Ann Leckie is probably the hottest name in science fiction and fantasy at the moment with her debut novel in 2013 achieving the unprecedented feat of winning both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards. I haven’t actually read her Ancillary trilogy though I really should. This is a newer fantasy novel which I thought might be easier to get into as a standalone work. This one did get nominated for a Hugo as well but she refused it as she had been a finalist too many times already.

A narrator recounts the story of Eolo from a second-person perspective. Eolo is the aide of the Lord Mawat, who is himself the heir of the Raven Lease of the city of Vastai. In this world, the gods are real and can exert their powers to provide practical services to people in exchange for prayers and sacrifices. In the case of Vastai, the Raven has long protected the port city based on an ancient agreement that the lease holder who communicates with the Raven on behalf of the city must die when the each incarnation of the bird that the god inhabits dies. However when Mawat arrives back from deployment as the commander of Vastai’s army, he finds that his father has gone missing and his uncle Hibal has usurped him as Lease. As Eolo, who is eventually revealed to be transgender, helps his lord to unravel the intrigue, we also learn that the narrator who has been watching him is a god as well, known the Strength and Patience of the Hill. In between telling us of Eolo’s adventures, he also recounts his memories and experiences as a god.

This novel is apparently based on Hamlet but I don’t feel that it is an especially close comparison as the portion of the story about the Hill god doesn’t apply at all. Even when it comes to Mawat’s story, his uncle Hibal’s betrayal doesn’t feel personal enough as the only mother figure is the priestess of the Silent God and she feels too distant from him. I also thought that not much happens in Vastai at all as the whole plot plays out exactly as predicted. I much preferred the story of the Hill god himself as he recounts his earliest memories of coming to self-awareness, how he must have existed for millions of years and how the earliest humans actually thought him to communicate with them through generations of painstaking effort. In this fantasy world, the gods alter reality simply by issuing statements. Whatever they say is either true, or becomes true if the god has enough power to make it true. This means that the gods have learned to word their statements very carefully and may sometimes say thing in a hypothetical manner to avoid unnecessarily expending their power.

This may be altogether original but it does make for a fascinating world, especially given vast time scales over which the Hill god claims it operates. I was surprised to see that the novel tries to cut a balance between a rationalist take on the god powers that exploits them with optimal efficiency and that more poetic take I expect as we see in how the Hill god usually recounts things as stories to avoid outright saying that they are true. Then there’s how the novel plays some games of ambiguity with regards to the identity of the god of Vastai and the gender of Eolo, more of than a few gods contending with one another, and intriguing hints of a wider world that has worked out how well to form civilizations each with their own pantheon of gods backing them. With all this and the excellent prose, there is more than enough here to make for a riveting read.

Yet good as this is, it doesn’t blow me away either. I think a big reason for this is that one standalone volume is just too short to introduce the world and its gods, relate the memories of the Hill god through the millions of years of his existence and have enough space over for the intrigues at Vastai to play out. That’s probably why Hibal’s plot seems childishly simple and straightforward. Eolo isn’t given much character development at all and we have no idea why Mawat trusts him so much. Actually, and this is a huge spoiler so look away if this bothers you, I don’t think we ever actually see the Raven in this book at all. His machinations are central to the plot and apparently drove some sort of arms race among the gods, leading to the smaller one being ruthlessly drained of all of their power, yet all of that takes place off-screen. We don’t even know which god was it that upset the Hill god so much that he decided to finally up and move. The fact that there’s so much more to the story and we get to see so little of it is also why I feel unimpressed with the little subplot involving Mawat and Hibal. It’s just such a small part of the overall story.

I also think that I’ve been spoiled by reading so much web fiction in recent years. In the online spaces, stories that have the gods operate according to such strict logical rules would be ruthlessly dissected and analyzed by the logicians and rules lawyers. The audience for a traditionally published book seems kinder to me and are more prepared to judge the book as a whole whereas web fiction is released chapter by chapter and commenters will respond to each as they appear and those criticisms inevitably shape subsequent chapters. Plus of course, web fiction is far, far longer in terms of word length. As it is, I did find myself being drawn into novel and enjoyed reading every bit of it. But at the end, I found myself asking, “Is that it? That’s all there is?” and wound up feeling not very satisfied.