 |
the sixty-ninth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Andy Holloway
I opened my last book review by saying, “After I read the author’s note that opens the book, I assumed that this would be another one I’d bail on early”, and much the same held true for this one. I started in, saw the map that came out of the same box as the maps of Middle Earth and Westeros, read about the cloaked men riding their horses to a stone fortress as they discussed which of the various gods were the strongest, and thought, oh, one of these. I am not usually into these. But as with The Monsters of Templeton, once I’d given The Raven Tower enough pages that I felt okay about setting it aside, I didn’t actually want to. It is indeed not my usual thing, but it is sufficiently well done that I was interested in reading onward. The premise is that this is a world in which animist gods really exist—the god of the forest, the god of the stones, the god of the insects, etc.—and, in addition to whatever innate power they start with, they can receive power from belief, prayers, and offerings… pretty standard stuff. The twist is that gods can only speak the truth, and if they say something that is not true, then that utterance becomes the truth—if the god has enough power to alter reality to the required extent. If the god lacks the required power, the divine decree backfires and weakens or even kills the god. So the novel unfolds on two planes: on the human plane, it’s about a dispute over who has the rightful claim to be the high priest of the raven god, and on the divine plane, it’s about the origins of the gods, a war between two major pantheons, and the aftermath of that war.
Even though my decennial survey explicitly tells respondents to recommend books they liked, rather than guessing what I might be into, I nevertheless always find myself wondering why someone might recommend this book to me. In this case, I thought it might be because most people who visit my site know me as an interactive fiction writer, and with the exception of the blue half of Narcolepsy, all my interactive stories are written in the second person—and so is this book. The main character, a prince’s aide-de-camp named Eolo, is addressed as “you”. I did say in my 2020 survey that I was hoping that people would recommend books I could teach, and in my AP Literature tutorials I have been citing this book a lot in introducing the idea of the narratee as distinct from the implied reader and the actual reader. There is also a very prominent “I”, and a fair bit of the intrigue of the book comes from the gradual revelation of who this narrator is—initially it seems like it must be the raven god, but the answer turns out to be the refreshingly non-gimmicky “a god who hadn’t previously been introduced”. And to circle back around to interactive fiction: I didn’t really appreciate this until I had to think about it for this article, but the ending revolves around a sort of logic puzzle involving the rules governing gods that Leckie has established—a plan collapses because it depends upon an assumption that does not in fact obtain, turning a winning move into a losing one. Very clever—I could teach plotting with this one too!
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||