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[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

[alchimie]

I too finished this recently and upon doing so became somewhat indignant on Hamlet/Mawat's behalf -- I would not have said prior to this I had much sympathy for Hamlet, but apparently I do. He's not just being difficult, he has legitimate concerns! He does not assume people are lying to him for absolutely no reason, most of the time they are actually lying to him! And etc.

I agree also about the plot, once I was convinced it was really Hamlet, I wanted it to do something that was not-Hamlet -- for Eolo to shift it, as you said -- not for the plot to just hit all the Hamlet beats with the regularity of a hammer.

The AI/stone had not occured to me before and now I cannot stop laughing.

[skygiants]

It's funny because the common joke about Hamlet is that he takes too long to think about and commit to a course of action, and here's Mawat CONSTANTLY IMPULSIVELY DOING THE WRONG THING ALMOST ALL THE TIME. Like, Hamlet absolutely makes MANY bad decisions, and also he's an extremely strange human no matter who's playing him, but he's also genuinely proactive about figuring out what's going on in a way that ... in this book is mostly displaced onto Eolo, Eolo is the one Going Out and Investigating and Mawat is mostly just having constant histrionics.

[alchimie]

Yes, exactly this! Mawat rants and emotes and impulsively does this and that, but he does not try to figure it out or investigate or tie himself in knots trying to make really, really certain he is right -- this is a Hamlet who is convinced from moment one that his uncle did it and the question is just why won't anyone listen to him?

[coffeeandink]

Okay, this is the final piece that convinces me of the theory that the true Hamlet of the story is the rock.

Or I suppose more accurately that the Hamlet is split between the rock and Mawat.