The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
What is the consequence of acting on your will? What is there to lose and to gain by aligning yourself with a god? Ann Leckie asks us to interrogate what it means as humans to offer our devotions to a being more powerful than us, that knows more than us, has seen more than us. The Raven Tower is a fantasy novel set in the city of Vastai, the country of Iraden. The narrator is called The Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god from the north who resides in Vastai. Though readers won’t learn that piece of information until late into the book. If you want to avoid spoilers, stop while you’re ahead. Much of the book centers around the concept that collective human belief in an embodied god grants that god the power to create sustained change through a verbal application of its will. Strength and Patience narrates across multiple timelines - from its birth as an ancient god, to the present day observations of the protagonist, Eolo. Eolo is a transgender soldier who accompanies the equivalent of a prince in Vastai’s culture: the heir to the Lease named Mawat. The audience follows Eolo while he leads his own investigation of the city on behalf of his temperamental ruler-to-be. The Raven Tower creates a puzzle of a plot for the audience. Readers are led to anxiously anticipate the discovery of who committed a murder that began the book without knowing if the murder actually occurred. If there’s no body, was there no crime? While the humans suspect and gossip about who murdered the human ruler of Vastai, the Strength and Patience of the Hill omnisciently tracks and questions their choices as an entity involved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years leading up to this moment in their society. Leckie uses Strength and Patience’s point of view to complicate how human devotion can create ambitious, imperfect gods and self-seeking humans who want to play god. Ultimately The Raven Tower grapples with a topic so queer: the power to manifest desire.
The most significant deity is The Raven, the god with sovereignty in Iraden, who is never truly present in any scene in The Raven Tower, but is referenced constantly. The Raven acts similarly to Fire Lord Ozai in the first season of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender. They are both a behind-the-scenes savior and tyrant and world-changer, depending on who you talk to in their respective worlds, that the main cast of characters must operate around at all times. The Myriad, Strength and Patience, and The Raven all can create contracts with humans or gods to accomplish different ends. They manipulate their will and various strengths to gain security and power from and among each other. Often the contract creation results in mutually beneficial relationships, but it also results in slavery, exploitation, and much death. The most notable contract would be that between The Raven and his Lease. The Lease is the top office in Vastai and Iraden for a human, chosen from a hereditary line of men. The Lease is the human embodiment of The Raven’s will. The office of The Raven’s Lease only lasts for the duration of a real raven’s life span. Every couple of decades, The Raven will need to be born again from an egg for a new body to inhabit. A god must follow its rituals too. When The Raven is born again, the Lease must die per tradition. The real raven is called The Raven’s Instrument and receives little screen time other than an occasional ominous presence and an egg cameo.
Leckie’s system of magic is relatively simple and has a reasonable amount of exposition balanced with leaving the readers to imagine it for themselves. The gods can change things through an application of their will (or maybe, their spirit would be another description.) They do this through language, spoken words. In every scene where a god speaks, the reader can pretty much imagine an astrology TikTok girlie saying “Call that manifestation” in the background. But in a “This is a serious fantasy book that won awards” kind of way. Strength and Patience’s narration teaches the audience that a god’s words must constantly be weighed before it speaks them, all to avoid unintended consequences. At worst, the consequence is the death of a god. The albatross of a god in this world is its ability to predictably measure verbal contracts in advance to prevent its own destruction or exploitation. A god doesn’t just put its foot in its mouth in Iraden; it chokes on it and dies.
One of the major appeals of the fantasy genre is how unique its characters can be, by species, dress, manner of speech, culture. Fantasy gives the audience imaginative license over their reading experience in the same way that queer people want imaginative license over their bodies and relationships. Tattoos, hormone replacement therapy, top/bottom surgery, cruising, piercings, avant garde hairstyles, relationship anarchy, ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, BDSM, kink. You name it. Queer people know what it means to dive into ourselves and bring that to life. Leckie’s protagonist, Eolo, is a transgender man, but more importantly, he’s incredibly nosy. His gender identity isn’t that big of a deal in the book. (And thank goodness for that - queer people don’t need to be stuck in the adolescent “insecure, figuring it out” phase forever in literature.) Instead, Eolo’s deep dive is into the power structure of Iraden society. Eolo discovers the murder plot of gods and their humans alike, foreign country interference within the city, and how a few different characters suspect he’s sleeping with the heir to the Lease. (Though it’s never confirmed nor denied.) Eolo manages to sneak his way into the most sacred of spaces in Vastai - the tower and the chambers beneath - and bring their secrets to light in front of the most powerful members of Vastai. Always making these consequential choices on behalf of his retainer Mawat, Eolo manages to severely alter Vastai the city, Iraden the country, and the functionality of their deity contracts. The book began with Eolo entering the city for the first time and ended with his escape from their now-failing society - dysentery spreading rapidly among the people with an impending war. He is quite the destructive agent of chaos through his curiosity. And Strength and Patience treats Eolo as a favorite son through it all.
The ending fascinated me. Leckie spent the entirety of the book creating a unique society built upon The Raven’s contracts with the people of Iraden, its opponents throughout time, and the gods it had exploited, only to leave the world utterly changed by the book’s end. In barely more than 400 pages, Leckie created and unraveled a single world. Her use of cultural taboos especially interested me as a reader. If there was anything I would have liked to see more of, it would be more direct gay interactions among the characters. Though I believe she made it plenty gay for my taste. The Raven Tower is a book to check out if the reader loves messy gay and trans people, dramatic prince types, characters with something to hide, and local and international subterfuge.