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Feb. 8th, 2026 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBy sheer coincidence, I ended up reading Alix Harrow's The Everlasting almost immediately after The Isle in the Silver Sea. Both books are ringing changes on the same big themes -- the narratives of nationalism, fate and tragedy, Spenser and Malory, depressed lady knights and evil girlbosses -- and from what I had previously read of both Harrow and Suri's work I was tbh quite surprised to find myself liking The Everlasting a bit better.
The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.
Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!
Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.
This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.
However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."
Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...
Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.
The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.
Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!
Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.
This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.
However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."
Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...
Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.
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Date: 2026-02-09 04:11 am (UTC)Do you think it started out as one?
[edit] How much of Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000) is there by weight in this book? [edit edit] Allowing for the time loop and the alt-setting, I was immediately reminded by this description of Pierce and the Fraxinus manuscript and his obsession with Ash, not to mention history in a constant state of textual revision, the brutality of chivalric legend, and the modern academic frame that meta-eats itself. The Everlasting sounds as though it goes very different places including sort of The Crown of Dalemark, but it also sounds as though I'd still have ten cents.
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Date: 2026-02-09 04:36 am (UTC)I am glad that Harrow's books seem to be getting better as she goes -- in theory, that's what a long career is for! It's just that hardly anyone seems to get them these days.
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Date: 2026-02-09 10:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 01:26 pm (UTC)I would love to be able to answer your question but alas I have not yet read Ash! I really should, I've heard it referenced so many times. (I was also rereading Hexwood and Crown at about the same time I was reading Silver Sea and The Everlasting which ALSO made for QUITE a thematic dialogue.)
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Date: 2026-02-09 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 06:14 pm (UTC)Check. I just like phenomenal novellas and am more saddened to hear about novels that hang themselves up in their own narrative recursions. Not everything can or needs to be Hadestown!
I would love to be able to answer your question but alas I have not yet read Ash! I really should, I've heard it referenced so many times.
I add to the chorus of recommendations! Mary Gentle is either deeply hit or miss for me and Ash was one of the formative hits. It probably requires all the content warnings. You will be able to locate my favorite character within seconds.
(I was also rereading Hexwood and Crown at about the same time I was reading Silver Sea and The Everlasting which ALSO made for QUITE a thematic dialogue.)
Oh, yeah, that would. Well timed.
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Date: 2026-02-09 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 07:43 pm (UTC)This is on my tbr list and now I'm looking forward to it more.
Have you read The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar by Dave Dobson? Because it's almost exactly that. Here's a review. (not mine)
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Date: 2026-02-09 08:08 pm (UTC)Harrow wrote the novella The Six Deaths of the Saint that isn't quite the first section of the book, but it's very clearly her trying out the time loop and etc. and definitely ends on a more down note. I liked it a lot but YMMV?
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Date: 2026-02-09 08:18 pm (UTC)That's useful to know! Thank you.
[edit] So I should also have asked whether one of the inspirations for this novel was Edge of Tomorrow (2014)?
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Date: 2026-02-09 10:35 pm (UTC)I liked this a lot, largely because I was very into the Una/Owen romance and because I liked the time loop bits where small details would change. But I did have to handwave a lot of the time loop stuff, particularly near the end when evil girlboss proved even more omnipotent than previously hinted at.
I'm also not sure any book on resisting fascism and nationalism will lead to a single fix that totally sits right with me, just because it feels like it would require lots of complicated fixes. Obviously I am anti fascism! But the conclusion of "nationalism is bad and not trying to have a larger centralized government is an unfortunate result of this we just have to live with" also did not quite sit right.
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Date: 2026-02-10 01:14 am (UTC)"There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches."
And honestly I just have such a short fuse for sneering descriptions of women with bad makeup these days. If it's that their personalities are bad I think it can be left at that.
Then this came along:
"I'm not a natural rule-follower. I roll through stop signs, I swear in public, I lie in online personality tests so I get the answers I want (Hermione, Arya Stark, Jo March)."
and I read the rest of the short story but there was no coming back from this lmao
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Date: 2026-02-11 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 12:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 12:59 pm (UTC)But yeah, that's the other thing ... 'we changed the founding myth and it fixed fascism both for us and for our neighbors somehow (who did not immediately conquer us instead)' is like. A lovely idea. However. It's not that i'm desperate for a tragedy (though I cop to being a tragedy enjoyer sometimes) but I did want the ending to at least sit more with ambiguity.
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Date: 2026-02-12 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-13 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-14 08:21 pm (UTC)Kind of how I think a time-traveling meeting with Boudica would go. I may be unduly influenced by Gillian Bradshaw's brilliant *Island of Ghosts* (the protagonist doesn't meet her, but he does meet some fans of hers).