"Review" of "A Memory Called Empire" by Arkady Martine

This is not quite a review, more a collection of thoughts I have about A Memory Called Empire. I first read this book when it came out last spring, and have come back to it many times since, so these ideas have been marinating over time and don't really represent my gut reaction to the book like most of my other reviews. But with the Hugos coming up, and an excerpt of the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, recently posted, I thought it would be a good time to return to it. All the material below is full of spoilers, so don't read it if you haven't read the book; it won't make sense and will ruin a lot of the good twists in the process.

This is a story that is, at least in part, about the narratives that shape how we see ourselves and who we want to be. Martine's characters are very aware of the context they are in--the norms they must follow, what resonances their actions may have--and so is the overall plot. Not only do the characters use allusions and callbacks and variations-on-themes, the plot does as well. Lines are recycled and quoted, events are constructed for their symbolism to the reader; it's a good attention to detail, to make a book about endless overdetermined self-reference be built in that way. 

Martine likes organic metaphors for her spaceships. Several times, we get a smaller ship emerging from a larger one described as someone spitting, or the descent from orbit as a seed falling. This is most prominent at the beginning, where there's a lot to be said about the transition from space to planet. I was struck by how little space there is in the book. It only really comes up in the interludes, or where it's used to play out the quirks of Lsel culture. Really, this is a planetbound political thriller, not a space opera. When I first saw advertising for the book, a lot of the blurbs seemed to pitch it as a murder mystery; while there is a mysterious murder, that's definitely not what it is. It is, however, a well-paced political thriller. Especially having recently read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which is gorgeously slow-moving, A Memory Called Empire felt tightly wound. The ending in particular is breathless; I had forgotten how late in the book Mahit gets her imago-machine replaced, or how nonstop the plot is after that point. Aside from a brief moment in the Information Ministry when Mahit, Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea are waiting for bureaucrats to figure out how dangerous they are, there are no pauses--the story goes straight from surgery to riot to imprisonment to escape to desperate scheme to sacrifice, and only takes a breath once Nineteen Adze has been crowned.

The writing has a tone that's somewhere in the vicinity of sarcastic, or wry, or said with barely concealed bitterness and longing. Again I can't help but compare this approach to Mantel, and to Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant (which is extremely similar to Wolf Hall in many ways, but I'll leave that for another "review"). In those two books, politics is like someone opening up a clock--it's an experience of wonder, and the insignificance of the individual, and even when there's frustration or fear it's at the complexity of the mechanism, but stated with a kind of earnestness. "Earnest" is a weird word to use for two books built on lies and secrets, but for me it fits; actions might be secret, but the process is presented with clarity and focus. What internal tension there is. what doubts the characters have about what the right thing is (or what will work), come from clearly-framed unknowns. In A Memory Called Empire, the sarcasm or bitterness comes from everything having overtones and undertones, layers of meaning and implication, both for the characters and the readers. This difference is tied up in the differences between the titular empire in this book and the one in The Traitor Baru Cormorant. The former is seductive, entrapping, enticing even as you know it's consuming you; the latter is implacable, inexorable, appealing in its totality and inevitability rather than in how it hides that strength.

Martine writes good prose. There are moments where it feels like a debut, in that she hesitates to leave some metaphors on their own without a more literal description, or doesn't let characters' reactions speak for themselves, but that's partly my personal preference. It doesn't feel gimmicky in its prose, and was the most consistently pleasing to read of the Hugo nominees I've seen this year.  

That imago-replacement scene, and the way the imagos are used throughout, sticks in my head. It makes for a great contrast with Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, another favorite of mine that features one character preserved in another character's memories. In Ninefox Gambit, the memory scenes are written to erase the difference between the two selves. The rememberer, Kel Cheris, keeps her pronouns in the memory, even though she's remembering events that happened to a man, Shuos Jedao. Here, when Mahit is remembering Yskandr's experiences, Yskandr remains "he" even though Mahit is experiencing the memories from the first person. Yskandr's thoughts are <designated as his> by the very structure of the text, and either come as clear phrases or italicized emotions, but are never seamlessly integrated with Mahit. In Ninefox Gambit, Jedao is a part of Cheris that doesn't get a separate voice, because it isn't a separate person--he ceases to be a separate person and becomes absorbed memories. This choice is especially interesting because Mahit was raised to have an imago, while Cheris never even imagined the possibility of absorbing someone else. For all that Mahit says the imago-self is supposed to be one unified person, the imago is very much presented as one person aware of having been someone else entirely, not as one's own memories in different bodies. Mahit wants it, supposedly, but can't accept becoming someone else by making Yskandr part of her. Cheris, meanwhile, literally eats glass to take in Jedao's memories, and the experience is a desperate, painful one, yet by the end she is both entirely herself and entirely someone else rather than being two people in one body.

Along these lines, much of the pain Mahit feels throughout is knowing that what she's made cannot be only hers--her poems, her relationships, her view of Teixcalaan, are all modified and determined by the people and structures around her. Using memory is a really good way to mirror her external struggle to retain a sense of self outside of wanting to be Teixcalaanli. Mahit struggles throughout with wanting Yskandr's experience, but only in a useful way, a way that's hers. She doesn't want to have his feelings and be in his body, she just wants the memories and not the context. It might seem difficult to imagine, but everyone has moments where, just for an instant, they're in their own past--you see a person you haven't seen in years and for a second you're a younger version of yourself, or you step into a room and in between eyeblinks you've re-lived something else that happened there. The conceit here is that it can last longer, and come from someone more separate, than any past self, but the instinctive smile when Mahit sees Six Direction (Yskandr's smile, really) is not all that different from smiling when you see a childhood friend that you haven't been close with in a while. This parallel gives me more insight into why it's so hard for Mahit to accept that Yskandr isn't really a separate person anymore, but a part of her past; she's too smart not to realize that doing so would make her someone else, and even if she's supposed to enjoy and benefit from that transformation, it's a hard thing to do. In the same way, Mahit wants to be part of Teixcalaan, but that wanting is tainted by knowing that Teixcalaan is not her--it could be her, but right now, it isn't, and that means becoming Teixcalaanli means becoming someone else.

A Memory Called Empire saves its emotional payload for the end, or at least its interpersonal emotional payload. In Wolf Hall, the painful moments have to come early, because the reason they're painful is how they work as memories. The reader gets to feel Thomas Cromwell's sorrow and regret not in the moment, but afterwards, as an experience of the past. Here, you're seduced by the empire early, but the people late; you need time to get to know the characters so that you can understand what matters to them and be struck by the emotional weight of taking it away. The characters are a bit of a type, which makes sense given the setting, and are definitely detailed enough to be distinct and interesting, but I'm curious to see people other than cultured political operatives in the sequel. Given that it contains literal aliens, I think that won't be too hard to manage.

The one-line version is that this is a great book, both on the level of prose and sentence-level work and as an exploration of big ideas. It's definitely my favorite book of 2019, and well-deserving of all the nominations and awards it receives.

5 out of 5.