NB: I received a gratis copy of the book from the publisher but that has not affected the content of my review.
“You want to know what’s my purpose? To kill the men who killed my brother and father, leaving a grandfather fucking my own mother. To kill the men who killed my brother, because they killed him because he killed one of theirs. Who killed one of his, who killed one of theirs, and on and on while even gods die. My purpose is to avenge my blood so that one day they can come and seek vengeance on me. So no, I don’t want purpose and I don’t want children born in blood. You want to know what I want? I want to kill this bloodline. This sickness. End this poison. My name ends with me.”
Well, I asked for something new and different, and I got it! If nothing else, this book is unlike any other epic fantasy I’ve read.
Note: There aren’t any spoilers in this overlong review.
To manage expectations a little bit here, this book is being touted as the “African Game of Thrones”, but according to James, that was originally a joke he made. Other than an implicit criticism of patriarchal and misogynistic cultures, and a tangential nearness to actual thrones, this book has much more in common with other grimdark fantasies like those of Joe Abercrombie, than it does with A Song of Ice and Fire. This book is extremely un-European in style and content, and its mythological base was unfamiliar to me prior to reading.
I’m writing this review after sitting on the book for a week, and before I’ve read any other reviews, because I wanted to try and process my thoughts as free from outside influence as possible. As a warning if you are thinking about reading this book, I think you should know going in that because it is not like something I’ve read before, it does require more mental effort than most readers will be used to or comfortable with. It’s one of those books that you have to push through, that the more time you spend with it, the more it teaches you to read it. And not because it’s particularly tricky or it uses big words or anything like that, but just because your brain won’t really know how to process it right away, and like I did, you will bring your own expectations and cultural norms into the text where those norms won’t always actually apply. If you go in expecting to like it immediately, or understand it right away, or heck, even try to read it quickly, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. This is not a quick read book. It’s a book that you read fifty pages of and then step away for a while, and then come back for fifty more. It has to sit in your head for a bit.
“Where is the woman that you have hurt and abandoned?”
“She hurt herself.”
“Then she must be a woman of more power and means than me. Every scar I have, it is somebody else who put it there. Which woman is this?”
“His mother,” said the Leopard. I could have killed him in that moment.
“His mother. She and I have much in common.”
“You’ve both abandoned your own children?”
“Maybe we’ve both had our lives ruined by men only to have our children grow up blaming us for it.”
How do I explain this. It’s like listening to somebody, and even though they are speaking English and using words that you know, you still can’t understand them because the words mean something different to them than they mean to you. But if you take the time to think about it, the meaning becomes more clear. It’s just not automatic.
Right away, reading this felt extremely specific and unfamiliar. My brain wasn’t trained to read a book like this, like it has been my entire life for white, American-written or European based fantasies. This is one of the reasons I’m telling everyone I talk to about this book to push through the beginning and give it time; anywhere between 75-200 pages is the range I’m seeing for most people to get the rhythm and the meaning (it was about 100 for me). Obviously not every book is going to be for everyone (and people who dislike violence or sex and lots of talk of bodies in all states in their books probably won’t like this very much), but as a person who is white, who has read white European based fantasy for her whole life, I felt I needed to interrogate my own reaction to this book. How much of my discomfort with it at first was based on dislike of the story, and how much was based on sheer unfamiliarity? Turns out for me, almost all of it was unfamiliarity, and once my brain had enough exposure to it, I found myself really liking it in a way that was still unfamiliar, but also pretty exciting. (But, again, I like fantasy a lot, and if well done, I like grimdark pretty well, too. More on grimdark later.)
“And I thought, for a blink, What should I construct now, and how much will I have to build on it? The thought alone made me tired. I told myself that I was just tired of believing there was a secret to protect from some unknown enemy, when the truth was I was tired of not having someone to tell it to. Here is truth: At this point I would have told anyone. Truth is truth, and I do not own it. It should make no difference to me who hears it, since him hearing the truth does not change it.”
So the gist of this story is that our main character, Tracker, is a prisoner, and he’s telling his interrogator the story of how he and a handful of other mercenaries were hired to find a missing boy, and how the boy ended up dead. (Not a spoiler; literally the first sentence is, “The child is dead.”) The second two books in the series will be the same story told from the perspective of other characters, Rashomon-style. So automatically you have an unreliable narrator, and we’re only hearing his side of the conversation, and the tone is hostile. I kept having to remind myself as I read, What is he emphasizing? What is he leaving out? He’s telling this story to an enemy, you can be almost certain he’s leaving things out. Or straight up lying. With first person narrators, often even unreliable ones, you feel they are talking to you, but Tracker is not talking to us, the readers. He is talking to his torturer. Because of this, we get most of the emotion and meaning out the dialogue, and not Tracker’s inner dialogue because it’s NOT inner dialogue. Tracker holds himself back, he obfuscates, and it’s harder to get to know him as a character because of it.
What actually ends up happening, though, is that Tracker tells the interrogator the story of his life along with the story of finding the boy, and he does it in circles. There are stories within stories within stories here. Tracker will be telling one thing, and then will digress, and then within that digression another character tells him a story. Sometimes he will revisit a story that he never finished hundreds of pages later, and finally finish it. Or he will skip something entirely and we feel the gap, but don’t get the contents of that gap until later and in a different form. It’s pretty non-linear, and I really liked that aspect of it. This is very much an outgrowth of the oral storytelling tradition James is working with, and it’s acknowledged in the book itself, which takes place in a world where oral storytelling was the norm until reading and writing became common a hundred or so years before the events of the book. This also adds to the confusion because you think you’ve missed something but you haven’t, it’s just coming later. This book definitely requires trust of its reader; this book is not going to hold your hand.
“The King before this one, Kwash Netu, was never one for learning. Why he would need to? This be something most people don’t know about kings and queens. Even back in many an age, learning was for something. I learn the black arts to use for and against. You learn from the palace of wisdom, so that you rest in a better place than your father. You learn a weapon to protect yourself. You learn a map so that you is master of the journey. In everything, learning is to take from where you be to where you like to go. But a king already there. That be why the King and the Queen can be the most ignorant in the kingdom. And this King mind as blank as sky until somebody told him that some griots sing songs older than when he was a boy. Can you think it? He never believe that any man would put to memory anything that happen before he born, for that is how kings raise their boys.”
I’m not a huge lit-fic fan, mostly because a lot of lit-fic seems to me to be overly focused on style, and on impressing other writers, rather than telling a story. James has his roots in lit-fic, according to that Vulture interview I linked above, largely because that’s what he thought he was supposed to be writing in order to be taken seriously: “At some point I divorced not from realism, but from the idea of what a novel should be. Then I wasn’t afraid to put the story in my head down on paper.” (It’s a good interview, you should go read it. He talks about getting the same feeling from comic books as from “real” literature, and he grew up not distinguishing between the two.) So this has a bit of a literary feel to it, but it’s not afraid of being a genre book, either.
Once I got my bearings, I started to have fun with this book. Things flowed better, it was very funny in places (Tracker has a dark sense of humor), and I began to feel affection for the characters. Tracker is a cynical man living in a world that does not treat anyone very well, let alone those without power, women, the unfortunate, the different. He is drawn to outcasts and the oppressed, and his professed dislike and ill humor is often a veneer for something else, an inner kindness and love that has been beaten down again and again. He also has a lot of anger that threatens to eat him up. The other characters are interesting because we are seeing them through Tracker’s eyes, as he’s telling his story to another person, so it’s twice removed. Often his opinion of characters is extremely biased. But they are a ragtag bunch, pretty much the most anti-Tolkien group you can imagine: a witch (witches are very bad here), a sentient buffalo, an Ogo (a giant, but don’t call him that), a shapeshifting man-leopard, violent criminals, a man who can leave his old skin behind, and a bunch more they collect along the way. And there’s Tracker himself, a man who can track any smell across time and space, and who had one of his eyes replaced with that of a wolf. They’re in it for the money. They fight each other and argue, and they betray.
In terms of fantasy, the story isn’t all that revolutionary (it really did remind of me of Joe Abercrombie at points), but the way it was told and who it’s about feels extremely new, a new perspective on old themes.
There is a lot of dark content in this book, and not a guaranteed happy ending. Misogyny, violence, rape: those things exist in this world, and all our characters have to deal with it. Tracker has to deal with his own misogyny throughout the book; there were things that made me uncomfortable in his behavior, but they were acknowledged by the end as other characters called him out on it, and he learned and grew emotionally. There is indeed lots of talk of penises, as some other reviews have mentioned, but the main character is a gay man, coming to terms with being a gay man in a world that fully thinks it’s unnatural, so penises are an inevitability, really.
The more I think about this book, the more I like it, but I also feel that I need to see where the story ends up before I can fully form my opinions. This is only Tracker’s version, and presumably Sogolon the Moon Witch and the boy himself are going to have very different perspectives on these same events, these same concerns. I am going to wait to see past Tracker’s dark outlook, past his vengeance and the feeling of meaningless he has; the central question of his book seems to be: What are stories for in a world as terrible as this?
“Maybe this was how all stories end, the ones with true women and men, true bodies falling into wounding and death, and with real blood spilled. And maybe this is why the great stories we told are so different. Because we tell stories to live, and that sort of story needs a purpose, so that sort of story must be a lie. Because at the end of a true story, there is nothing but waste.”
If the answer is as nihilistic as it could be, I may feel differently about this book in the future, but I’m hopeful any ending we get will be more bittersweet than bitter.