The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

This story strolls from strength to strength. It strikes me as similar in some ways to The Fifth Season in that both stories feature a narrator of immense age and unreliable perspective, or biased perspective, and both stories’ narrator ends up being a character in the book. Is this a thing that authors are doing now?

This story builds a wide world in a small amount of pages. The gods are everywhere, lesser and greater gods, some working together in alliances, fighting other alliances, scheming for more political power over potential prayer givers. Some gods get great power from human sacrifices, some gods choose other paths to personal fitness. Human relations with the gods often involve deals: humans will provide X, gods will provide Y. Spiritual capitalism, or bartering, from small things like a willing human sacrifice for a god providing surprise in a key battle, to big things like protecting an entire border of a country from raiding for fealty to the god. And on top of this layer of godly court politics sit multiple layers of human court politics. Leckie effortlessly weaves these together because she tells a story that involves all strata of her world’s population.

The narrator, a god, is eventually realized in the novel as a character that the human characters interact with. This ties the human story of Eolo and Muwat into the spiritual story of the gods. Eolo and Muwat are in a world where the gods act regularly and openly on behalf of their chosen people groups, which keeps the gods in mind during the human parts. Falling out of this split focus on the gods and the humans, the time-scale for either half of the story similarly spans different realms. Leckie tells the gods’ story over thousands of years, and the humans story over just a few—though, as the gods interact with humans other than Eolo and Muwat, to some extent the whole of human history in this part of this world is exposed.

And that’s a part of how she weaves so much information in so effortlessly: instead of massive info-dumps, Leckie relies on the narrator touching on all aspects, scopes, scales of the story told regularly. It can be a little confusing at first trying to determine the thrust of the story, but by showing all sides of it consistently—regularly returning to the gods, the humans, and the specifics of Eolo and Muwat—the three weave together in a complex but clear picture.

The other technique Leckie uses to weave this all together so that it makes sense: she tells interesting stories. The story of the spear meant to find its mark is more than just an explanation of the gods’ reluctance to speak, it’s a memorable parable that I still contemplate long after finishing the novel. This seems so simple, but its important: instead of throwing away explanations that illuminate characters, places, or situations, Leckie crafts microfictional interludes that stand on their own as solid stories, but serve the rest of the story in showing some aspect of the characters. Leckie spends a lot of time showing through telling—she shows why the gods do not want to speak untruth by telling the reader a story about a spear meant to find its mark. Does that make sense, or am I just confusing telling and showing? I think Leckie blends telling and showing.

A very good novel, one I took a little time to dive into, but once I groked the interrelated nature of the three-fold narrative (another similarity to The Fifth Season), I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to just about everybody. Leckie is still adding to her string of good novels.

Provenance by Ann Leckie

This book focuses in on the life of one character—her family struggles, her difficulties with money, her hairbrained scheme to jailbreak her adopted mother’s political rival’s son. But it also manages to simultaneously focus on the larger, galactic political situation—after the Ancillary events, the AI demand citizenship in the treaty, so everybody is going to come together and debate it: the Raadchai, the Presger, the AI, and the Geck, at least. But the book focuses on Ingray, and her interiority.

As such, the strength or weakness of the book is based on the strength or weakness of Ingray. I found them to be a weak character. Not a character who has weakness, but a weakly drawn character—perhaps it doesn’t help to have a simple, coming of age main character, and then have your other characters point out how simple Ingray is. The starship captain says something like, “I know you, you’re going to panic for five minutes, then grasp the situation and think of something unexpected to do.” And Ingray does, again and again.

Yet, the fact that the panic almost always takes the same form lets the portrayal of Ingray down, removes some potential complexity from them, makes them more simple. Simply put, Ingray cries every time she is put under stress, freezes up, then sucks it up and holds her chin up and gets stuff done. Ingray often finds the strength inside themself to do this, but only after an initial panic and cry. That reaction didn’t start to bother me until the last third of the book when I realized that she rarely reacts otherwise no matter the seriousness of the situation—an attempt at her life? Good thing she already had a panic and cry about the coming confrontation with her would be assassin, because she was able to chin up and get it over with. Facing task master mother after long trip abroad, coming back broke with a fugitive in tow? Get the cry in on the way home, then face her stone faced. Exchanging herself as a hostage for a pack of schoolchildren caught in the crossfire of a small invasion? Sit down with the other hostages and have a good cry, then start thinking about how to escape.

My problem with this mono-reaction: going to the same well to draw tension into your novel starts to fade after time. George Martin fakes character deaths again and again, and I don’t believe him that characters are dead anymore. It takes the bite out of death. Here, I don’t really care that Ingray is crying again, just skimming a couple of sentences or paragraphs until she’s over it and gets onto the solution to the problem—no tension added from her crying. Her crying shows a realistic, relatable reaction profile, but until the second to last conflict, it’s the only one Ingray shows. Her coming of age becomes acting first, telling her mother “no”, then crying afterwards. And this new reaction unlocks a third one, telling her competitive brother “no”, and then not crying afterwards—the final conflict in the novel.

These split-focus books—the interior emotions of a single character who isn’t some all-powerful emperor played against a wider political background that intrudes in increasing ways throughout the book—strike me as sensational. NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season pulls it off brilliantly, as does Leckie’s Provenance here. However, that style of narrative does somewhat depend on how well the main character holds the interest and sympathy of the reader. And here, Ingray was just too one-sided for me to invest in like I invested in Jemisin’s Essun. Yes, Ingray changes, but only finally in the last ten to twenty pages, too little too late.

The theme of the book examines vestiges, historical artifacts, in their present relationship with society. In America, something like the Liberty Bell probably wasn't actually rung out after the Declaration of Independence was Signed, but it was there at the time, and so we respect the cracked hunk of metal. Leckie tries to dive more deeply into these relationships between artifacts, the truth of their historicity, their role and place in society, and our personal feeling about them. It's a fascinating discussion that held my interest throughout the novel. She uses the word "Vestiges" to cover post-cards and declarations of independence alike—as well as all manned of keepsakes and mementos and souvenirs in between. I'm not sure she comes to any new idea here, but she examines the concept and concludes that they are, ultimately, replaceable and repairable, but still somehow invaluable to a culture. So, though the reflection doesn't provide any major insights, it does trace pathways of thought that broaden the discussion around artifacts, rather than deepen them. Some characters try to use vestiges for racial arguments, some for personal glorification, some for gravitas, some for pure monetary profit, and Ingray sees all these characters in her homespun adventure and reflects on them all.

I found this a fascinating world and a fascinating story, but I found Ingray to be a flat character that let the whole thing down a little.