Review of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

You know your girl loves a time loop. So when I realized one of my favourite contemporary authors wrote a time-travel secondary world fantasy, my jaw dropped. Has Christmas come early?? The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow’s latest, might be my favourite novel from her thus far (I would have to reread The Once and Future Witches to be sure). Despite being in no uncertain terms a romance, its time-travel mechanics are timey wimey in the best possible sense. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Tor in exchange for a review.

Owen Mallory (nice reference there) is an historian and veteran in the country of Dominion. His life’s work is studying the folk hero Sir Una Everlasting. However, when he’s sent back in time via a convenient magical book and meets his hero face-to-face, he’s in for a rude awakening—and so is she. Owen and Una are being manipulated by a force beyond their control, someone who has plans for Dominion not just in Owen’s present but in the past and future as well. Can Owen and Una find a way to change their fate? And if they do, what becomes of Dominion itself?

I don’t know where to start, and I will desperately try not to spoil this book, but wow. Time travel is always hard to write, and I love how Harrow manages it here. I readily admit that some of the logic confuses me; however, I also didn’t pay that much attention to the exposition we were given. (This is usually for the best with time travel!) Overall, Harrow spreads out the exposition very cleanly. The looping doesn’t feel repetitive, and the time-travel mechanics fit nicely into the world she has created.

Creating a secondary world for this story was very smart for many reasons. I can’t recall how much other secondary-world time travel I’ve read … it’s rare, probably because time travel feels more exciting when it involves time periods we are at least vaguely familiar with. Of course, when you write time travel in our world, you then have to adhere—more or less—to our history. And that isn’t Harrow’s agenda here. A different world cleverly sidesteps all that.

Nevertheless, Dominion and the legend of Una Everlasting owes much to our history, particularly of course the Arthurian legendarium. As Owen remarks throughout this story, Una’s mythology is a palimpsest of records from various scholars centuries after she died—just as the quasi-historical King Arthur’s legend has been written and rewritten numerous times in the 1500 years since he was purported to exist. Harrow finds a way to hook this into the time-travel narrative, of course, which I find delightful. At the same time, this serves as commentary on the fragmentary and even unreliable nature of historical accounts.

This, in turn, plugs into the main plot and theme of The Everlasting: namely, she who controls the narrative controls the world. Dominion is literally a story crafted by a cruel yet capable ruler. Harrow, through Owen, picks apart the ways in which stories like King Arthur have been used throughout history as founding and nationalistic myths—their historicity is secondary to their inspirational value. (The same is true here in Canada, whether it’s our tenuous grasp on homegrown heroes who go on to do big things in the world or our constant attempts to rewrite our history as somehow kinder towards Indigenous peoples than we actually were.) The only difference, of course, is that in this book, there is a specific person in the driver’s seat for these founding myths.

All nations engage in mythologizing and revising their history, and none is so ruthless about it as a fascist nation. This, too, Harrow explores explicitly in The Everlasting, and it resonates in a big way with what I see happening in the US and, to a much lesser extent for the moment, here in Canada. Storytelling is a huge part of the Trump administration’s push to normalize everything from immigration raids to the dismantling of higher education. His anti-trans rhetoric is right out of the 1930s Nazi playbook. Harrow mirrors this with the shifting rhetoric and laws Owen experiences as the history of Dominion—thanks in part to his own, coerced efforts—warps around him.

Harrow is one of those authors who always seems to be writing stories about stories. The Everlasting reminds me a lot of other such metafictional stories, including the last few seasons of Supernatural, and basically all of NuWho. Not only does she meditate upon the political value of storytelling, but she also uses it as a driving force in the romance between Owen and Una.

Now, you know this aromantic gal isn’t big on romance in her fiction. But I really enjoyed how Owen and Una’s relationship develops. The different perspectives, especially the second-person narration at times (what a treat) are great. These are two characters who are extremely different in temperament, background, and skills, yet they each choose to sacrifice for the other. There is an equity to their relationship that I find so refreshing and which belies the reductive, usually chauvinistic qualities found in the stories referenced here. Una is obviously no damsel—yet she is also not just a fearsome warrior. Owen is obviously no knight—yet he is also more than just a scholar. They are complex people, cowardly and courageous at various times, and theirs is a love story truly through the ages.

The Everlasting is top-shelf time travel, top-shelf fantasy. It’s achingly beautiful romance, deep and thoughtful politics, and perfectly confusing time-loop logic. I’m still thinking about it a week after reading it—and will likely think about it for weeks to come. It just makes my brain fizz with connections and ideas. This is what speculative fiction should be at its best.