This one was an outside recommendation, initially seeming like another version of the big warrior woman (Una) paired with a squishy male scholar (Owen) trope. That’s practically old hat by now, at least in indie works, but it makes sense this had now proven bankable enough to get a foot in the trad published door. I think if this was just a goofy little romp, that would have been fine. But, as a queer-feminist work trying to be very grim and serious, I don’t think it has enough self reflection to escape the very problems it is critical of. About the only positives I got from this book is to hold it up as a mirror to the history of actual woman warrior characters.
In particular to this, is the observable way that sword and sorcery fantasy shifted in different eras, telling stories of what should be possible according to a justification for why women get to have adventures and fight… while still pleasing the presumed audience’s suspension of disbelief. And, what that disbelief said about what they thought real women were capable of.
First, stepping beyond Tolkien, outside of princesses and damsels getting a bit more spicy and plucky, the girl characters got to be witches, healers or thieves; or sometimes simultaneously bodaciously booby and gracile swordswomen. We could be samurai (but only with pole arms) and ninja. Or shield maidens, though there wasn’t much venturing thee as much as at least getting to be in your family’s retinue. In sports we might be likewise, first with softballs, ice skates and rhythmic gymnastics, or with the one girl on an ensemble cast of misfit tweens trying to fight to regionals (if it is a sports story). Or if you were lucky, the heroine in inspiring stories everyone knew were just for girls (boys being seen as incapable of empathy with such characters, though not the inverse), where their raw exceptional talent will bust through the otherwise accepted norm that boys are the default. Books boys should be expected to read (at least in the last two centuries) make sure it’s clear physically accomplished girls are a part of the support ensemble, whether armed with sports equipment or battle axes.
And I remember reading quite a few non-fiction essays and forum debates over the years, discussing this problem of the woman warrior, seriously, of the how, always with more incredulity over than than elves or dragons. Those, we can accept are entirely fictional, but women? Those are as real and mundane as toasters! Once characters start having gender outside of hero, you need a justification, don’t you? Usually, phrases like “upper body strength” were thrown around liberally as the lack to overcome, the X factor for why certain doors were still to be assumed closed due to the requirements of realism.
And then outside of fantasy, the popular consciousness went through a reckoning, a fad for strength training for women (as the new antidote to fatness, mind you), a re-examination of how weird it was that we starve female athletes and retire them on the cusp of adulthood. Brienne of Tarth and other, muscular but beautiful women became another possibility for viable marketing. We thought a little bit about that, about how book Brienne was characterized as ugly while actress Brienne was nothing of the sort, but most blamed the shift in medium.
Now in stories women can be stockier, more solid, playing the Barbarians and whatnot. The characters are still considered exceptional, but not impossible. Overall, an improvement. As someone who fenced saber, who never had any less restraint or subtlety than a mace when it comes to my physicality and couldn’t pull off dancing ninja dexterity to save her life, I should be flattered. Likewise the world needs more room for masculine delicacy, though those characters have had a much longer tenure as general reader inserts and underdog runts to root for. But I will admit, now spoiled by more abundance of feminine strength and size, I am bored to tears with the implication that a strong woman cannot be properly loved except by a man who is distinctively “deficient” in that specific quality. He will, in these stories, always find instead it is inner strength he compliments her with. And only be can truly appreciate the nuanced woman beneath the muscle.
That’s not to say I hate the pairing altogether! His Secret Illuminations for example, remains a favourite, very much depending on muscle on her and squishy on him. But this also reflected the book bordered on a lit RPG, a place where nobody gets to be good at everything due to game mechanics. Here… eh. Owen’s frailty is so conveniently hand waved as never being a real disability (he is even a mysteriously crack shot despite having vision so poor as to need to cheat on the exam), but he won’t shut up about it while simultaneously making it clear he doesn’t respect Una’s intelligence in the least. It’s tedious, as if we can’t trust the heroine’s potency without making things oddly re-gendered.
Perhaps some day will be a reliable trends of romances about two warriors who loved each other and they didn’t need her to be this magical creature who excelled in a clearly defined as male field or needed completion by a character framed as able to see past her lack of femininity. Indeed there’s always an element of the monster fucker genre in these sorts of books. A powerful woman is the beast for whatever nebbish man shall magnetize himself to her. Additionally, and making this problem worse, The Everlasting is very firm that at no point, even in the chapters told from her perspective, are we to consider Una outside of the hero’s contrasting admiration. He takes a while to get correct about who she is, but it’s still his gaze that stays the strict focus we should see everything through, like a person getting the right prescription. Once he can see Una correctly then he has truly mastered things and can he the true hero of the story.
The book proposes to be a fierce, queer deconstruction of nationalistic myth and the sanitization of stories in service to that. Instead, The Everlasting is a book about an exceptional man realizing he is as special and good as the few exceptional women he has surrounded himself with. The evil villain lady will be defeated; the wise, acerbic academic mentor exceeded in rebellion and achievement in pursuit of truth; the immortal Una will literally kneel before him and then he will climb still higher. How, really is this progress?
Going in, The Everlasting gave me mixed feelings. I wanted to like it. Aesthetically, it is very pretty, an alluring elseworld with a vaguely inter-war feeling and the pageantry of the Arthurian elsewise it dressed itself up in. There’s definitely a reasonable point there from a starting premise, both the problem of being a fan of old things being infested with RETVRN assholes, that one’s dark academia daydreams are of a people who benefited from both class and empire, or the real sanitization of old stories. For example the original Arthurian myths have multiple non-white knights. This hasn’t stopped more contemporary depictions from leaning heavily into the idea of a round table that looks like a 1950s suburban HOA.
One does want to figure out how you get beyond that, or reconcile one has left wing politics with ones love of things that are unavoidably attached to stuff contradictory to them. The Everlasting knows this and wants a solution, and that the current path of ever changing stories might hold a kernel of that.
There are moments though, when the self awareness is a bit too much of an echo that overwhelms the original speaker, the camera pandered to too much, too intrusively. A little might be accepted as thematically in line with the book’s intent, but here, too much so is an authorial elbow nudging you “nationalism is a lie for imperial fascists, get it?”
And while I don’t doubt the left wing bonafides, there also is the book a victim that no matter where you go, there you are. The Everlasting is trying to talk about finding a pure place out of time, but it is not written from that place because such a utopia does not exist. It carries the problems of its own era without ever really escaping them. It cannot imagine identity without core nations, even if its base units of acceptable identity are (red headed) fantasy Gallics, swarthy Hinterlanders, vaguely sketched Roma coded travelling people. It’s concerned with the domination of people who imagine themselves bright blond and blue eyed, but applies an odd sort of martyred purity to everyone else. Remember what I said about an infestation of the RETVRN assholes if you are a fan of the past?
And I don’t mean to say everything is a morally grey area where actually the conquered people of this story deserved it or it was an equal conflict (in this story, hardly, as the imaginary racist fascists have a magical advantage), I mean that it never thinks the other groups might just as much be stories. And it absolutely abdicates thinking about the mobility of people outside of an imperial lense. Without too many spoilers, it’s solution is for a minority of the right sort of misfits to fall out of sequence with time and place into a sort of pocket. It’s trying to use the idea of a found family but sort of fumbles the what’s next bit.
And so, without it meaning so, in so many small ways, it grates and argues against its own point. There’s the way the background misogyny of the setting is handled with all significant female characters speaking with frank simplicity about how hard it is to be a woman as a major defining quality. (As if anyone reading a sprayed edge, marketed as Romantasy novel is surprised by sexism being a problem?) Or there’s the discordant Monty Python reference pulled directly from a Life of Brian joke about left wing infighting through precision on shifting faction names. The background eternal wars of the story, too, are pulled from WWI in a way that suggests a more recent imperial conflict just isn’t romantic enough.
And then of course there was a moment in which the hero, described as having skin the colour of golden beer with dark hair, and subjected to all manner of casual discrimination for his foreignness by the more hateful within the Dominion, in a setting where it’s been hammered how the evil people want everyone to be proper blonds, not even redheads… where he finally ascends to his specialness. To show that his hair now matches the female lead all nice and white so we know he is now truly ascended. I had to go back and re-read that part a few times to confirm that one actually happened.
But you probably aren’t reading this review project to hear my feelings on the ham handed parts of left wing fantasy. You wanted to know about the femdom.
Outside of the little man/big woman, yes, the sex scenes make it clear that the couple is kinky but also that the female protagonist is as submissive as the male one. Dialogue swings back and forth about being of service and being of use equally. We learn that the hero wants to be dominated and pinned down by the heroine, yes, but also that she likes to get permission to come.
This is, of course, not outside of how real people fuck. It’s not offensive in so much as it is arguing women cannot be truly dominant in bed, it just gives both leads a sexuality based on their roles of being there for use, for sacrifice and to take the punishment that results. They are both bottoms.
On the femdom front, what remains is mostly the villain, Vivian. In the old Arthurian myth that’s the witch who finally stuck Merlin in a tree after seducing him. Given Merlin’s happy willingness to help various Arthurians get up to rapey nonsense and the implied “no fool like an old fool” cautionary tale of old powerful men chasing young women you can easily make things more morally grey empowerment tale.
In The Everlasting, Vivian is an immortal mastermind, the scheming politician of the protagonist’s era, the divine Queen of an elseworld Avalon. She is power hungry to the point of insanity, successful to the point it makes her the most interesting of the characters, and intensely brutal. And then she opens her mouth next to the male lead and whines. “Don’t you know how much I suffered to pull this off, even as a woman?” just so Owen gets to roll his eyes and point out actually everyone else suffered more than she has.
Don’t you understand, you silly woman, that being a child slave and molestation victim warped by forces beyond her control isn’t an excuse?
Inevitably, eventually, Vivian gets killed, undone by the heroine and hero, the bad single mother-of-nations thrown down so that the good, heterosexually reproductive couple can escape her and live forever as a perfect family in vaguely implied commune with nature.
There’s probably an anchor here in quintessential Britishness (at least as much as a person from the US sees Britain through their fiction, Harrow is American). There is a country with a habit of producing Queens who eclipses their Kings, or later Thatchers. They are an indelible and weighty part of their history with long claws on the psyche of the smaller kingdoms that ended up clasped together by them into a whole nation. But it’s not these women who seem to whine much about their struggles on basis of sex. Elizabeth I, nor Victoria, nor even Thatcher didn’t seem to linger on that and they certainly didn’t need the sympathy of their minions. But Harrow is writing amateurishly, second hand, attacking the pedestal elite women often get placed on, and gives Vivian dialogue of the fandom of queens.
And of course whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad ends, so Vivian loses to a man and a woman who have the courage to care about proper things like babies and romantic partners. And, for me, if you can’t tell a story without making your avatar of villainy your resentment of Liberal Feminism’s flaws, even more so than genderless violent nationalism, you aren’t going to make a very satisfying conclusion either as a leftist response to the right wing parts of fantasy OR as a source of femdom.
