Book Review: "Iron Widow" weaves disparate concepts together to form a compelling whole
*contains mild spoilers for Iron Widow*
On the surface, mixing concepts like Pacific Rim and The Handmaid’s Tale shouldn’t work as a novel. Or as anything. But in their debut novel Iron Widow, author Xiran Jay Zhao shows that a story with enough conviction and truth behind it can not only manage to work, but can also flourish.
Based very loosely on the story of China’s only female Emperor Wu Zeitan, Iron Widow tells the story of Zeitan, a teenage peasant girl living on the frontier of Huaxia, a country that has spent centuries at war with the monstrous Hunduns on the other side of the Great Wall.
The war, however, is not fought by soldiers in the traditional sense, but by pilots. Mecha pilots to be precise. Channeling their qi and an inner strength called “spirit pressure” these pilots - always male - command, control and in essence become their vehicles, known as Chrysalises. But they do not pilot alone. Each is paired with a woman known as a concubine-pilot, whose purpose is to act as a soothing support while the men fight.
Zeitan’s sister Ruyi was one such concubine-pilot, having enlisted for the good of her family, and for the money it would provide them, even though concubine-pilots hardly ever survive. But when she is killed outside of battle, Zeitan makes it her mission to enlist as well, find the pilot responsible and kill him in revenge.
Knowing very little about the book beyond the basic premise, I expected this to occupy the vast majority of the plot, especially considering the weight given to both Zeitan’s desire for revenge and to Yang Guang, the pilot responsible for killing her sister. However in an interesting twist, this murder plot of hers is not the climax of the story, but its catalyst instead.
Within the first few chapters, Yang Guang is dead and the army realizes that Zeitan is far more powerful than any of them had given her credit for. She is dubbed “The Iron Widow” owing to her immense spirit pressure and for surviving where her male pilot did not, and paired off with a new pilot, Li Shimin, “The Iron Demon”, who is among their most powerful pilots but is also volatile and dangerous. A murderer with a past.
I love him already.
A Chrysalis of the type that Zeitan and Shimin must operate will only function well if the two pilots are in sync, something that the two of them most certainly are not. It is only when they begin to get to know each other, and to delve into the damage and pain that the other has suffered that they truly begin to come to an understanding. Adding tension and a truly unexpected twist to their burgeoning dynamic is Gao Yizhi, the boy from back home that Zeitan is in love with.
The setting of this book is fantastic, both familiar and unfamiliar. It occupies that kind of atemporal place in time that is neither clearly in the past, nor is it the sort of future commonly seen in science fiction. Rather, it feels organic and rooted in a near-past Earth history, while also possessing technological advances and concepts about on par or slightly beyond what exists now. Except for the Chrysalises of course. Those are pure sci-fi.
In their author’s note, Zhao notes that the book is a celebration of Chinese culture and a critique of what they call “its worst beliefs”. While the celebration is evident in things like the setting, the fashion, the friendships and love, anything that makes the world feel lived in, it is the critique - namely the treatment of women - that stands out most prominently in the text.
(Note: I, like Zhao, acknowledge that misogyny is not restricted to any one location or culture, and in no way do I mean to imply that in engaging with this text.)
Much of the story hinges on the perception by the men in power that the function of women is to live in service to the men around them. That they are by nature weaker, less powerful, and not in possession of the same wants and needs as the men are. Second class citizens in every sense of the word. Iron Widow is the story, then, of one girl openly defying such restrictions and seizing for herself the kind of life she wants, while trying to change the whole system at the same time.
The delivery of this central thesis hit some of the stumbling blocks expected in a debut novel. Zeitan challenges men’s assumptions about women either out loud or in her narration. When done as dialogue, it worked just fine and was perfectly in keeping with her character. As narration however, the delivery at times felt a little too meta-textual, as if these weren’t thoughts Zeitan was having, but something the author was explicitly telling me, the reader. Many such realizations for Zeitan - regarding gender roles, or same sex relationships for instance - have the appearance of being long-held beliefs, while also seeming to just occur to her in the heat of the moment, which was a little confusing at times, and contributed to the feeling that this was more for the audience than for any character in the book.
What I found most interesting in this examination of the pervasiveness of misogyny within a culture was the dynamic between Zeitan and the other women in the book. Too often, in real life, women facing this kind of oppression are expected to present a united front, to all tackle the injustice they face in the same direct way, and to dismantle the patriarchal structure until it crumbles. And while the book does not suggest a passive approach in the slightest, it does do an excellent job of showing the different ways women choose to make a stand, while underlining the tragedy of those who feel they have no choice nor power to change their circumstances.
But in and among the giant robots, the war, and the dismantling of the patriarchy, there is my favourite part of any story: the romance.
By the basic setup alone - Zeitan being partnered to Shimin while Yizhi hangs around - the romance looks like a fairly standard YA love triangle. But Zhao manages to avoid this pitfall in both an emotionally resonant and organic way. As Zeitan points out, the triangle is the strongest shape. The romance seems almost secondary to the sort of love and understanding that unites the three characters to each other. Each of them has suffered at the hands of the society they live in, and each is as invested in the healing of their friends as they are in their own healing.
Overall, Iron Widow is a lush, compelling read where the action starts early and moves at a breakneck pace throughout. Because of that, I found myself wishing it was about a hundred pages longer, purely because of how full it is. There are so many concepts, and plots and moving parts that I wish each had been given just a little more time to really breathe and expand. But then, I think it’s a sign we have a winner on our hands when the reader comes away just wanting more.
Iron Widow is out September 21, 2021, and is available for preorder now.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for an advance copy for review purposes.