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.
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