Everyone at NUBClub gave a pretty good but not great grade to this novel. The writing was compelling overall and no one had issues with Mengiste's descriptions or prose, so it's a quality book. All of our arguments centered around the plot and what themes Mengiste was explored. To start, most of NUBClub was disappointed that the women warrior concept was presented in such a dark and underwhelming way. We spent a lot of time talking about Hirut as a warrior -- how she wasn't that valorous or successful on the battlefield, and how her bravery and strength primary manifested in her ability to endure under horrific circumstances. A few of us pointed out that in war, that is a real type of success, and that led us to a longer discussion about how Mengiste handled war in the novel. There's simply nothing heroic about it -- it's brutal, random, and thoroughly immoral. This surfaced an interesting theme about representation and storytelling. Mengiste drifts through several ways of understanding the war -- the mythological stories told by the Ethopean people about the brave fighters, Italian soldier Ettore's photos of the war and its crimes (a kind of truth but also something staged), the emperor's impotent fantasies of his country from exile, and the actual narration of the day-to-day betrayals and cruelty -- and that to us had an interesting synergy with the concept of the shadow king itself, the false figure that inspires but only when not seen clearly. We also talked a lot about our dissatisfaction with the characters' relationships and ethics. Some of us were very critical that Hirut doesn't ever form a connection with her former master Aster even when they are both imprisoned after fighting alongside each other, and many of us questioned what the connection was supposed to be between Ettore and Hirut. Where we supposed to understand their struggles as comparable? Was Hirut's abuse and rape by her commander Kidane equivalent to Ettore and his family's persecution as Jews despite Ettore's service to the army? A few of us found Ettore reprehensible for not doing more with the photos of war crimes or acting more to resist Italian abuses, and thought the comparison was fundamentally flawed. Others thought that they were similar, in the sense that Mengiste was painting a world where heroic leaders were actually petty tyrants who simply abused their own people. We also posited that perhaps the trauma was so deep and constant in this world that no one could form meaningful connections, even if they should have. All of this brought us to consider The Shadow King as an extremely cynical expose of the falsity of national myth and the depth of the horror of violence, and that theme seemed strong, if very dissatisfying to many of us, because many of us just ended up feeling alienated and detached from everyone in the novel as a result. This dissatisfaction hit all of us the hardest in the conclusion when Hirut has a delusion of seeing the true emperor and still wants to serve him. Hirut still falling for that myth was just unbelievable to many of us, and distasteful to those who thought it made sense given the very dark themes. Overall, The Shadow King is not a bad book. It's a very bleak one, and one which many of us didn't think was worth the suffering and pain to read. We couldn't argue with the writing and the themes seem consistent and interesting, but it's just not a very humane or redeeming read.
