Jo Walton's newest novel, Or What You Will, is inventive, original, fantastical in every sense of the word, richly referential, and a fascinating read from start to finish. It tells the story of a story, threading together the biography of award-winning fantasy novelist Sylvia Harrison, facing her own mortality and what she will leave behind, and Sylvia's work in progress, a Shakespeare-influenced fantasy set in an Italian Renaissance world in which she last wrote decades earlier. Both stories weave in and out of one another through the voice of an unnamed impish narrator, Sylvia's imaginary friend and muse. This muse is facing his own mortality along with Sylvia's, since, if someone dies, what happens to the characters trapped inside their minds? Unlike Sylvia, though, our narrator has a plan to avoid mortality altogether.

Walton's splendidly metafictional work takes the architecture of a novel and opens it up for everyone to see. Everything that inspires a character or plot twist or detail of setting, every piece of research that goes into crafting a pseudo-historical fantasy world - it's all laid bare before the reader, with the fantasy novel a translucent film on top of the suddenly visible bones of reality, research, history both personal and global, of literary tropes and personal biases, of all the pieces of reality that feed into even - perhaps especially - the most fantastical of stories.

Late into the book, Walton, via her nameless narrator, describes a pair of portraits which feature cartoons on the reverse side of the canvas. The narrator remarks on the museum’s new display for them, which reveals those reversals, saying, “It’s strange and delightful to see a picture you have seen a thousand times, and suddenly be able to see the secret hidden behind it.”

This is the spirit of Or What You Will: the strange and delightful magic of reading a fantasy book, a story with all the story tropes and character archetypes and world-building conventions so familiar to fantasy readers, and suddenly have it unfold into a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the author’s inner workings, the wealth of research that informs every tiny reference or choice, the realities that inspire the fantasies. Yet Or What You Will is not just a documentary on how a fantasy novelist writes her books, just as the drawings on the portraits’ flip sides are not merely a sketch for the better-known front. It weaves the overt contextualization and exposed structure of real history and “real” author biography in and out of the fantastical, but typical enough for easy recognition, story of dukes and wizards and portal crossings from one world to another. Each is enhanced by the other, the suddenly revealed secret side casting the better-known front in a new, starker, light, and the carefully crafted fantasy rendering what might be the dull history of a city’s paving stones and wall repairs and a bleak personal biography of abuse into a copper-bright piece of magic.

The thread tying these two worlds together, the canvas between them, is the narrative voice, Sylvia’s imaginary friend and muse, the frequently recurring character - her nameless messenger of the gods. His (to arbitrarily select a gender) presence is constant, as he is the narrator, but occasionally forgotten, when the reader is lulled back into the usual feeling of reading a book, passively offered by a non-personalized provider of words. Then he re-emerges, to remind us that he’s always been there - after all, the story is being told, so someone is telling it. When the text directs the reader to “Imagine spending a day there...” that imperative comes from someone. The judgment of “All Italian ingredients are better than ingredients anywhere else,“ the artistic appraisal of a well-described sunset or scoop of gelato, are not somehow objective or universal - there is a voice, and therefore a consciousness, behind it all. This isn’t a new twist Walton came up with for Or What You Will - this is how novels, written in this common narrative voice, work, whether we take that narrative voice for the author, some god or providence in the characters’ world that controls their fates, or this muse of fire, a Greek chorus relating and commenting on the action, but no less present and capable of agency and independent thought for all that.

It’s an approach that I’ve seen more often done in theatre, which is in some ways its natural home (perhaps one reason why the fantasy world in Harrison’s story leans so much on Shakespeare’s oeuvre) and somewhat less frequently in literature, but for a book that so relishes its referential nature, let’s have a few references: Or What You Will is reminiscent of Calvino, of Oyeyemi, of Stoppard and Sondheim (sorry, back to theatre), of Edward Eager in his enthusiastic in-text gratitude toward E. Nesbit, and of every classic fantasy writer you can think of who took some real-world culture or piece of history for their inspiration and spun a yarn that alleges to be fantastical but is inextricably tangled up in all their own real biases and egoism. (For the wry comment on vaguely drawn “exotic” fantasy cultures that smash thousands of years and many disparate cultures into a sketchy realm of magic carpets and sand, this Iranian American reader is grateful.) And Walton knows whereof she writes, since she's as much the highly awarded, famous-in-a-certain-circle fantasy novelist as her on-page surrogate, Sylvia.

Yet Walton is also marvelous at writing reality like it’s fantasy - the unbelievably delicious “wish fulfillment narrative” of Teatro del Sale’s food and function, the world-building offered in real historical details of cities both Italian and Canadian, the escape of a portal fantasy in Sylvia’s move from abuse in Montreal to self-actualisation in Florence. Sometimes reality is fantastic. Sometimes fantasy is based on reality. Maybe, sometimes, through stories, through fantasies, we can leave Plato’s cave and emerge into a world where if a thing is perfect, “they have it there, and they always have,” a world where death comes as a chosen sacrifice, not an arbitrary horror. Where time stands still and perfection persists. Where to exist in a story is to exist forever, read and reread and immortal on the page.

*Thank you to NetGalley & Tor Books for this advance review copy. All quotes in this review were taken from an uncorrected proof and are subject to change upon publication.*