A review by marmoo
He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

adventurous dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Loveable characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

“But she thought, violently and abruptly, that she had loved him,” one character reflects after the death of her lover. “It was the kind of thought that needed confirmation from the world. It needed her pain, so she could know it was real.” 

She’s not alone in only being able to tabulate her love using the proxy of pain. In fact, it’s a recurring theme of the story, as multiple characters muddle through the hard work of living in the wake of loss and understanding their murky feelings after a lifetime of wrapping themselves in the armor of disassociation. 

If the emotional pain is ratcheted up in this installment, so too is the violence. That shouldn’t come as a surprise—we are after all reading the fictionalized rise of a character who in real life had dozens of concubines sacrificed for his burial after his death—but I did keenly feel the absence of the punctuations of Zhu’s more youthful charm and tenderness in the previous novel. You can’t have made it through the first book and come into this one expecting a joy ride, but even so, this is dark. 

As the characters sunk deeper into their molasses of guilt, self-loathing, and pain, the flaws in the plotting and narration became harder to escape. The implausible military gambits are pushed to even more implausible extremes, crossing the line from “ooh, clever!” and into “uh, really?” 

Not trusting us to pick up on anyone’s motivations by their actions, characters repeatedly lay out those motivations in lengthy internal monologues, then other characters repeat those motivations once again in their own observations. 

Where this novel did improve on the previous was in its palace intrigue plots, particularly through the deepening of Wang Baoxiang’s character, who steps forward from his role as a side character and into the third lead. 

The resonance between the main characters for their varied defiance of gender expectations also continues to be a meaty theme, though one that I found strongest when treated with a lighter touch in She Who Became the Sun. 

Whatever my ambivalences about this conclusion, Shelley Parker-Chan has proven themself as a talented writer; I’ll be interested to see where their career goes next.