(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
There are some authors you read because they are the kings or queens of masterfully woven narratives, while still others grab your attention because they inject searing emotion into every word, deed or impactful character moment or they are able to take astonishingly imaginative premise and make it feel it real abd believable while still taking you on an escapist journey like no other.
And then there are consummately brilliant writers like Alix E. Harrow who are adept at bringing all three of those compelling elements into novels like The Everlasting, her latest excursion into character-rich, premise-fantastical, narratively dense writing that consumes your mind, thrills your heart and leaves your soul feeling like it’s been taking somewhere quite movingly beautiful.
The Everlasting is all these things and so much more, a story that starts out promising one key of thoughtfully tended narrative and ends up delivering quite another, never once putting a foot wrong or a word out of place in the intervening period.
On paper, and that’s how the novel was read in a deluxe hardcover as lovely as the words on the pages within, The Everlasting is the story of a legend that united a country known as The Dominion, once a scrappy backward kingdom that rose, through war, battles and endless political struggle, to dominate the island on which it sits and to stand as a beacon of all that is good and righteous and true.
I [Owen] closed my eyes. I smelled pine and snow, now, instead of flowers.
Vivian’s voice came to me from very far away, softly urgent. ‘She needs you, Owen.’
At least, that’s the propaganda that underpins the legend of a country that has long gone past the acquisitional phase and is now an authoritarian behemoth that has overrun the people of the Hinterlands and which has displaced countless others who have been pushed to the margins.
If, like Owen Mallory, historian and veteran of the latest bloody Dominion war for control of everyone and everything, all in the name of a Saviour who apparently favours this one country above all others, you believe in the teachings of Dominion, then there is nothing to worry about.
But plenty of others have suffered and are suffering to keep the aura of Dominion alive and inviolable, all of which under the boot because of the legend of Sir Una Everlasting, a heroic figure who selflessly, endlessly and valiantly served her queen one thousand years earlier and who has since gone on to inspire people to go to war and to fight for a country which has long since ceased to be the beacon of anything worthy (unless, you have drunk the Kool-Aid, in which case you believe it all without question).
Separated at the start of The Everlasting by a millennia of history, propaganda and war, Owen and Una come together in the most extraordinary of ways when the former is sent back unexpectedly through time and discovers that the woman of the myth and legend is infinitely more wonderful and alive and nothing like the figure used to prop up a regime that possess none of her nobility of purpose or raw truthful humanity.
Their initial meeting is frosty and uncertain with Una treating Owen, a man dressed strangely and out of time, thought she doesn’t know that except to sense there is something different about him, as someone to be held at arm’s length.
But as the two get to know each other, and Owen attempts to write her history, at first compelled to edit out her flaws and her raw humanity in favour of the accepted elements of myth and legend which Una mightily resents, it becomes clear that each needs the other in ways that neither could possibly have imagined when they first met.
Theirs becomes an epic love story for the ages, one which battles for actual existence against a very dark force which is playing them and forcing them to relive their lives over and over again like some sort of macabrely medieval Groundhog Day. (To be clear, wonderful that movie is, The Everlasting is a thousand more complex and utterly enthralling and deeply, deeply moving.)
As Una and Owen relive their life together over and over again, each time manipulated and bested despite their most intense efforts, The Everlasting assumes a blockbuster epic feel while still feeling devastatingly, beautifully emotionally intimate, a raw and feverish battle between the majesty of love, power at its most concentrated and self-serving and seemingly interplay between history as propaganda demands it be told and written down and what actually transpired.
Slowly, even the scholar came to trust the woods. They began to loiter there, for days, then weeks, then whole greedy seasons, seeing no one but pig boys and berry pickers, runaway lovers with flushed faces and ragged peasants fleeing the queen’s soldiers.
In this sprawlingly lush and thoughtfully clever story, we bear witness to the way in which kingdoms rise and fall, worlds are built and then crumble and hope rise and falls in ways that those in the midst of the events fail to fully appreciate.
The genius of The Everlasting is that eventually Una and Owen come to understand how they are being played and that for them to have any sort of future or history or both – as Doctor Who would say, things get very timey-wimey in the very best and meaningful of ways – they must step in and actively write the very history in which they seem to be puppets and pawn.
The seizing back of this agency is two steps forward, three steps back dynamic for much of The Everlasting and as you come to love these two impossible lovebirds and hate the manipulative threads that work to keep them apart and purely at the beck and serve of authoritarian impulses, you not only come to love the characters but cheer them on their mission to write a history that they can live in and with.
More than that, you are utterly enthralled by the Arthurian majesty and grandeur of the story, by the way in which it effortlessly skewers and roundly condemns self-serving political storytelling, which exists only to keep people in power and cares not for truth or human life, and how its journey across time and a thousand iterations of the one much-manipulated world seizes your heart and mind and makes you realise for some lives to be lived, everything must be sacrificed in the hope, that one day, agency can be restored, love can take centre stage and the world can be as it is and not as someone wills it brokenly to be.