A masterpiece of politics, people, magic, murder, and war
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| Cover design and illustration by Lucy Scholes |
I almost didn’t read this book. I had enjoyed the first book in this series, She Who Became the Sun (SWBTS), so much, and felt so satisfied by its ending, that I was hesitant to crack open the sequel for fear of a disappointment. But I was not disappointed, my friends! Everything that made SWBTS an outstanding book returned, in spades, in He Who Drowned the World. Twisty turny betrayals? Court politics? Conquest strategy? Tragic character arcs? Explorations of gender presentation? Wang Baoxiang1? Yes, yes, and yes. Also yes. And, yes, again, yes.
If you have not read SWBTS you need to put down your device right now and go read it. It is superb. It won the British Fantasy Award both for Best Newcomer2 (it is Parker-Chan’s debut novel) and for Best Novel overall. It follows the initial rise to power of Zhu Yuanzhang, historically the founder of the Ming Dynasty. However, in this telling, Zhu is not the son of a tenant farmer, but the daughter, so disfavoured that she is not even given a name. In a searing first chapter, relentless drought and famine, combined with a bandit attack, destroy her family, including her brother, who had been given a prophecy of greatness by the village fortune-teller. The girl, whose own fortune was a laconic ‘Nothing’, refuses to accept this future. She takes her dead brother’s name, and with it decides that she will fool the fates and take his fortune of greatness as well; and for the rest of the book she becomes Zhu Chongba, a man whose rise to power you can read about in the history books (or the wikipedia page I linked earlier). SWBTS ends with Zhu’s victory halfway up the ladder to total domination: she has taken the city of Yingtian, changed her name to Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, and declared that she will lead her people to rout the Mongols from China.
It is a wildly satisfying ending. I loved it. But it is not the end of the story. The Mongols are not gone yet, and the Ming Dynasty has not yet been founded.
He Who Drowned the World continues that story, from three primary perspectives. All three are familiar from SWBTS, and all three have achieved the first stage of their goals from that first book.
First, we have Zhu Chongba (now Zhu Yuanzhang), who’s doing pretty well! She’s in charge of an army and recognized as the Radiant King of her people in the southern regions of the disputed territory. She further holds the indisputable Mandate of Heaven, which manifests as the ability to generate light and see ghosts. She is also well-supported by her wife, Ma, who has managed to get over a bit of child-murder at the end of the last book. The child in question held a Mandate of Heaven of his own,3 so Zhu had to off him in order to remove a possible rival to her own claim. To be honest, the kid was a bit creepy throughout the book, so his murder didn’t really bother me as much as it probably should have.
Second, we have General Ouyang. Ouyang has also managed to achieve the first step in his life goal. When he was a child, his family was captured and murdered by the Prince of Henan, down to the last man — except him. Him the prince castrated and left alive, and Ouyang has since grown up as a kind of pet eunuch to the family, acquiring enormous skill in murder and warfare, rising to command the entire army of Henan, while nursing in his bosom the desire for revenge. His only goal in life now is to revenge himself upon the Mongols — but he’s not happy about it. He had started building a kind of life for himself, anchored by his deep, agonized, sort-of-but-not-really-but-kind-of sexual-romantic attraction to the Prince’s son, Esen, who in turn trusts Ouyang utterly. So Ouyang has been kind of putting off the first step in his revenge, until battlefield losses to Zhu kind of force the issue. By the end of SWBTS he has betrayed and murdered Esen, and feels pretty darn miserable about it. But that’s ok: All that remains for him to do now is to find and murder the Great Khan, and then his life will be complete. He is not in a good head-space, but he’s got his goals and is making progress toward them.
Third we have Wang Baoxiang. Wang was Esen’s brother, and now, after Ouyang’s murder-spree, the Prince of Henan. He is deeply pissed at how everyone has been treating him: they see him as effeminate and unmanly for being bad at stabbing, and refuse to recognize his bureaucratic skills. So he’s decided to use those skills to climb the ranks at court, and become the Great Khan himself. Also, he’s haunted by his brother’s ghost (he may have had something to do with smoothing the way for Ouyang to do the murder), and seems to have some sort of Mandate of Heaven of his own.
What makes He Who Drowned the World just sing is the way each of these characters engages with the same themes from different perspectives. Each has a clear goal which in some way requires taking down the Great Khan. Zhu is the merry warrior, who never doubts the rightness of her path. Ouyang is the tortured warrior, who is fighting the blackness of despair at every step, and regularly doubts the rightness of his path. But — having taken that terrible first step in betraying and murdering Esen — Ouyang cannot allow himself to take any other path. no matter the kinder opportunities that present themselves. Wang, too, is tortured by despair, unable to turn off his cruel, traitorous path to power, despite meeting kindnesses of his own that might, in other circumstances, have made a difference. But for all the similarity between Ouyang and Wang, Wang is not a warrior, so his actions are fundamentally different in strategy from Ouyang's. And all three of them, to one extent or another, must face the question: Is it all worth it?
Another key theme is the subversion of gender roles. Zhu is the clearest example of this: a woman posing as a man. Or perhaps a non-binary person who takes up whichever gender presentation suits her needs at the moment. She does not envy men their bodies, except inasmuch as their larger size and strength makes them better at fighting; and she does not hate her own, except inasmuch as it poses obstacles to her goals. Honestly, she’s much more inconvenienced by her missing right hand (which Ouyang cut off in SWBTS) than she is by her anatomy.4
Not so Ouyang, who is a eunuch, and hates it. He has the manliest of manly roles — the general of an army — and yet everyone describes him as beautiful, woman-like. He is effectively the opposite of Zhu, who approaches gender from a deeply pragmatic perspective: she benefits both from everyone’s acceptance of her as a man as well as her ability to present as a woman when subterfuge is required. She gets the best of both worlds. By contrast, Ouyang, who abhors everything female, is denied maleness as well. Like Zhu, he is mutilated, but unlike Zhu, this obstacle is connected with gender. He gets neither world, and his misery and despair in no small part springs from that.
Wang Baoxiang offers a third perspective on gender roles: he is a man, a cis-het man, with all the relevant anatomy. But he is seen as unmanly (because he does bureaucracy instead of battle), and perceived as being one of those men who sleep with other men. He doesn’t like this perception, which contributes to the general social disrespect that motivates his own actions throughout the book; but he’s not above using it to his advantage, to make alliances and develop relationships that he can exploit and betray when the time comes.
Oh, and speaking of relationships, I’ve got to mention the sexual encounters in this book. Because, dang. There are a lot of them, and not a single one is built on basic kindness or affection. Every single sexual encounter is a power play, a political act, a treachery, a betrayal, manipulation. The degree to which Parker-Chan can construct such a wide variety of unhealthy sexual encounters, all of which are vital to the plot, is astonishing.
Because, yes, they are all vital to the plot. The plot is intricate, subtle, heart-breaking, surprising, inevitable, and deeply, deeply satisfying. The twisty-turny politics, the subtle character studies, the psychology of ambition and regret and sacrifice for a larger goal, are all woven into an astonishing tapestry. It is dark and brutal, with a great deal of dismemberment, but there is just enough hope and goodness that it’s not all awful. Just barely. Maybe. Assuming you don’t need a lot.
1 Wang Baoxiang is the half-brother of the Prince of Henan in SWBTS. He won my heart by being entirely uninterested in battle and manliness, instead turning his considerable brains to the minutiae of administration, supply, and all the other activities that make it possible to feed, outfit, and field an army to do the stabby bits. ‘Moar Wang!’ became my battle cry at my book group meeting. Friends, there is so much Wang in He Who Drowned the World.
2 Full disclosure: I was on the the panel for that award, and I don’t mind sharing that there was no disagreement at all among panelists that SHBTS was far and away the winner.
4 Mutilation, in this world, is seen as deeply wrong. Ghosts of mutilated people turn into soul-eating monsters; and even before they are dead such people are shunned and reviled, refused entry into monasteries and other important locations. Actions like, oh, say, sending a jar of pickled hands to your enemy have a very particular resonance in this context.
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Nerd Coefficient: 10/10, mind-blowing/life-changing/best.book.evar
Highlights:
- Trenchant psychological character work
- Betrayal, politics, and manipulation
- Twisty turny gender stuff
Reference: Parker-Chan, Shelley. He Who Drowned the World [Tor/Mantle, 2023].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.
