Natasha Pulley is one of the best and most consistently stunning novelists of our time. Her Watchmaker trilogy is still my favorite (The Bedlam Stacks in particular), but each of her books manages to find a its own voice while still exploring realms just on the edge of a fantastical world.
The Hymn to Dionysus imagines a world where Greek citizens stood side by side with demigods. Phaidros, the protagonist, grew up trained to be a fierce warrior for his people. Helios, his mentor, protector, and father figure is killed in battle due to Phaidros’s own strategic mistake, one he will never forgive himself for. He dedicates the rest of his life to training other young soldiers and protecting his queen and kingdom.
When a drought threatens the kingdom’s survival, the queen negotiates a trade of grain with the wealthy Egyptians. But this coincides with an event no one can explain. Quakes and fires are side-by-side by priests who repeat a single song in another language. Starving refugees from the even drier countryside arrive, adding to the chaos? Is it a meteor strike, a dancing plague, a curse from the gods, or the return of the true prince? Are there answers in the oracles, or the massive automatons only the aristocracy can ask? Or perhaps the young, mischievous Dionysus who has just arrived can help Phaidros and his people before the grain stores are empty.
The marvels were like nothing I’d ever seen. The quantity of bronze was madness. it could have supplied a legion of knights with full armour. The quality of engineering too. It could only have been a message from a queen or king. Nobody else could have commanded anything like the wealth to build these things. Whatever they were saying, it had been important to whoever wanted them built. And it was hard not to feel as thought, for all they were saying words we couldn’t understand, this was what you would make if you weren’t building something for now, but for people living a thousand years after your language had been forgotten. That was the only reason to do this, instead of just carving it on the city walls. If you carved it, you expected someone to be able to read it. … Whatever the marvels were saying, thought, it was a warning. You didn’t build twenty screaming Furies and bury them in a cavern for a once-in-twenty-generations drought to uncover if you were saying anything good. ~Pg. 135
Phaidros slowly realizes that Dionysus is connected to the strange happenings. He is causing green things to grow, despite the drought, and people to experience dreamy confusion. As Phaidros begins to understand Dionysus is not like other people – and perhaps something inhuman – he discovers the depth of his own humanity.
Pulley’s ability to weave reality, history, and fantasy is unmatched. In every book she has written, all of these elements are quietly, perfectly stitched together in such a way as the reader barely realizes the more extraordinary aspects. Just as The Iliad isn’t (really) about the Trojan war, The Hymn to Dionysus is not about an endangered kingdom. It’s about looking at oneself and finding the divine heroism within.
[For Watchmaker fans, Keita Mori doesn’t make an appearance, but the clockwork automatons make one wonder if he hadn’t made a stop in ancient Greece.]
My thanks to Bloomsbury for the review copy.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (March 18, 2025)
Language: English
Hardcover: 416 pages
ISBN-10: 1639732365