This is an epic poem – or rather, a collection of poems telling one epic story: The protagonist Xau is the king's fourth son, and upon his death, is sent to the mountain to be presented to the king-choosing dragon, who has rejected (and killed) his older brothers first. He is the classical good/unassuming/stable-boy-type king, and is chosen because he doesn't want the crown. He repeatedly wows people by bowing to them, in an inversion that goes from lame to funny to deep at least twice over the course of the book. He saves everybody. He is always fair and good, even when dealing with his enemies, and in dealing with each of his two wives and all of his children. All evil is naturally evil, all good good-if-misguided. Xau is capital-g Good.
I'm not sure what I think of the repetitions and the black-and-white storytelling – on the one hand, I can see how it'd be annoying, objectively, on the other hand, it's all very in tone for this kind of work. In the end, I had too much fun to be overly critical.
The poems differ in perspective and style – the majority is narrative from an omniscient narrator, but some are from specific people – advisors, townsfolk, enemy soldiers, the cleaning woman he forms a friendship with, and best of all the palace cat (“Likewise, the palace is hers, / though she condescends / to share her territory / with the king.”, “Permissible that the king pauses, / pushes away paper and brush, / bends down to stroke / behind her ears. / Later, she will inspect his desk. / Items may need to be rearranged.”) –, or tales told after the fact, or rhyming poems for special circumstances (mostly evil. Evil rhymes.)
There is one poem that details how King Donal, not very scholarly, learns the language of Xau, and I just enjoyed it so much:
Donal, the Red King,
red-haired and red-handed in war,
battles behind him, restless in peace,
decided to learn Meqingese
in proof of friendship.
Cut his temper against erudite tutors:
raged, roared, railed,
without retaining the rudiments
of pitch and tone.
Regrouped. Reconsidered.
Rented a mixed-race whore.
Practiced basics in the bedroom:
between, beneath, belt, button,
strap, skirt, shirt, silk, satin,
open, closed, finger, thumb;
the rising, falling, dipping tones
of woman, man, mouth, lips, hips, ribs,
breast, buttock, belly, balls,
hot, heat, hand, hold, hard;
repetition and variation:
standing, lying, table, chair,
front, back, over, under,
in, in, in.
Then wine, honey cakes,
a master class of pillow talk.
Months later,
speaking Meqingese to Xau
for the first time,
Donal, flustered,
complimented Xau’s clothes,
his hair, the fineness of his eyes,
while Xau, perplexed,
inquired how heavily
Donal had been drinking.
Getting to know the other characters, especially the nine guards, over the course of the book was really well done, as were the two very different wives, the advisors, the other kings. There's much more character in this than you'd expect knowing it's a fairytale black-and-white epos. I liked it a lot.
Also, the author seems cool: Proceeds from 2020 (pandemic) sales were split between Doctors Without Borders, a local-to-her food bank, and the Trevor Project. The book is named after a book shop she loved as a child. She got a mathematics degree at Cambridge and her previous book, Elemental Haiku, contains one haiku for every element of the periodic table.
