This is a novella that caught my eye in one bookstore, and I bought in another. The premise immediately intrigued me: a group of historians and other scholars are press-ganged by a despot into fabricating an acheological dig of a fake ancient city, as a means to (literally) manufacture consent for his war with the neighboring nation. Politics! Worldbuilding! Clever social maneuvering! A lot to be interested in just from the blurb. I put off buying it, though––I forget if I was buying nothing that day or focussed on other purchases. But then, passing through a different bookstore along a walk to yet a third (I may have a problem), I spotted a used copy, a bit dented in one corner, going for a mere $11, which happened to be almost exactly the ammount in which I had store credit for that particular chain, having previously sold a hardcover at––you guessed it––yet a fourth store. Chatting with some other shoppers about my selection, they were also intrigued by the premise, but voiced a desire to wait to hear a proper review before picking it up for themselves (If you actually are reading this, hi!).
Thus, here I am, back on the review grind.
My main takeaway is thus: This is a book that lies to you about what it is, repeatedly.
There is no more fascile mode of review than “This is not the story that I, in my infallible literary wisdom, expected it to be,” and so I’ll strive to avoid overemphasizing the failures of my personal presumptions. Instead I’ll do my best to focus on the way this book develops expectations, and what it does with them. This is, of course, difficult to do without spoilers, so I’ll aim for a more general review in the first part of this article and clearly deliniate where you should stop should you wish to read the book for yourself. This is one of those stories that’s hard to discuss without getting into the meat of it, so I can’t promise that latter section won’t make up the lion’s share of this review.
So. Lies.
The story takes place in Aelia (the demonym of which, “Aelian,” so far as I can tell should be pronounced much like an exraterrestrial), a fairly direct cultural analogue for classical Rome, complete with a mentioned equivalent of the Aeneid. Our unnamed narrator is Aelia’s presiding expert on linguistics and philology. As far as narrators go he is…wry. The book leans on his wryness rather heavily, in fact. His meandering diversions, his commentary on his collegues, his contextless name-dropping of fictional foreign cultures, his self-deprecation with regard to his own fascination with his expertise. He is, in places, funny. He is, in others, tedious by light of his attempts to be.
Normally I’d admit that the tone afforded by this sort of narrator would be purely a matter of personal taste––if you enjoy a Tony Stark-esque smarmy genius act, more power to you. But in a narrative so centrally concerned with the construction of history, it feels jarringly out of place. For a protagonist who prefesses himself to be singularly obsessed with language and culture––this preeminent, presumably toga-clad scholar––his particular breed of arrogance is strikingly pedestrian.
This leads into a broader complaint about the tone of the story, which is that the author can’t seem to decide how seriously we’re to take the central theme of historicity. It pontificates about the mutable nature of history, the search for a central proveable truth, and then sends me scrambling to Wikipedia to check dates by throwing in the word “screwdriver” (first documented in the late 15th century in a practical knowledge guide for nobles but likely not popularized until the 1800s when industrialization made threaded fasteners comodifiably mass-producable) (this would not be nearly so egregious were it not both a paragraph specifically about historical development of language and a sentence where literally any solid handheld object would suffice).
It’s important to note, and I feel mostly comfortable doing so before the spoiler break, the narrator never leaves our fantasy-city of Rome (also unnamed, as memory serves). If the premise written on the back or the ruin depicted on the cover made you think we the readership would actually visit the fake archeological site, you will be dissapointed, as I was. The frought construction, the teeming masses of doomed workers, the rolling landscapes of the border country, are all, at best, related second hand by one of the other scholars who actually deign to venture out and oversee the implausible project. Firsthand, we rarely see the outside of the narrator’s office, and what we do see outside of it is rather thin on description. For all the story’s focus on the trappings of culture, we never really feel our presumable mediterranian-euqivalent environment. Does our scholarly protagonist wear a toga? What is the archetecture of his university like? How’s the damn weather? Some dozens of surrounding cultural demonyms are name-dropped but given very little in the way of flavor or substance. The entire premise of the narrative is that these scholars are reconstructing a hypothetical ancestor to their own much-lauded culture, and yet we are given scant understanding of their starting point.
I should perhaps also go into the plot, by which I conveniently mean both the main events of the story and the secret plan it centers around. First Citizen Gyges, a foreign-born, recently-crowned despot still fresh of his conquest of the Narrator’s native Aelia, would like to further conquer the neighboring “backwards” nation of Ana Strasoe, in a lead-up to yet more conflicts culminating in the conquest of the ancient and powerful Sashan Empire, which seems to be playing off Persia, with a bit of China. Gyges’ popularity is already suspect, so he needs a firm and romantic justification to get the Aelian (again, I can’t not think of little green men) people on his side. He decides on an appeal to “history”: long ago, your ancestors presided over a great and utopian kingdom, whose grand cities stood resolute for a thousand years before those savages over an Ana Strasoe raided and sacked them to the last, sending our people back to the stone age from whence this new mighty empire has arrisen. Should we not show them what for this millenia-old atrocity? To prove it, here’s the totally-real archeological site of the only one of those cities on our side of the border, complete with a just-legible accont of the waning days of war in an ancestor of our language. Please ignore that all the preeminent scholars in the region have been oddly preoccupied for the last several months and thousands of imprisoned laborers have gone missing recently.
This is a fascinating and, I would say, literarily delicate premise. It’s the kind of stupid oversized scheme that requires a very narrow tightrope of suspension of disbelief, much like a good heist movie. Not so fantastic or discreet from reality that you can comfortably shut the real-world settings of your brain off entirely, but relying enough on implausible assumptions and over-precient planning that happens to shape out “just as planned” as to force a mental distance from the obvious objections. Not at all an impossible line to walk mind you—I and presumably everyone else who’s read this scanned the blurb on the back and had a realistic expectation for how that would satisfactorily shape out. And once the actul narrative begins, and the twists and turns start coming, the book moves along at a good clip, and the second act feeds into a genuine curiosity I’ll explore more in the spoiler section.
So long as you don’t, say, toss some big twist at the reader that doubles down on both the supposed groundedness of the setting and the open preposterousness of the schemes at hand, pulling that tightrope to a razor’s edge we had no way of knowing we were walking in to, you should be fine.
At this point you’ll need to either delve into the spoilers or jsut read the dang book.
SPOILERS, you have been warned, read no further if you wish to read this book. If you’d like a broad and relatively unspecific summary of my conclusions, you might skip down to the last full paragraph (not counting the single-line plug).
Everybody out who wants out? Good. This is your last warning.
The story starts to hit its stride when the first twist arrives: the scholars’ creation is taking on a life of its own. By some subtle, retroactive magic it seems, the anceint civilization of Aelian predecessors they are inventing whole cloth seemingly is and always has been. Our linguist hears a sailor use a word not from modern Aelian but from his fake Reconstructed Proto-Aelian. The art historian finds a salvaged bronze on the market in exactly the style he had devised for the ancient city, aged in a way none of his laborers or subordinates would have bohtered or even thought to fake. A Sashan holy book of records finds its way into Aelia after being long forbidden to outsiders with entire passages of an ancient treaty––in exactly the fake language our narrator has devised. Somehow it was all becoming real.
My fellow readers, I was hooked.
This was nowhere in my expectations for where this story was going, and I felt deleriously, beautifully lied to. This perfect bout into magical realism so beautifully deepened that delicate premise, putting just the right amount of slack into the tightrope to swing on (no, I don’t know how tightrope walking works, sue me). Immediately I was willing to look past the sly tone, the constant name-dropping of surface-level worldbuilding, even the screwdriver. Perhaps I had gone in expecting some delicate revolutionary intrigue, scholars cleverly towing the line between fulfilling a tyrant’s demands and subtly underminging his aspirations from just beneath his nose; a careful game of propaganda within propaganda. I didn’t get that, but this new and subtle turn to the narrative excited and compelled me, and ultimately you can’t judge a book by your expectations of it, only on its own terms.
But sometimes a book fucks its terms with a screwdriver.
The scholars studiously avoid any mention of the implication we’re thinking. It’s coincidences, it’s leaks in their security, it’s an eleborate Sashan plot. Even the narration, the most secret thoughts or our baffled linguist, never dares openly speculate that something actually magical is occurring. Their only option is to soldier on, get the job done, and avoid as best they can the wrath of their tyrannical benefactor.
That last starts to weigh on our narrator. Prompted in part by his girlfriend, a former prostitute whose retirement he funds, he begins plotting to fake his death and escape to foreign lands with her, her connections in the performing arts furbishing him with the skills and makeup he needs to really sell the act. There’s a good bit of clever scene-setting in this plotline, setting up the kinds of odd precautions one would take to verifiably appear dead, set fairly firmly in the story’s time and place.
These plans are forced to accelerate when the magic reaches a crescendo. Rain forced them to move the fake dig site, you see, and in the new location they found…a real dig site. An actual ancient city, with the same artistic motifs they devised, nearly identical city planning, and whole inscriptions of the war that ended them in the Narrator’s exact conlang. Perfect almost down to the last detail.
Once again, the sholars stubbornly refuse to even speculate that they’ve somehow altered reality. They got lucky, that’s all, and a good thing too since they’re well behind schedule and this makes everything a lot easier. They don’t have the luxury, with Gyges’ sword dangling over their heads, to find a rational explanation.
Good thing too, because there’s not one coming.
The Narrator’s fake death is all set up, meant to look like he poisoned himself in a bathhouse. His mistress assures him, the best idea is to actually take the poison, so they’ll smell it on him when they find his “body,” and then the antidote.
She didn’t bring any antidote, though.
This is where you start to feel less comfortably lied to.
It was all a ploy, right from the beginning you see. Our abruptly villainous sex worker spells it all out, assured that the narrator—whom she never really liked, by the way—is near death. The Great and Glorious Sashan Empire planned the whole thing from the get. From their ancient records, they already knew there was such a grand utopian nation whose cities are burried under the plains—destroyed not by the ancestors of Ana Strasoe, but by savage early Aelians. When First Citizen Gyges visited Sashan, they carefully seeded the idea of ancient cities useful to propaganda in his mind. They then prepped an intricate web of espionage in the Aelian capital, suborning each and every one of the mistresses and boyfriends of the preeminent scholars they knew would get dragged into the project. Through these spies, they subtly manipulated the effort, pushing it closer and closer to the truth, ultimately resulting in the real unearthed city. Then Ana Strasoe, the intended target of Gyges’ folly, can quickly conquer the site on Sashan’s instruction, finding clear records that the Aelians were the ancient, brutal savages who destroyed this great civilization, and turning popular opinion across the region well and truly against Gyges and any further Aelian Invasions.
This, you may realize, as I did, makes not a lick of goddamn sense.
What do you mean a foreign power Inceptioned the Caesar into exactly the cockamamie scheme they wanted? What do you mean a bunch of hookers and college freshmen were seamlessly converted into spies with none of their romantic partners getting wise through months of active paranoia? What do you mean the Narrator actually perfectly recreated an ancient langage despite working from entirely the wrong principles?! He was operating on the premise that he was building what his peoples’ language evolved from after getting sacked back to the stone age, why in God’s name would that still hold when it’s actually the language of the people his ancestors sacked? Even if they adopted the language of the slaves they took… but I’m getting pointlessly diverted.
The whole Dramatic Twist™ makes, at best, half sense. Sure, I guess Zero evidence of this kingdom survived into the modern day, not even as a myth or a rumor. Sure, I guess this whole elaborate plan went off from a thousand miles away without a goddamn hitch. Sure, in an entire massive plain they guessed the exact right location of the real city on only their second try, and completely random weather conditions just so happened to make that second try necessary. Sure. But that still leaves the question of Dear Christ WHY?
All the Sashan actually needed in this scenario was for the actual city to be unearthed so Ana Strasoe could annex it and reveal the truth. Perhaps I lack some necessary geopolitical brilliance, but it does seem to me that starting a rumor of a gold rush in the area would have a lot fewer points of failure. The Sashan did not need the Narrator to decode the language because they had it in their records, they did not need the first fake dig site to be constructed, they did not need to waste a king’s ransom bribing select mistresses, they did not need to psychologically terrorize a random band of academics by putting their lives in jeopardy and then convincing them they were wizards.
The whole thing is just… just such a blatant post-hoc conclusion, the grasping of an author who wasn’t sure how to put a punchline on what he’d set up. He built up all this expectation, this glorious, vague magical realism out of an intriguingly insane scheme and then let it all fell flat. There lies the real problem: The Magic we thought was coming justified the precariousness of the premise. “Build a fake archeological city as propaganda” is moderately preposterous, but if some magic of this world is that that which has been so perfectly imagined can by that effort be and always have been, then obviously that scheme is one of very few scenarios where that magic could manifest. It gives us the undefinable impression of a setting where this particular ridiculous plot is the only way to expose the subtle mechanisms of the world. The Twist™, as it’s presented, does not solve a problem weighing over us—it renders us unsure what the point was of any of this.
The Narrator lives, whatever, thanks to induced vomiting and quick medical aid—uniquely among his collegues, whose own illicit partners were universally successful in arranging botched fake suicides. He alerts Gyges to the “real” story, and the First Citizen retakes and destroys the site of the city, and prostrates himself before his enemies, staving off all the wars meant to be initiated by these simply ludicrous schemes.
To the end, the story never deigns to state outright the conclusion we were all walked to by the hand through the middle act. Even when the Narrator speculates that his assassin-cum-mistress was lying or mislead, that Sashan seized the opportunity from something else going on, the entire paragraph is so obtuse and meandering it’s funtionally a Rorschach test: we know what the hell you’re trying to say only because we’ve been waiting for you to say it for sixty-five bleeding pages. And all with this air of a grand poetic summation, for somethign you can tell fairly clearly was cobbled together as the author went and pisses on its own theme as it goes.
I’ll be honest, if I hadn’t known I was going to review this novella from the jump, I might have been kinder to it. Less analytical of its flaws, at the least. I’d have run through it, found it dissapointing, and written off my twelve-dollards-for-used-ten-for-new store credit as a loss. I know damn well that endings are hard, and sometimes you find that you’ve sailed out to sea with no heading and feel you have to dock at the first port that rears its head over the horizon, even if it means a hard turn. But I have a perennial grudge against “And it all went according to plan.” It’s central to my opinions on everything from She Who Became the Sun to Tigana; if you’ve got a Plan on the page, even retroactively described, you’ve got to really earn everything going according to it, for my money. Too many obvious points of failure that just get ignored can throw me out of a story entirely. Throughout Making History I was cautiously hopeful of seeing an either genuinely well-arranged or cleverly subverted Plan; then happily surprised to discover the Plan fed into something else entirely and its execution was irrelevant; then force-fed a different Plan all the more egregious in its “all according to-edness” by virtue of encompassing the first Plan like a reverse Plan Matryoshka Doll. My dissapointing subverted expectations are all the more so for following up a happy subverted expectation, and because of some lovely people I chatted with at a bookstore I’ve had to think very hard to articulate why exaclty that is: I am left, twice over, sad for what this story lied to me about being.
You can find Making History by K.J. Parker at your local bookstore.