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A review by trilbynorton
Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley
5.0
"We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do."
Crows are among my favourite animals (a fact known by the friend who gifted me a copy of this book), and John Crowley’s novel combines them with another of my favourite things: stories about stories. The eponymous Dar Oakley is a crow living on Bronze Age Europe who finds himself caught up in the burgeoning human civilisation and its propensity to narrativise everything. He gains immortality by (what else?) stealing a shiny during a classic yarn of a trip to the underworld. Then the book follows him as his story weaves through that of humanity, from the rise of Christianity, to the New World, and finally the near future.
As the origin of Dar Oakley’s immortality suggests, this is a book largely concerned with death. Crows are “death-birds”, variously carrion eaters, bad omens, and psychopomps, and the stories Dar Oakley finds himself in reflect our changing attitudes to death and the dead. In the Bronze Age, the dead are honoured and live on in the tales told about them. In the near future, a grim representation of the predicament we currently find ourselves in, the dead are nowhere to be found – in a way, we are the dead.
All of which makes Ka sound like the most depressing book you’ve ever read, which it is not. Crowley’s attention to corvid behaviour, and Dar Oakley’s bemused detachment from human behaviour, lend the book a dry humour which helps to put our unhealthy obsession with death into perspective. Crows live to live, after all. To them, dead is dead.
Crows are among my favourite animals (a fact known by the friend who gifted me a copy of this book), and John Crowley’s novel combines them with another of my favourite things: stories about stories. The eponymous Dar Oakley is a crow living on Bronze Age Europe who finds himself caught up in the burgeoning human civilisation and its propensity to narrativise everything. He gains immortality by (what else?) stealing a shiny during a classic yarn of a trip to the underworld. Then the book follows him as his story weaves through that of humanity, from the rise of Christianity, to the New World, and finally the near future.
As the origin of Dar Oakley’s immortality suggests, this is a book largely concerned with death. Crows are “death-birds”, variously carrion eaters, bad omens, and psychopomps, and the stories Dar Oakley finds himself in reflect our changing attitudes to death and the dead. In the Bronze Age, the dead are honoured and live on in the tales told about them. In the near future, a grim representation of the predicament we currently find ourselves in, the dead are nowhere to be found – in a way, we are the dead.
All of which makes Ka sound like the most depressing book you’ve ever read, which it is not. Crowley’s attention to corvid behaviour, and Dar Oakley’s bemused detachment from human behaviour, lend the book a dry humour which helps to put our unhealthy obsession with death into perspective. Crows live to live, after all. To them, dead is dead.