Review: The Raven Tower
Ann Leckie
407 pages
Orbit Books (2019)
Read this if you like: Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, fantasy with unique voice & POVs
tl;dr summary: Fantasy-mystery-thriller narrated by an ancient god who shares highlights from his very, very long life along the way.
Second person is a controversial point of view, especially when it’s directly addressing a character in the narrative. While I’m not personally against the second person, before reading The Raven Tower I would have said it’s a POV best used in shorter narratives, and not one I’d want to read for an entire novel unless it’s a choose-your-own-adventure. And I’ll admit, when I opened the book and saw all the “you”s on the first page, I was skeptical.
For the record, I still don’t think the second-person voice is a great choice for most novel-length stories, and there were moments in The Raven Tower even that it read as a bit clunky to me. But I also can’t imagine this story being told any other way. The use of the “you” voice allows Leckie to control the flow of information, obscuring details that would be difficult to keep the reader from knowing using other POVs. The “you” being addressed is Eolo, the present plot thread’s main character, an attendant to Mawat, heir to the throne of the kingdom of Iraden, who would be the logical choice as a first or close-third narrator—except then I think the reader would get too close to Eolo too quickly, and some of the joy I got from discovering Eolo more gradually would be lost.
It helps that the entire book isn’t addressed to Eolo. The present plot line is told mostly in the second person at first, following Mawat and Eolo as they return to Vastai, the capital of Iraden, but the book reverts back into a more typical first-person voice for a smidge on page 18, and does so periodically throughout. This is also when we learn just who has been addrressing Eolo: a god, The Strength and Patience of the Hill, who takes the reader back to his earliest memory, before the time of humans. His story of the distant past, culminating in the conflict that brought the god of Iraden, the Raven, to power, is woven in between the present-day tale of intrigue: Mawat’s uncle has usurped the throne from his father, who has disappeared, and has bigger dastardly plans afoot that Mawat and Eolo attempt to uncover and thwart.
I don’t want to go into more detail than that about what happens in the book, because the discovery of just what happened to Mawat’s father, and why the Strength and Patience of the Hill is the one telling the story, is much of the joy in reading it. In that, it reads like a mystery novel, with a dash of political thriller, all set in a fantasy world that puts a fascinating new twist on some familiar tropes.
The world of Iraden is one where the gods are real and regularly interact with humans—in fact, they rely on humans, whose offerings sustain their power. And they have a lot of power, like you’d expect from a god. The most powerful ones can make just about anything true just by saying it. There’s a catch, though: anything a god says must be true, and if it’s not currently, the god’s power will be used to make it so. If that’s more power than the god has, they die. This stipulation creates some very interesting power dynamics between the gods who come into conflict with each other. It’s also crucial in putting some kind of stakes on the actions of the god characters. It takes a lot to kill some of them, but they can be killed. There are still consequences for their actions, and this adds a tension that would have been lacking otherwise.
Something else I appreciated was the fact that the gods aren’t anthropomorphic. Instead of taking human bodies, they inhabit objects or animals. They can also move from one object to another, while some can inhabit multiple animals at once, like Myriad, who takes the form of a cloud of mosquitoes. Because of this, not all of them can speak directly to people. The Strength and Patience of the Hill didn’t even know what language was until humans taught him. Many gods who take animal forms speak to humans directly, but others communicate through bags of tiles that the priests interpret. The whole set of rituals constructed around worship of the gods adds depth to the world’s culture. These details also make the gods feel more separate from and above the human characters—in reality they’re incorporeal, but just take shape as it suits them.
From a craft standpoint, people who work with mythology or religion in their stories will likely find a lot in The Raven Tower to study and enjoy. It’s also a great study in how to effectively construct a long narrative timeline, how to balance parallel timelines, and really just in how to structure a complicated book overall. Even for folks who normally scoff at second person, this might just be the exception that proves the rule.
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