A Review of Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts through Water (Del Rey, 2022)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

 

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Uttara Rangarajan 

So, first off: I am the biggest fan of Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds, so much so, I was a little bit scared to pick up his second publication. Would it be just as good? Well, we can put that question to rest because Jimenez has produced a startlingly immersive. sophomore novel called The Spear Cuts through Water (Del Rey, 2022). I call it “startling,” because it’s so different from the first novel in terms of form and content. Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “The people suffer under the centuries-long rule of the Moon Throne. The royal family—the despotic emperor and his monstrous sons, the Three Terrors—hold the countryside in their choking grip. They bleed the land and oppress the citizens with the frightful powers they inherited from the god locked under their palace. But that god cannot be contained forever. With the aid of Jun, a guard broken by his guilt-stricken past, and Keema, an outcast fighting for his future, the god escapes from her royal captivity and flees from her own children, the triplet Terrors who would drag her back to her unholy prison. And so it is that she embarks with her young companions on a five-day pilgrimage in search of freedom—and a way to end the Moon Throne forever. The journey ahead will be more dangerous than any of them could have imagined.”

 

This novel’s longer than most, so the plot description here can only do so much. It does a reasonably good job, but what it cannot describe is the discursive mode. This novel has one of the most unique storytelling approaches I’ve ever read. There is a form of second person address that I haven’t seen used in the way Jimenez does. Somehow it toggles between second and third person in a way that is sometimes brokered by tactical line breaks and the use of italics. The second person narrative conceit becomes increasingly intertwined with what can best be described as the main diegetic story level, the one that is essentially a quest plot. It will take about four hundred pages for the second person “frame” to become fully enmeshed with the diegetic level. We know, as readers, that there is a kind of theater taking place in which the audience, who includes the “you” protagonist, is watching the events unfold. These events involve Jun, Keema, and the god, who are on their way to vanquish the Three Terrors. But, the “you” protagonist, if I’m understanding correctly (and please feel free to turn away here because it could be a minor spoiler), is related to the characters in the novel, as the “you” seems to be a distant descendant. At one point, Jun and Keema even move into the space of the theater and briefly interact with the “you” and then return back into the diegetic fictional plane, where the novel bears out the plot.

 

I think what makes this book so extraordinary is this form of narration, which not only involves this “you” protagonist but necessarily and always implicates its implied readers, precisely because the “you” can be conflated with the reading subject, who is continually and also being hailed. As we “become” part of the story as well, we gain more and more investments, even if the story itself seems so different from our reality. After all, there are talking tortoises and god-like powers that are manifested once characters literally eat parts of the divinely-imbued subjects. Nevertheless, at its core, this story is one about our inheritances and our mythologies and how we derive power and stability from knowing more about our past. In this respect, I do think Jimenez has written a masterful allegory about immigration and the need to acknowledge our forebears and to know our histories, however complicated and speculative they may seem. A truly original and enthralling work of fantasy.

 

Buy the Book Here

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