“When everyone has a story of loss to tell, nothing is worthy of the grand title of tragedy. Each tale contributes only to a mound of sadness: heaped. Unclimbable, the stories slowly bleeding into each other until they are impossible to tell apart. Brother, sister, father, daughter. Mother. Piled high, the mound getting bigger. I had no wish to add to it, so I did not talk about my personal losses every night, in the main hall, by the glow of the stone hearth. For some, the repetition of the names of the victims of this war were all they lived for. They grew tiresome in their desire to hear the names aloud. I avoided them, when I could.”

Since the 2014 publication of The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley has written some of the most exciting modern genre fiction published. Each of her novels and novellas has been a masterful exploration of the power of narrative to shape our perception, to literally build the worlds we live in. Each one also somehow manages to be more ambitious and mindbending than the last. The Misheard World continues this tradition. It’s a remarkable work about language and how the act of storytelling is always inherently political. Set in the midst of a destructive war, it’s also an exploration of how the stories we tell, what we choose to remember and how we choose to share those stories, is a crucial part of how we deal with grief and process trauma. It’s also Whiteley’s most formally ambitious novel to date. She is no stranger to using unreliable narrators to create complex works that invite interpretation, but The Misheard World puts her in the league of Christopher Priest and Gene Wolfe in terms of authors who can completely pull the rug from underneath you and make you see what you just read in an entirely different light. 

It’s going to be difficult to write this review without recourse to spoilers, but I will do my best, because the various twists in The Misheard World are Whiteley’s to reveal, and part of the joy of the novel is the incredible skill with which she pulls them off. The novel’s primary protagonist is Elize Janview, a soldier from the city of Droad. Droad was destroyed in a brutal attack, wiping out the life Janview grew up with and plunging the North and the South into a bitter war. She joined the army for revenge, but has been relegated to guard duties in the South’s impenetrable fortress of Crag. But everything changes for her when the legendary Marius Mondegreen, the Misheard Word,magician and agent of the North, is delivered to Crag in a wooden box. Janview is recruited to witness Mondegreen’s interrogation by the Allynx Syld, beautiful and cruel socialite of the South turned spymaster and interrogator. The Allynx Syld believes that Mondegreen knows the secret that will finally bring an end to the war. The rules are that she must listen, remember everything the Syld and Mondegreen say, and report it to Warden Beck, but never participate in the discussion itself lest Mondegreen use his remarkable powers on her to affect his escape. But the more she listens to the Syld’s and Mondegreen’s bizarre stories and verbal fencing, the more Janview finds the very perspective that grounds her in danger of falling apart.

This is where the novel starts at least, before it leads the reader through a genuinely destabilising series of twists and turns. One gets the sense reading The Misheard World of a master at work – every word, every image, every nested story is chosen with surgical precision. Her sleights of hand are as impressive as Mondegreen’s – you feel safe in the knowledge that you have understood the import of a particular scene, only for Whiteley to casually and devastatingly reveal the hidden meaning underneath multiple chapters later. As with Gene Wofle’s The Book Of The New Sun, one is left feeling at the end that the only rational response is to reread the whole book in light of the new information revealed. And as with Wolfe’s writing, you could find yourself reading a different book each time you revisit it. The elision between the Misheard World of the novel’s title and the Misheard Word, Mondegreen’s self-chosen title, is entirely intentional – misunderstood or reinterpreted words open up entirely different worlds of understanding.

All this might make The Misheard World sound like an exercise in clinical paratextual construction. Nothing could be further from the truth. The novel is about the impossibility of dealing with grief, what it’s like trying to survive in a world where atrocities keep piling up on top of each other, rendering your own personal loss invisible. It’s also directly about the forces of capitalism that breed such atrocities for their entirely selfish and inhuman reasons, the unfeeling brutality of a system that literally gambles on people’s lives and suffering. Janview is one of many broken people trying to make some kind of sense out of living under these conditions, finding community and meaning where she can. Are Mondegreen and the Syld capable of these feelings, or have their complex machinations and devious plans for the world removed them so far from this experience of common humanity that they’re no longer really human? Whiteley’s novel provides no easy answers, but it does force the reader to reflect in their own complicity in the horrendous levels of human suffering we are all living through at the moment. 

The Misheard World is a triumph of speculative fiction. Its complicated narrative games serve to demonstrate the ways in which the stories we tell can be used and misused to construct the worlds we live in. It also suggests the ways in which storytelling can be an act of resistance. If the stories we tell shape the world around us, then telling better stories, fuelled by empathy and understanding, might just help us find a way out of this incredible mess we’re in. Whiteley’s written some incredible books, but this one might just be her most urgent and powerful as well as her most ambitious. The Misheard World is a novel that will rewire your brain, and if you’re lucky, it just might save your life. If we don’t see it on the awards shortlists next year, something will have gone terribly wrong.

The Misheard World is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org