Reading the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize Shortlist - Mammoths At The Gates
Nghi Vo - Mammoths at the Gates
- Publisher – Tordotcom
- Published – 2023
- Price – £12.99 hardback | £8.99 Kindle
In the past 12 months I've attended the funerals of my father and my stepfather. I didn't know either man particularly well - my father because I chose not to speak to him for the past 18 years or so, and my stepfather because my mother remarried after I had already left home, and I didn't see either of them as often as I should. I've been to many funerals over the years, but those two were among the strangest, as I listened to stories I had never heard about men I probably should have known better.
Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle is all about stories. What starts as a simple tale of a Cleric travelling the land and speaking to the people they encounter to learn its history (The Empress of Salt and Fortune) soon asks us to think about the ways in which the same stories can change dramatically depending on the teller (When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain) before reflecting on the fact that we can never really know everything there is to know about a person, and can never hear their whole story (Into The Riverlands). It's a story that unfolds slowly over the course of the books, always taking its time, never rushing to get to where it's going.
Where it's going is, it transpires, home. In Mammoths At The Gates we finally get to see the Singing Hills that we've heard of so many times but no nothing about. In all of our journeys with them, we've never really learned anything about who Chih is or where they came from. We've spectated as they learned new stories, or as they recounted the stories of others, but we've never heard their story - something I hadn't thought about until this book began, but which Into The Riverlands was pointing directly at.
Each of the books in the cycle takes a different approach to storytelling and how its frames the tale, and Mammoths is no different. For the first half of the novella we don't see Chih in pursuit of any new stories at all. Instead we follow them closely as they return home, as they chafe against the way the once familiar has become strange in their absence, as they contend with the fact that you can never leave anywhere in stasis. Life goes on for those you leave behind - and, in some cases, it comes to and end. Cleric Chih returns to find that their mentor is dead, and that death means that your past finally gets to catch up with you. Chih is caught between the traditions of the life the late Cleric Thien chose for themselves, and the traditions and demands of the family that they left behind to choose that life. And amidst all of this they have to find a way to manage their own grief and the grief of the one who knew Thien the best.
Vo's prose has always been fantastic, and it's at its most beautiful here. Mammoths At The Gates contains the strongest writing of the series to date, unmarred by the very few issues that I had with some of the earlier books (namely that I don't feel her action scenes work particularly well, which isn't a problem here). Chih, no longer allowed to hide behind the stories they've collected, finally steps into the spotlight as a character with depths of their own, and the emotional core that runs through all of these books is even more resonant now that we get to experience it first-hand rather than through someone's retelling. The final moments are the most moving of the whole series.
Mammoths At The Gates feels quite different to the other books in the Cycle, at least initially, but I think it's much stronger in every conceivable way - and I say this knowing that The Empress of Salt and Fortune was one of my favourite reads last year, and that yesterday I said When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain is one of my favourites this year. Where the others were books about stories, this is a book about grief - not just for the departed, but for your own past and the person you once were, the grief of coming home and finding it changed, grief for the futures that could have been but weren't - and it's beautiful. In some ways it feels like the first three books were just building up to this point, and that this is the book Vo has been leading us to all along. I know that there is another book in the series after this one, and I suspect that Vo has more in the pipeline, but if the Cycle were to end here this would be an incredible closing chapter for it.
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