this book governs. Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower is a story about a god — the Strength and Patience of the Hill — and it is the story of humans (and gods) caught up at the intersection of human and divine politics, it is the story of a particular region of a fantasy secondary world over a geological timescale, and it is the story of the conflict between the gods of Iraden and the gods of Ard Vusktia, two cities separated by a narrow and strategically and economically important (for both gods and humans) strait.
the book is narrated by the Strength and Patience of the Hill, speaking in first person but largely addressed in second person to Eolo, assistant to Mawat — the heir to the Raven’s Lease, pledged to rule and die according to the lifespan of the Raven of Iraden’s vessel (a raven, albeit one inhabited by a divine presence). for reasons the Strength and Patience of the Hill does not entirely understand, it is drawn to Eolo, even when Eolo cannot quite perceive it, and so its narrates Eolo and Mawat’s return to the Raven Tower in Vastai — where Mawat expects to take up the privilege and burden of the Lease, only to find his uncle sitting on the Lease’s bench — by following Eolo closely, speculating about his thoughts and his emotional state, musing aloud, wondering whether Eolo can hear it. its musings range across its life history, from its earliest days on the ocean floor to, eventually, the war between the gods of Iraden in the south and the gods of Ard Vusktia in the north, and Leckie’s pacing is impeccable as the novel moves back and forth between the Strength and Patience of the Hill’s long timescale history and the compressed history of Eolo and Mawat’s return to Vastai and attempts to discover the truth of what happened to Mawat’s father.
(apparently people read this as Hamlet, but while I guess, in the abstract, I can see that many of the plot beats are — to emphasize, in the abstract — comparable to Hamlet, I think Hamlet is a) boring and overrated and b) not interested in any of the same things that The Raven Tower is interested in, and if a friend hadn’t pointed it out to me I would have let Lev Grossman’s blurb saying there are “echoes of Shakespeare” in the book stand as one of those weird things critics say sometimes. as such, I’m going to ignore this and talk about the book as I actually found it.)
in his essay “Radical Fantasy”, Fredric Jameson, seeking to articulate what a “materialist fantasy” might entail, says:
If sf is the exploration of all the constraints thrown up by history – the web of counternalities and anti-dialectics which human production has itself produced – then fantasy is the other side of the coin and a celebration of human creative power and freedom which becomes idealistic only by virtue of the omission of precisely those material and historical constraints. I propose to read magic, then, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production) but, rather, as a gure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualisation of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the present. (Jameson, “Radical Fantasy”, 278)
Jameson links this to Feuerbach’s reading of religion as “a distorted vision of human productive powers, which has been externalised and reified into a force in its own right” (Jameson, 278). thinking with Jameson and Feuerbach, what The Raven Tower asks is: what if there were an economics of divine power? the gods of this world are beings not altogether unlike humans — though they are embodied very differently and live on radically different timescales — except that 1) when offerings are made to them they gain some kind of power from the offerings and 2) whenever a god makes a declarative statement like “the rock is blue”, either that statement will become true (immediately or, for more complex statements and situations, as soon as is practically possible) or the god will — sooner or later — die, having exhausted all of its power in an effort to make the statement true.
the result of these two key differences is that there is a divine political economy, and central to the Strength and Patience of the Hill’s historical narrative is the relationship between the divine political economy and the human one: just as the humans of Ard Vusktia and the less hospitable north made trade agreements with the humans of Iraden and the south, so the gods of Ard Vusktia and the north have — at humans’ behest — made trade agreements with the gods of the south to facilitate the movement of necessary materials (wood, in this case) to the largely treeless north. when the Raven begins his campaign against Ard Vusktia, it is in the interest of consolidating his own power and his economic base, and the competition between the Raven’s divine statements and those of the gods of Ard Vusktia requires the gods of Ard Vusktia to, among other things, rearrange the economy of offering and sacrifice in order to channel power from the smallest gods to the greatest gods. this is, fundamentally, a book about divine labor exploitation.
I am obsessed with this. it reminds me in this respect of the otherwise mostly unremarkable Darksword series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which likewise posits a precisely quantifiable magical economy, such that magic is carefully distributed to ensure that peasant laborers have access to exactly as much as they need to complete their labor, but no more; I also wonder if it wasn’t an influence on Maya Deane’s conceptually compelling (though I found frustrating in execution) Wrath Goddess Sing. Leckie’s gods have not only personal and, for that matter, social histories (the Strength and Patience of the Hill must learn a new language when a new population begins to visit its home region) but also economic ones. incredible. (I also, as an aside, really appreciated Leckie’s both grasp and portrayal of the economies of itinerant/“nomadic” peoples and that the itinerant peoples that the Strength and Patience of the Hill has interacted with have their own political and economic histories rather than being treated as Timeless Primitive Nomads™.)
the focalization of the narrative through the Strength and Patience of the Hill means that the portrayal of the human characters is quite distant. this, too, is a fascinating choice, particularly for Eolo, who is, on the one hand, a protagonist (though not, I would say, the protagonist) but who remains to a significant extent inscrutable: we know only what he says about himself to others, or what the Strength and Patience of the Hill — who is an astute observer — can glean from watching his actions and reactions and combining these observations with its knowledge and speculations about Eolo’s life and background. this means that even as Eolo is, in some ways, functionally our POV character the narrative nonetheless holds him at arms’ length. this reminded me in some ways of the both distant and highly opinionated narration in Tanaka Yoshiki’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes — I know this perspective doesn’t work for everyone, but the ungraspability of Eolo did work for me. it helps, I think, that the Strength and Patience of the Hill itself doesn’t know why Eolo, specifically, has caught its attention, only that he has. the relative intimacy of the narration contrasts rather wistfully with the distance between the narrator and the narrated: I got the sense that the Strength and Patience of the Hill would like to know Eolo better but can’t under the circumstances (and in light of its larger projects).
I also am obsessed with Mawat, specifically. I don’t have much to say about this other than that I love this kind of religious character, driven by the implacable logic of their faith even when its logic seems to be leading them to self-destruction. he reminds me of almost all of my TTRPG characters, and I love that for him.
I can see — if not articulate — why this book might not have made the same #impact as Imperial Radch, but I loved it and will be thinking about it for a long time.
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