He Who Drowned The World

By Shelley Parker-Chan
Historical fantasy/Mantle/Paperback/487 pages/$32/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3uK3vm7)
4 stars

How does a lowly monk become emperor of China? It sounds improbable, yet this is the extraordinary true story of Zhu Yuanzhang, whose journey from nobody to the founder of the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century is one of the most astronomical ascents in history.

To this already incredible tale, add one more ingredient: What if Zhu were, in fact, born a girl?

Shelley Parker-Chan’s gender-bending duopoly began with She Who Became The Sun (2021), a New York Times bestseller that won the British Fantasy Award.

It was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Parker-Chan the first Australian author to be nominated for the prestigious prize.

She Who Became The Sun explores Zhu’s early years as a nameless orphan, who steals her dead brother’s identity and begs her way into a monastery.

When the monastery burns down, she joins an army and winds up leading it through a series of tactical miracles. What starts out as the sheer will to survive anything evolves into a hunger to conquer everything.

Parker-Chan’s sequel is as gripping – and a whole lot grimmer.

It picks up in 1356 after Zhu has been crowned the Radiant King. She possesses the Mandate of Heaven – a mark of ruling potential that manifests as a coloured flame, along with the ability to see ghosts – but she is not the only one.

There is, for instance, Wang Baoxiang, the Prince of Henan, a civil servant at the Mongol-led Yuan court whose scholarly mien masks a deadly ambition.

Zhu, meanwhile, has an unexpected ally – the eunuch general Ouyang, who has turned against the Mongols he once served to avenge his father’s death at the hands of the Great Khan.

Ouyang is Zhu’s clear narrative foil. She has suppressed her femininity in her quest for power, though she reverts to it when it is useful to her.

He, castrated as a child, has developed a poisonous hatred for his emasculated body. Both have committed unspeakable betrayals in their respective quests for power and vengeance.

Their toxic dynamic crackles in a narrative that bristles with profoundly awful personalities. The brutality and backstabbing here rival the HBO series House Of The Dragon (2022 to present).

Parker-Chan nimbly interweaves heart-in-throat battlefield sequences with vicious palace intrigue.

The novel takes a while to gather its disparate strands, but once it hits its stride, the twists just keep coming.

Plenty of hands get chopped off. People mutilate themselves and one another with abandon. Every time you think a character has hit rock bottom, another will find a way to crawl deeper into moral depravity.

Yet, none of the narrators, however despicable, is ever utterly unsympathetic. One of the most fascinating points of view is that of Madam Zhang, one of Zhu’s enemies.

A former courtesan who has risen to become the ruthless Queen of Salt, Madam Zhang both suffers and inflicts immense cruelty. She has cultivated a remarkable habit of dissociation. “That’s my body,” she thinks during a sex scene, “but my body isn’t me.”

He Who Drowned The World is an intense deconstruction of gender, sexuality and biological determinism. Zhu’s strength lies in how she can recognise all of these as constructs and so transcend them, building a destiny other than that dictated by the body she was born with.

What she desires is to remake the world as she would remake herself. As the novel hurtles towards its bloody conclusion, one is forced to contemplate if the cost of those desires is more than a single body can withstand.

If you like this, read: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (Penguin Teen, 2021, $23.89, Amazon SG, amzn.to/411HE5J), a high-octane dystopia in which historical Chinese rulers are reimagined as giant alien-fighting mecha pilots. Male pilots typically drain the minds of the girls they are paired with, but 18-year-old Wu Zetian proves so powerful that she kills her male partner instead, elevating herself to the rare rank of Iron Widow. As her battlefield prowess makes her a controversial celebrity, she sets out to undo the entire system.