Fiction Reviews
The Poet Empress
(2026) Shen Tao, Gollancz, £20, hrdbk, 390pp, ISBN 978-1-399-62896-9
This fantasy novel by first-timer Shen Tao came to SF²C Towers with a great deal of publisher advance hype – and I’m pleased to report that on this occasion you can well believe it. The Poet Empress is very good indeed.
The story is set in a fantasy equivalent of China where the ruling dynasty maintain power through poetry magic – translating words into wizardry. With the proper training, the right calligraphy and the correct sensibility, any man (and my use of ‘man’ here is deliberate) can inscribe a poem-spell onto paper for later casting.
But only the royal family also bear a word of power on their own skin, allowing them the use of powerful magic without scrollwork. And blade-magic is the purview of Prince Guan Terren: heir to the throne, scourge of the Emperor’s foes, drunkard, psychopath, mass-murderer. Almost unkillable. This is the man to whom the young peasant girl and protagonist Wei becomes the foremost of his thirty concubines and his Empress-in-waiting.
This is no Cinderella story – Wei ends up in this precarious situation partly through her own determination to better her family’s standing, partly through Prince Terren’s own distaste for women and flouting of court protocol. At first concerned mainly with her own survival in the face of court machinations and the cruelty of her husband-to-be, she gradually finds her feet.
But as she does, Wei realises that for the good of the kingdom (drought-ridden and crumbling) as well as for her own survival, Terren must be killed. Other heirs, like his elder sibling Prince Maro, are available. But only one spell can get past Terren’s magical defences. This poem must be written and cast by someone who truly understands and loves him, at a time when he is at his most vulnerable.
Wei would be the obvious candidate, that is if women were allowed to learn to read or write. How then can such a poem be conceived of?
So, she begins a seemingly impossible mission: achieve literacy, find out why Terren turned out the way he did, sympathise with him, gain his trust and grow to care for him, while also secretly composing a sonnet that slays him. All without being killed in the process – and this book does not stint on the many ways that Wei has to cheat death to achieve her goals. Lucky then, that she has an indefatigable spirit in the face of these challenges and provocations.
While her investigation progresses, we also jump back into the childhood and young adulthood of Terren and Maro. We gradually learn what really happened to them both, and how one became a monster and the other a hypocrite. I won’t give the game away, except to note that there is some truly bad parenting involved.
The Poet Empress is a compelling read, if gruelling in its trawl through the less pleasant end of human behaviour. On the plus side, I cannot fault the relentless momentum of the plot from start to finish. For a book mainly based on court intrigues and poetry, there is no dawdling about, with Wei’s quest giving it a welcome direction and shape.
Wei herself is a masterful creation too – full credit to author Shen Tao – who more or less carries the emotional weight of the book single-handedly and compels you to read on.
As for the bloody side of the story: we are not quite down in the deep end of grimdark. There are shafts of light amid the darkness as well as some genuinely noble characters, Wei foremost among them. But they have difficult choices to make and often bear the brunt of the savagery of others, Wei most of all. The scenes in which she is tortured for suspected literacy, and when she has to take drastic steps to ensure her marriage appears consummated, are particularly intense.
Normally, this level of grand guigno would risk putting me off. It is also hard to go heavy on what you might call ‘human horror’ without losing an element of subtlety and flexibility of tone. Thankfully The Poet Empress does everything else it does so well that it just about carries this off.
Whatever the publisher's marketing campaign might hope for, it’s not quite in the ballpark of Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became The Sun/He Who Drowned The World duology. But it is a very good, if somewhat more conventional, novel using similar cultural and mythical foundations and if you liked one you may well enjoy the other. Go read!
Tim Atkinson
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