates between two seemingly unrelated story strands far apart in time and place from each other and only gradually reveals their connection. Part of the pleasure of reading both books, then, derives from not knowing just who (or what) is speaking to us and not knowing just what is happening. In both books the pleasure of mystery fades when the identity of the narrator has been revealed and the two time strands of the plot have merged. Luckily, Leckie writes compelling main characters, convincing sf and fantasy narrative worlds, and clear prose. The narrator of The Raven Tower is The Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god who inhabits a stone and is one of the Ancient Ones, one of the first and strongest gods that came to the world. Strength and Patience alternates between two narratives, a first person one depicting the long history of its consciousness and life as a god in a stone in the north and its long friendship with the Myriad, another Ancient One manifested in mosquitoes, and a second person one happening in the present of the novel in which Strength and Patience addresses itself to “you,” like this: “Could you hear me, Eolo? Can you hear me now? I’m talking to you.” Eolo is a soldier of the nation called Iraden and right-hand man to Mawat, the heir to the Raven’s Lease. The Raven’s Lease is the ruler of Iraden who must dedicate his life to Iraden’s protective god the Raven (not an Ancient One, but a younger god) so that when the Raven’s Instrument (a raven through whom the god speaks) dies, the Lease will sacrifice himself to the Raven. In return, the Lease rules the land, in consultation with the Directions (men who represent different regions of Iraden) and the Mother of the Silent, the senior priestess of the God of the Silent Forest who supposedly protects Iraden. As the novel begins, Mawat and Eolo ride into Vastia, the capitol of Iraden, because the Instrument and hence the Lease of Iraden is soon to die, so Mawat expects to take over as Lease. Instead, they find that his uncle Lord Hibal has suspiciously become Lease, because, he claims, Mawat’s father absconded from the Raven’s Tower (the center of the god’s power in Vastia and the residence of the Lease). The rest of this part of the novel concerns Eolo’s efforts to find out what happened to Mawat’s father while managing the hot-headed Mawat. The situation is complicated by the presence in Vastia of representatives from an expansionist culture and by the increasingly organized and threatening raids of a barbaric culture in the south. Meanwhile, Strength and Patience is filling us (“you,” because it’s telling the story to Eolo) in on its millennia of existence, from when it found itself at the bottom of a sea and when the sea receded and left it on a hillside, to when it began to be worshipped by human beings and when it met the Myriad (or vice versa), and so on. Apart from its narrative tactics, the novel may sound like a typical epic fantasy (complete with usurping uncle), but Leckie does interesting things that set it apart from the herd. First, her book is a compact stand-alone novel and not first in a door-stopper trilogy or longer series. Second, she doesn’t just write gods as super-humans but as Other beings, as with, for instance, the way they gain power from sacrifices and offerings and the care they take with language and boons and curses because anything they say Will Happen but often with unforeseen consequences that may wind up, say, killing their worshippers or they themselves. Third, she does more cool things with gender than most fantasy novelists do (I can’t say what they are without spoiling a neat surprise, but can say that after a certain point gendered pronouns become problematic). It’s not a perfect novel. Although Eolo and Strength and Patience are great protagonists, supporting figures are not as interesting. For instance, there is a pair of one-dimensional twin villains who do too much smirking skullduggery (though they have their reasons for being reprehensible, as twins in Vastia are cursed and ostracized). Also, the book almost tired me in its first third, when it seemed that Strength and Patience was going to take forever to catch up to the present. And readers who require exciting battles scenes will be disappointed, because Leckie generally avoids them or depicts their aftermaths. There are a couple scenes showcasing Eolo’s man-to-man fighting prowess, but many more showing his diplomatic skills and keen insight into political machinations and motivations etc. Finally, I recommend Leckie’s book because it is thought-provoking and moving (but unsentimental) and uses gods to highlight human brevity and mortality, the power of language, and the wonder of working together to create something better for our posterity. View all my reviews
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