ALIX E HARROW The Everlasting. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

Alix E Harrow’s time-travelling new novel asks questions about our most cherished national myths and what might happen if they were to change.

Alix Harrow’s latest fantasy is a story about the power of stories. And while there have been plenty of these, this is a subversively political take on the idea. The Everlasting is a novel about the power of narrative, of national mythmaking, and how it can be used to shape a people’s idea of themselves and those around them. But it is also a knight’s tale, a time-travel story and a romance driven by a page-turning, constantly shifting plot.

The Everlasting opens with a fairytale:

It begins were it ends: beneath the yew tree …

They say time runs strangely, beneath the yew. They say many things are lost there, among the tangled roots: years, hearts, lives. But they say, too, that some things are found: fates and fortunes, beginnings and endings.

And one, a child. You know her name, too, or at least one of them.

This is the story of Una, a girl who grows up and pulls a mystical sword from that tree to rescue Queen Yvanne and become a knight in her service.

Over the years Una gathered more names. She became the Queen’s Champion, the Red Knight, the Virgin Saint, the Drawn Blade of Dominion. She became Sir Una Everlasting, hero and paragon, arcing through history like a bright-tailed comet.

She became a legend.

Ten centuries later, the legend of Sir Una and her exploits is one of the founding tales of the Dominion. It is used to inspire the populace to seek expansion and to rally them to war, particularly against their neighbours the Hinterlanders. One of those is academic Owen Mallory, who enlists and returns scarred by the experience but still obsessed with Una’s story. Some time after his return, Owen finds himself holding a copy of a book that until then had itself been a myth: The Legend of Una Everlasting. He is asked by the Dominion’s Minister of War to translate the book, but it turns out she actually has other plans for him. Those plans involve sending him into the past to travel with Una and record her story, as he tries to explain once he arrives in Una’s world:

‘Listen to me. I am not a bard or a scribe. I am Lance Corporal Owen Mallory of the 2nd Battalion, a shit soldier and a decent historian. I was sent here from –’ I paused there, lingering in this last moment of sanity and order – ‘the distant future, to record your story and – somewhat indirectly, I suppose – save Dominion.’

So far, so timey-wimey. Owen Mallory understands the mission: he must win Una’s trust to write her story and learn to live in the distant past to do so. But this is really just the set-up for something much more interesting. The story is initially told from Owen’s perspective, and it is only when this story is later retold from Una’s point of view that things start to get a little weird, and then they get weirder. At this point, the narrative jumps between the two, giving very different perspectives on much of the action.

One of the delightful elements of this book is Harrow’s description of Mallory’s growing understanding of what life is like in a medieval world. In her acknowledgements, Harrow credits her mother with giving her ‘six single-spaced pages describing everything I’d gotten wrong about horses’. Which leads to observations like these:

I made a dismaying discovery that day: A journey which takes only a few paragraphs in a book takes considerably longer on horseback. Especially if the horse is old enough to draw a pension, and the woods are thick enough that there are no straight or obvious routes, but only slim game trails that weave and curl among the trees.

Despite some lightness, Harrow has fairly serious intent. What The Everlasting is ultimately about is the way people use stories, for both good and ill, to create a national identity. She explores issues of nationalism, including racism and cross-border aggression. The story of Una Everlasting and her fellow knights has definite (and deliberate) echoes of the Arthurian tales, which themselves are often used as a basis for different forms of British nationalism. In doing so Harrow looks at how these stories are sanitised and moulded to fit the need for a heroic arc:

‘Your story has been – will be, I suppose – written down in a dozen different ways, by a dozen different authors … Personally I always liked the one where they find you at prayer, and you break your vow of silence to answer the summons. “I would deny God before I deny my queen,” you say and then –’

‘I told them to fuck themselves.’ You settled the log on the coals and added, almost chattily by your standards, ‘I was drunk as a dog, when they found me.’

‘… Oh.’ I chewed my pen some more then wrote: When the queen called, Sir Una answered, as she ever had. There was no need, I thought, to burden the reader with unnecessary detail.

Harrow uses the time-travel element of the story to consider what were to happen if that foundational story were to change. How key elements of it are used and abused. As with all time-travel stories, it does not help to think too long about the mechanics here or how they work. Firstly, it will hurt your head, and secondly it will diminish your overall enjoyment of the book. As with any time-travel tale, the best advice is to just go with it, and the significant fantasy element to this one makes that advice even easier to follow.

As with her previous books – The Once and Future Witches and Starling House – Harrow effectively deploys fantasy, myth and fairytale tropes to say something about serious real-world issues. In The Everlasting she does so with a nested, time-travel driven plot with engagingly flawed main characters and what at first seems to be a classic, moustache-twirling villain but, as should be expected from Harrow, a character who has their own tragic backstory.

Alix E Harrow The Everlasting Tor 2025 PB 320pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He was a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards for many years and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

You can buy The Everlasting from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Alix E | Harrow, fantasy, myth-making, national legends, nationalism, rewriting history, time travel