Books Read: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Fuck tonne of fun.

Everlasting didn’t feature in my Locus Year in Review column because (a) I was three-quarters of the way through the piece when I started reading the novel, and (b) my essay was already too long.¹ Would it have made the cut if I’d read it in November? Yes. Most definitely. I loved this book.

The Everlasting casts itself as an “adult fantasy novel about a big, sad lady-knight stuck in a time loop, and the anxious historian trying to save her.” Yep, that’s an accurate summary. But to add a little more flesh to the bones: the sad lady-knight, Sir Una, is the fabled hero of the Dominion. Centuries later, the Dominion Empire is still standing, though it’s fallen on hard times—as all empires inevitably do—beset by internal and external strife. Our anxious historian, Owen Mallory, couldn’t care two hoots; he’s far too excited about a manuscript sent to him in the mail purporting to chronicle Una’s life. His professor thinks the book is a fake. Mallory is convinced it’s real, all the more so when someone steals the manuscript, leaving behind a calling card instructing him to visit Dominion HQ. He goes. He encounters his estranged father leading one of the protest groups (awkward) and then, through a secret entrance, confronts the fearsome—and decidedly evil—Vivian Rolfe.

Vivian has the book, but the pages are (impossibly) empty. It will be Mallory’s job to fill them, to write a history of Una and the Dominion that the people can rally behind, one that will quell the protests. And he doesn’t need to invent anything, because a knife-slash across his palm—a drop of blood on the page—whisks Mallory back in time to an ancient yew tree, where a despondent Una is contemplating ending her life.

The Everlasting is, of course, another novel in a library of a thousand books (and counting) that reimagines, reworks, recreates, retells (all the re’s) the Arthurian myth. For me, that was the least interesting aspect of the novel. Mostly because I’ve never been especially invested in Arthur. As much as I loved By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar and The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, it wasn’t the Arthurian lore that got me all hot under the collar; it was the fact that they were both hugely entertaining novels. Same with The Everlasting. It’s enormously propulsive—so much so that, in my youthful days when I was pepped up on (natural) goofballs, I would have read the novel well into the night.² I get that, as a critic of some renown, thank you very much, I should be pondering the novel’s themes (and I briefly will), but sometimes it’s enough to recommend a book because it’s a fuck-tonne of fun to read.³ That’s especially true if, like me, you’re a sucker for time loops (and time travel in general).⁴

If I must talk themes, The Everlasting is another example—much like A Rebel’s History of Mars—that reacts to the way nativists and authoritarians (you know who) weaponise myth to strengthen their power base. Harrow employs a modified version of the Arthur myth to show how malleable these legends are, how they can be written and rewritten, twisted out of shape, out of all recognition, to serve rhetorical ends. I thought it was clever, but it’s not why I kept reading. I wanted to know more about that sad lady-knight stuck in a time loop and whether she and the anxious historian trying to save her would ever find happiness.

1. I think it’s the longest piece in the February issue of Locus (which you should subscribe to if you have any interest in genre reviews and criticism).

2. Now it gets to 10:30 and I’m a goner. What’s happened to me?!

3. “A fuck-tonne of fun to read” — Ian Mond, critic of some renown. Come on, Tor, you know you want to.

4. I didn’t want to admit this in my main review for fear of being ostracised, but here, in the footnotes that no one reads, I feel safer confessing that I didn’t entirely understand how the time travel worked. To be clear, I get that the book (spoilers) is (seriously, spoilers) the product of the magical elm tree that Mallory keeps returning to—a tree imbued with time-travel magic (I think there’s an explanation for how it obtained that power, but I’ll be damned if I can remember it). I also understand that the manuscript Vivian sends Mallory (SPOILERS) is the finalised version of a book he wrote earlier—but where does the original blank book come from?

What I’m saying is: she sources the written book from Una’s tomb (the one written by Mallory in the past that Vivian sends to him in the future), but she also hands him an empty book. Do I conclude that two versions of the same book exist simultaneously in different states? Is that right? Has she been holding onto a copy of the blank version for centuries so Mallory can later fill it in? Or does she pop out to the tree and lop off a branch before meeting him? And why am I still writing this footnote?

But no, seriously—am I overthinking this?