Hans Hummel is one of the fond legends of Hamburg. Two decades ago when I visited the city, his statues were everywhere. Now there are only a few. The rest were auctioned off the year after I was there last. Spotting the statue again chimed well with the book that I began reading in that city one evening. This was The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Undoing the tropes of fairytales, swashbuckling boy’s tales, and Tolkienesque fantasy is a genre that has developed in this century. This book is a very good example.
What does every king want? To stay king.
Alix E. Harrow (in The Everlasting)
“Study fairytales if you want to write,” my high-school English teacher had advised me, handing me a slim volume of Tolkien’s lesser-known stories. That remains true today, I found as I read this book. The story is a time-loop, of the kind that has become very familiar since Groundhog Day brought it into the mainstream. It is a love story between two soldiers, separated by a thousand years, and it is a story about the power fantasy that causes them to meet. In the structure and central theme it is similar to last year’s Hugo prize winner, Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.
Nevertheless, its narrative structure is unusual. The first two iterations of the time-loop are narrated by different people, once each by one of the principals. So it took a while for me to figure that the two traversals of the loop were going to go slightly differently. The later traversals are written in other registers: for example, one as a fairytale. This is where secondary characters begin to come into their own, further subverting genre conventions. A stylistically interesting aspect was that through a large part of the book the second person narrative is used, but by different people. So the reader is drawn into deconstructing a power fantasy.
Everything I had believed in and fought for – crown and country, the flag and the church, even the past itself- had proved false. What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father’s hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly, the brusque press of Sawbridge’s lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you.
Alix E. Harrow (in The Everlasting)
It is interesting at the end to see the unmaking of Tolkienesque narratives: of anointed royalty, of magical objects, of quests to kill dragons, of jealousy amongst knights, and of the notion of just wars. Instead new narratives are seeded.They seem more like the Hans Hummel story. There are many of these also in Tolkein, but modern media corporations will not fund the making of movies from them. I’m glad that they are being arrived at, and enriched, by new authors.
Don't hold your breath 
