(no subject)

[skygiants]

I finished Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower!

As I said on Twitter: massive respect for Ann Leckie's mineral protagonist progression from 'passive-aggressive AI' to 'literally just a very sulky rock.'

I'll admit it took me some time to come round on the sulky rock, but then the rock insisted on being hauled halfway across the continent in a large unwieldy carriage out of sheer bloody-mindedness despite several protestations from annoyed divine friends, and suddenly I loved that rock. We are all what we are.

I also have a slightly more confused respect for her decision to plant her flag firmly on the Horatio/Ophelia rarepeair while vehemently refusing to support all the more common Hamlet ships. Bold choice! Little out of left field, but bold!

As with Ancillary Justice, I found this a slow build and an increasingly rewarding one as it went on. Things that Ann Leckie clearly likes and is good at, in combination with mineral protagonists:
- unusual and somewhat deliberately distancing narration
- non-human entities moved to action by feelings of affection and responsibility towards specific humans
- very long-game revenge plots
- careful plot-relevant linguistic exploration! MY FAVORITE PART


As much as I liked the book overall, I did not find the ending as satisfying as I wanted to. I think part of that is just that I care more about Hamlet than Ann Leckie does. And, I mean, Hypercompetent Trans Horatio is very much a character who's written for me to love, but by 2/3 of the way through the book it's pretty clear that the whole Hamlet side of the plot is just an unstoppable rolling stone set in motion by the Strength and Patience of the Hill, and the ending is very much just that stone landing where it has to, and I kept waiting for Eolo's presence to ... maybe shift the path of the stone a little in the final pages? For the Strength and Patience of the Hill's interest in Eolo to be relevant to the endgame, other than 'Eolo lives', which we know is going to happen anyway because that's what Horatios do. So when that didn't happen, and the ending just thunked itself right into place, it felt slightly anticlimactic to me.

Also, Mawat feels like a Hamlet written by someone who doesn't much like Hamlet-the-character, and I didn't think I was a person who much liked Hamlet until I found myself becoming vaguely indignant on his behalf as I read through the book. No, that's not the right kind of drama queen-ing! Hamlet is more genre-savvy than this!

Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

I loved this book, but I twigged that the rock was the sampo/Grótti during the first conversation with the dog god, and that really colored my experience of the rest of it.

[skygiants]

I had no context for the sampo until I went through and was reading people's reactions afterwards, so it was all a surprise to me! I'm curious what changed expectation-spoiler-wise, knowing that was the influence? (I did spend a lot of the book not paying any attention to Mysterious Grinding Noises and completely convinced that Strength and Patience of the Hill had been built into the stones of the tower.)

[ellen_fremedon]

I thought that too at first! But when SaPotH says it needs to be turned, I realized it was one of the magic millstones of Nordic myth, but it wasn't clear to me which one. So I spent about half the book thinking that the story was doing the Kalevala, not Gróttasöngur, and expecting SaPotH to be discovered in the tower somewhere in Act III or IV, stolen back across the channel, and sunk into the ocean to grind salt.

Which could still happen after the end of the book--it's part of the stories associated with Gróttasöngur, but the poem ends very abruptly right where the book does, with the sudden appearance of the army, and I loved how that ending and Hamlet's clicked into place in the same moment. I love how well the conceit meshes with the structure--three different stories (though I only noticed two) spinning in place mechanically, but all coming around to the same moment and doing the same work.