RAY NAYLER Palaces of the Crow. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

Ray Nayler shows his versatility in his latest novel, a historical fantasy exploring war, survival, birdlife, and magic.

Ray Nayler is a speculative fiction author who does not remotely do the same thing twice. His first novel, The Mountain in the Sea, was a slightly futuristic tale involving sentient octopuses. His second novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, went further into the future and considered a scenario involving the collapse of AI-run governments. Palaces of the Crow, his third novel, could not be more different from these, yet explores some of the same concerns.

Palaces of the Crow opens early in the morning in June 1941, in a small shtetl (village) near Vilnius. A teenage girl called Neriya follows a crow she has named Buster (after Buster Keaton) into the forest.

Buster was a large, handsome looking crow. When he visited Neriya in the yard he strutted around … black wings folded over his pearl-grey back, his back tail swishing from side to side like the coattails of a Vilnius gentleman with arms folded behind him, out for a stroll in his new frock coat.

Over the preceding months, Neriya has developed a relationship with Buster and has found him to be surprisingly intelligent. While she is away from the village, it is destroyed by the advancing German army as part of its offensive into Russia. It turns out that Buster had come to rescue her. Alone in the forest, Neriya joins together with a very young Russian (although originally Polish) soldier called Cesław. Cesław’s family had been moved to Siberia, where he trained as a hunter; he joined the Russian army at 14 when his father and uncle were taken away by the secret police:

He had not joined the Red Army out of patriotism. He had joined so that he could disappear. So that he could hide inside its mass. That was all. He understood that if the secret police took him as well, it would kill his mother. So he had to stop being himself. Become no one.

Later they take in a Romani teen called Kezia, whose family has also been slaughtered, and who has rescued a mute Lithuanian boy. The main story follows the four children as they try to survive through the war by slowly moving deeper into the forest, all the while maintaining their relationship with, and seemingly being protected by, the local flock of crows.

They had not been children, any of them. And they had not been adults. They had been the kind of human survival makes. An ancient state of being, in which they were bound to others for heat, food, shelter in ways the modern human had stopped recognizing … Bound in a way in which words like friend or family made no sense.

While Palaces of the Crow is a story of survival, it is also much more than this. At one point the narrative jumps to the Soviet Union in the 1970s,  a time in which one of the survivors has tried to write the story of all of them (which by implication is the main text of this book):

She felt the audacity of what she had done. The intrusiveness of it. She had not only written herself, her own thoughts, her own life – she had written all of them. Reassembled who they were, out of the stories they had told one another, out of the observances of them.

And it would not be a Ray Nayler book if there were not epigraphs. Each chapter begins with a quote from a book called The Autobiography of a Burned Village, written by an old man before the action of this novel begins, about the same village Neriya lived in when it was burned by Cossacks during the pogroms. The first epigraph sets the scene for this:

We became real only at the moment of our ruin. Our shtetl takes form at dusk, as the Cossacks ride into its outskirts.

We become solid as the shutters slam, as our shaking hands extinguish candles and the pogrom begins …

We wake to reality and the reek of fire.

There are resonances between these remnants of text, their author, and Neriya’s own experience. These excerpts deepen the exploration of the experiences of Jewish populations living in Poland and Lithuania in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The whole of which is succinctly encapsulated in this quote:

Our history can be summed up in a single sentence. We arrived, we lived awhile, and then we were driven out.

Palaces of the Crow is predominantly a historical novel with a slight speculative flavour, which comes from the actions of the crows and their relationship with the four children. Much like the sentient octopuses in Nayler’s debut, the crows have their own culture that is specifically not a human culture and which those observing them can only guess at. This allows for plenty of contemplation of the differences between human and crow societies:

War was a feast. The way the garbage bins of Vilnius were a feast humans had made for crows. Whatever humans did in the world, it seems the crows understood how to turn it to their own advantage.

There are so many novels about World War II it sometimes feels that this period of history has been over-explored. But it is now long enough ago that people need to be reminded about the reality of the dehumanisation and the violence that followed – and that this was not a one-off event but part of a cycle. Ray Nayler has found a new way into this history that does not shy away from the destruction and the privation. But he does so by bringing a sense of wonder, of something magical, into a world that was otherwise dark.

Ray Nayler Palaces of the Crow Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2026 PB 384pp $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

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Tags: crows, historical fantasy, Lithuania, magic, orphans, pogroms, Poland, Ray | Naylor, speculative fiction, World War II