The Raven Tower (Leckie)

[cahn]

4/5. I really loved this book. Though something I should say about it is that I read the kindle sample and was... not thrilled by it? A large part of it is in second person (some of it is in first person) and nothing happened in the kindle sample and I was not sure whether I wanted to read the rest. Then I happened to be in the bookstore with my kids buying a birthday party present, and read something like the first 50 pages, and Things Happened, and I was utterly hooked and I actually bought it in hardcover, which never happens, and devoured it over a weekend. (All that is to say, read the first 50 pages before giving up.)

I wish I hadn't had the spoiler about its literary antecedents, because I would have enjoyed figuring it out on my own, but even so it was a lot of fun to trace the story through and figure out the inversions and motivations and how they differ from the earlier canon. (I also am told that there is another literary antecedent which I have not read and am thinking I have to now.)

I have So Many Feelings about this book which I am struggling to articulate, because I am not entirely sure why I loved it as much as I did, and I can't say that someone else might or might not like it. I think what I love about it is how Leckie is playing with this idea of the assumptions we bring to a text, and how we fill that in. This is manifest in both the rules of the narration as set forth by the narrator (who has to be very careful about only saying things that the narrator knows to be true, and so never assigns definite motivations or feelings to a character) and the way that the entire book functions as a retelling of a story we all know. We never really get the full backstory on Eolo and Mawat; we don't really know why Eolo is loyal to him or what that loyalty looks like from the inside (from either side) at all. But because we know this story, because we know that loyalty-relationship trope, the trope works and works brilliantly even though I closed the book and thought, "Now wait a second... there wasn't any internal scaffolding for that relationship there at all, how did she do that?!"

I was entertained that Leckie appears to have read Max Gladstone, or at least we are now living in a post-Craft-Sequence god-worldbuilding world, because the conception of gods appears to have some distinct similarities, although Leckie is interested in different facets of this conceit. Really interesting how the two authors took a similar idea in two rather different directions.

The book also kind of hit the sweet spot for me between having to sit down and figure out what happened via all the intriciacies of what was and wasn't true in the narrative, and being straightforward with a level at which I could enjoy it without figuring anything out and I didn't have to work so hard that I was frustrated.

And I haven't even mentioned the delicate way the book touches on gender, without it being a big deal. There's a lot going on in this book -- it's deceptively carrying a lot of freight, I think.

(ETA: Tried not to put spoilers in this post, but spoilers in comments are fair game!)

Comments

[okrablossom]

>> I wish I hadn't had the spoiler about its literary antecedents

I have read the book and didn't catch any of these. Would you please tell me what they are? Thanks.

[cahn]

Hamlet is the big one / the one I had been spoiled for beforehand. The one I haven't read is the Kalevela. I believe there's supposed to be a third one as well, but I don't remember it offhand.

[okrablossom]

Thank you!

The Kalevala is a lot of different stories, some of which I'm familiar with, but apparently not the one she used as a source/inspiration for this.

[cahn]

Apparently Strength and Patience of the Hill is (inspired by?) "the sampo," if that means anything to you?

[okrablossom]

That does ring a bell. Wikipedia confirms there's a milling aspect to it here but it also sounds like a Silmaril to me :) Thank you!

[sophia_sol]

The third one is Death and the King’s Horseman and iirc is actually the one that inspired Leckie to write the novel, according to an interview with her that I saw! It's just that it's wayyyyy less familiar to Western audiences so all of us notice the Hamlet parallels first. But Death & the King's Horseman is about someone being prevented from committing ritual suicide after the death of the king he serves, so it's a big one too.

(I'm glad you enjoyed this book so much too!)

[cahn]

Excellent, thank you!!

And you were one of the reasons I kept pushing through even when the kindle excerpt didn't grab me. (The other is Ann Leckie -- everything else I've read by her I've loved, so I was willing to give her a little more time :) ) SO GOOD.

[sophia_sol]

Oh yay, I'm glad my review helped convince you to give it more of a chance!

[hebethen]

I am a l8 m8 g8crasher, but if you don't mind my l8 m8 g8crashing, I just wanted to let you know that she's been writing short fiction set in this universe for a while! I really loved them and they were the reason I was specifically excited for TRT (although I ended up loving TRT for almost completely different reasons). The earliest one that I know of is The Nalendar!

[cahn]

ALWAYS feel free to come in at any time and tell me about awesome short stories! (I mean, feel free to come in at any time, I'm always happy to talk and talk about books or whatever, but especially mooooore stories in awesome universes :D )

Question: what do you mean by entirely different reasons? (Though perhaps I should go read the stories first.)

[hebethen]

Oh, just that I really enjoyed the wryness and worldbuilding of the short fiction, but wasn't expecting the perfect self-involuted meta of TRT or how fiercely I'd love the narrator!