In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.
Do you remember back in, oh, 2017 or so, when a certain variety of shellshocked well-intentioned liberal looked at the news, wrung their hands in distress, and bleated ineffectually, This is not who we are? People are resistant to changing their opinions on the basis of something as unreliable as mere factual evidence, but still, some facts get through, and some opinions do change. It’s been very clear for a while now that yes, this is, in fact, very much who we are; it’s who we’ve always been; and it’s who we’ll always be, without some powerful work to leave that rut and break a new path.
The Everlasting is a story about the stories nations tell themselves about who they are; and what it takes to change the story, in the hopes that changing the story will change the nation. It is deeply embedded in modern times. It responds directly to the creeping, running, leaping, bounding, racing encroachment of fascism, but it drapes the conversation in the costumes and set dressing of historical fantasy, because every message is always more palatable when we have knights in armor acting out the lesson.
The tale is told by Owen Mallory, a historian by training in the nation/republic/empire of Dominion, which is not at all Great Britain. Before returning to academia, he served as a soldier in the not-at-all World War II against the Hinterlanders, who are not-at-all the rest of Europe. Although Dominion won the war, the conflict — the latest in a long series of similar such conflicts — has left lingering wounds in the nation and the people. Owen himself is scarred across the throat from a wound that did not arise from honest combat, and speaks with a rasp in his voice. Owen’s father has been left a drunk, a frustrated pacifist forever getting into trouble. His political agitations, a produce of his own participation in the previous not-at-all World War I have for years brought shame and scorn upon himself and, by association, Owen. Now, he is joining activists for change within the Dominion, whose increasingly vehement demands are causing embarrassment to the government.
The novel opens with Owen, in the proud tradition of academics everywhere, struggling to write a book in his chosen specialism, the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion, and especially the legendary founding figure of Una Everlasting, who is not at all King Arthur. Any resemblance between the name of Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, and our own Owen Mallory, is entirely coincidental. One day Owen receives in the post an inexplicable book: a manuscript entitled The Death of Una Everlasting, an apparently contemporary record of the legend herself, written in the hand of someone who knew her personally, loved her, and watched her die.
Owen throws himself into the work of deciphering the book, and the moment he has finished it, he is summoned to a government office, to meet Minister Vivian Rolfe, whose position is at risk as she absorbs the blame for the civil unrest. The nation must remember what it is, she tells him, and the publication of this new, contemporary account of their founding hero is just what the nation needs. Only Owen Mallory, a lifelong devotee of Una Everlasting, can write the translation that will save the nation from descent into factional violence. Then Vivian stabs Owen’s hand with a letter knife. His blood spills onto the book, and he awakens in the past, under a tree, in the presence of Una herself. The book is in his hand, its pages blank. His task, it turns out, is not to translate an extant manuscript, but to write it himself, in the time and place where Una’s story happened.
The first third of this novel seems straightforward enough: a time-travel tale, a nascent romance, a man struggling to reconcile his view of a myth with the reality of a person. He follows Una on her famous quests: to slay the last dragon in the land, to retrieve from its lair the Grail, which is the sole hope of saving the life of her beloved queen and benefactor, Yvanne. He is with her during the last, final betrayal, in which her comrade, the fabled Ancel the Betrayer, stabs her, so that she dies at Yvanne's feet.
Una's death seems like a logical stopping place for a story that is. . . simpler than I would have expected from Alix E Harrow. All we need is an epilogue, time enough for Mallory to return to the present, process his adventure, and make some grand decision about whether he will serve as a government propagandist for history, given that he now knows the reality of the past. Except the book is only a third of the way through, Part 1 is titled The First Death of Una Everlasting (emphasis mine) and things develop in ways that are far from simple.
I hesitate to write more, because part of the wonder of this book lies in following the timey-wimey twisty turns, the betrayals and revelations, and the long thread of cause-and-effect that makes up the history of a nation. But even in that first third we have a skilled depiction of the parallels between past and present, illustrating the inexorable repetition of historical events. The glorious martial campaigns that Una leads in Queen Yvanne’s name mirror the Dominion’s conquest in modern days against the Hinterlands; and although the historical records and modern newspapers both report heroic victories and cries of welcome from the liberated populaces, the actual mood on the ground is very different from reports. The quest to kill the last dragon is justified with tales of dragons’ dangers to civilians; but evidence of that danger seems scarce when you approach the dragon itself. Still, every story needs a villain; and when there are no more dragons to kill, Ancel the Betrayer steps in to serve that role in the national mythology, just as the Hinterlanders do in the present day.
It is hard to control the flow of history so that the sequence of events arrives at a particular desired present. The whole genre of time travel fiction is one long conversation about the challenge of truly understanding cause and effect. But controlling past events is not the only way to control the present. One of the brilliances of this book is its meditations on the types of stories that a nation uses to serve its interest. There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war, says Vivian to Owen, and he thinks, There was no God in Dominion; there was only Vivian Rolfe, telling a story.
A truly powerful story is not created on the spot, however. It must age. It needs the legitimacy of myth and history behind it. Owen, sent back in the past to tell Una’s story, is given the opportunity not only to affect events, but to affect how they are remembered. I’m not entirely sure his final solution is all that different in method from what Vivian wants him to do; but it is very different in its outcome. Do the ends justify the means? There’s an argument to be made in this book that they do. Or rather, at the end I was unconvinced that this argument was satisfactorily refuted.
This is not necessarily a criticism of the book. Vivian is an extraordinary character, and I found myself at more than one point musing that her side of the story would make a magnificent tale in its own right, far more sweeping and epic in its scope and deeds than the focused, personal narrative we get from Owen. Owen values the individual; Vivian values the nation. Or her version of the nation. Or, perhaps, her view of what the nation should be. This book is not, I think, discussing whether the ends justify the means, as much as which ends those means are pursuing. And it's a hard question. Vivian's ruthless utilitarianism is not a mere strawman argument here. It's given a chance to make its case; and to the extent that you agree that there is a case to be made for it, you might find yourself, like me, wishing that there were a companion novel telling Vivian's story.
But perhaps cliches about ends and means are not the perspective to take here. Perhaps we should turn our eyes to a different idiom. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Vivian Rolfe does not learn. But Owen Mallory does.
Give this book to your friends, your family, your enemies. Propose it at your book group. It needs to be discussed by people who have read it to the end.
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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.
Highlights:
- Time travel
- National myth-making
- Not-at-all an allegory
- Medieval knights and armor
References:
Harrow, Alix E. The Everlasting [Tor, 2025].
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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
