OR WHAT YOU WILL

Through the experiences of a novelist and her character, this fantasy explores the boundaries between life and death, fantasy and reality, creator and created, and intriguingly blurs the borders between each.

The novelist in question is Sylvia Katherine Harrison, who shares some, but decidedly not all, qualities with her author. But the narrator/protagonist of the story is a nameless, protean, pansexual character who has played a role in much of her fiction. This being persuades and assists Sylvia, who is slowly dying from cancer, to craft an escape from mortality via Illyria, a fictional realm she built in previous novels and which draws upon Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night as well as the best aspects of Renaissance Italy. As Sylvia writes a new novel concerning two 19th-century visitors from our world who presage change for the beautiful, magical, but essentially static society of Illyria, the narrator also helps her process the difficult parts of her past. If she can come to accept the strength of her fictional world as well as her own deepest truths, sourced in her damaging relationships with an impossible-to-please mother and an abusive first husband, she and her character may be able to fully transcend worlds. Walton continues to indulge an obsession with the two real-life Renaissance philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who appeared in different forms in her Thessaly trilogy and her previous novel, Lent (2019). They seem to represent the power that mind and will could potentially have over what we perceive of as the physical universe. (They also apparently serve nearly the same function for Walton in her creative process as this book’s narrator does for Sylvia.) Despite pondering the foundations of reality itself, the book doesn’t have quite the philosophical heft of those prior works. Instead, this is a deeply personal work and a charming love letter to Florence.

Odd, thought-provoking, and charming, with an emotional gut punch: quintessential Walton.