The Raven Tower: Intelligent, thoughtful, and visceral

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

The Raven Tower (2019) begins, as so many fantasy tales do, with a young man returning home to claim the powerful title and honor which are his birthright. Upon his arrival, he discovers that his father has gone missing and is presumed dead, while his uncle has taken the seat of power for himself with the promise that it will be given over to the young man when the time is deemed to be right (with the implicit understanding that the uncle will never do so). The young man then sets about proving his uncle’s perfidy and setting the countryside back to its normal state of affairs with the help of a few trusted friends. Despite much hardship and sacrifice, the young man succeeds in usurping the usurper, titles and honor are bestowed upon him, and everyone lives happily ever after, right? Right.

Except The Raven Tower is an Ann Leckie novel, and that means that nothing can be taken for granted or assumed to progress along the predetermined path. Fans of her science fiction novels like Ancillary Justice and Provenance will be pleased to hear that Leckie has just as deft a hand when it comes to gods and humans as she does with AI and orbiting stations. There’s a bit of “Hamlet if the story focused on Horatio rather than the Danish prince” at play, but that’s just one element of many, and the overall novel is a complex interweaving of mythology and history, faith and its effects on gods both great and small, human society and human nature, economics and politics, language and customs, rituals, and even a little bit of humor.

Once there was a man who rode home to attend his father’s funeral and claim his inheritance, but things were not as he expected them to be.

That man is Mawat, intended inheritor of “the Raven’s Lease of Iraden.” His father previously held that position, which involves conveying the will of their living god to the people of Iraden, and which Mawat has prepared his entire life to fulfill. Their god, the Raven, requires a blood sacrifice from the Lease; in return the Raven offers protection to Iraden and, particularly, the residents of Vastai, the port city where the Raven’s Tower was built. But Mawat’s succession to the Lease’s bench is thwarted by his uncle Hibal, who claims that Mawat’s father vanished and surely must have died, leaving Hibal with no option but to occupy the bench in Mawat’s absence as Mawat and Iraden’s soldiers patrolled their borders. Mawat knows but cannot yet prove that his uncle can only have become the Lease through dishonorable means, so he openly sulks for days in the Tower’s courtyard while charging his most trusted aide, a stalwart young man named Eolo, with discovering the truth.

It quickly becomes obvious that Eolo is the focus of Leckie’s story, not Mawat. In fact, the novel begins with a narrator describing Eolo riding out of the forest with Mawat, remarking that Eolo was as-yet-then unknown to the narrator, with a few hints that the narrator has their own involvement in the events leading to Mawat’s return to Vastai. So Eolo goes about meeting people who either helped raise Mawat, such as Mother Zezume of the Silent, an order of women that “began as a secret religious organization,” or the lady Tikaz, who grew up alongside Mawat and is well-acquainted with his infamous temper and mood swings. Eolo’s investigations and questions also put him in the orbit of a group of Xulahn travelers, who patiently-but-incessantly insist that they simply want to move through Iraden on their way to see the wider world before retuning home and writing about their travels. The truth of it all must be uncovered, but doing so might shake Iraden down to its very foundation.

Meanwhile, The Raven Tower‘s narrator — who consistently relates these events to and about Eolo — breaks up its story of Eolo’s investigation by inserting its own history and memories, stretching back almost to the creation of the world. It’s clear early on that the narrator is a figure of great power and longevity, one who makes friends with small gods and hides its existence from the ancient ones, who could absorb its power or extinguish its life simply by speaking aloud their desire to do so. This being has seen and experienced much, including its interactions with early humans that eventually became more sophisticated; their identity, and their ultimate relationship to the city of Vastai and Mawat’s family, both delighted me and made my blood run cold. Throughout the novel, the narrator repeats the idea that “there will be a reckoning,” and what that reckoning is in response to and how it takes form literally gave me chills.

The Raven Tower is the kind of novel that I’d love to discuss in deeper detail, poring over the various ways Leckie plays with language and expectations of every stripe and sort, but doing so would either necessitate several dozen spoiler-redactions or require me to write a thorough, academic-style examination of all its moving parts and pieces. Additionally, it’s my understanding that Leckie has written several short stories within this larger universe, and I’ve committed to tracking them down and reading them in order to spend a little more time in this world, possibly meeting inhabitants of lands which share borders with Iraden or getting to know some of the gods the narrator mentions, like The Myriad (who takes the form of a cloud of mosquitos) or The Silent Forest.

Take nothing for granted in The Raven Tower, pay attention to everything you’re told, and don’t let the seemingly-typical fantasy novel setting catch you off guard. Everything — every action, every detail, every conversation — has inescapable consequences. Highly recommended.

~Jana Nyman

Jana did a masterful job of discussing the plot of Leckie’s 2019 The Raven Tower without creating spoilers, no easy task. I’ll spend most of my review talking about the function of gods in this book, and how Leckie has used language to explore life, power and the nature of reality in a really interesting way.

In The Raven Tower, gods have existed before humans, or at least some did. They definitely benefit and gain power from worship and sacrifice. There is a hierarchy of gods; there are small gods that specialize (there is a god that only helps flintknappers), there are gods of great power and there were ancient gods, who may have been even more powerful than the present-day beings. Gods can share their power with one another if they choose.

Gods can change reality. To change reality costs a god a great deal of power that must be replenished through worship or sacrifice, or the borrowed power of another god. Most gods change reality hesitantly for that reason, and also because changing reality can create unintentional results or strange resonances. If a god speaks a thing it must be true, or else the god must expend enough energy to make it true. Gods having a casual conversation (to the extent they do) word their statements very carefully. For instance, several times in the course of the book we hear statements from a god that start with, “This is a story I have heard,” a truthful and neutral statement that protects them from accidentally saying something they must then expend power to make the truth.

At the time the story starts the Raven, the protector god of Iraden and the city of Vastai, is in a state of vulnerability and weakness. The Raven chooses to inhabit an actual bird, called The Raven’s Instrument. The human who rules the nation of Iraden is called the Raven’s Lease. When the Instrument dies, the human Lease must sacrifice themselves before the next Instrument hatches. This willing sacrifice empowers the Raven to continue its protection of the nation. When Mawat’s father disappears without sacrificing himself after the Instrument dies, the Raven is vulnerable and so, by extension, is the nation. Our narrator, who starts the book and tells the “present-tense” story in the second person, knows a lot about Mawat, but it is not Mawat they are watching; it’s Mawat’s aide, Eolo.

Eolo is a person with a secret who is also brave, perceptive, thoughtful, and exhibits unalloyed loyalty. Eolo also has the abilities of a priest, and this is one of the things that has drawn the narrator’s attention.

In some ways, the conjunction of language with power in The Raven Tower reminded me of China Mieville’s Embassytown. Leckie’s book is firmly rooted in fantasy, not SF, and I found her book more accessible, but she and Mieville are looking at some of the same themes. The concept of “speaking a thing into truth” is at the heart of a war between gods that we see in the book. Leckie manages to take the idea and use it as the basis of the story as well as a powerful metaphor for the power of language… or maybe, more darkly, the poisonous power of lies.

Some readers find second-person POV off-putting or pretentious; I encourage you to stay with it here, because it’s used for a very good reason. While my first impulse was that the very end of the book was rushed, I realized a moment later that it only seemed rushed from the perspective of the humans in the story. From the point of view of the narrator, it wasn’t rushed at all.

This is five-star book for me. I’m so glad I read it, and I’m so glad that Jana did all the heavy lifting in her review!

~Marion Deeds