Shadows Upon Time - Christopher Ruocchio

Well, this is it. The final book in the Sun Eater series from Christopher Ruocchio. Shadows Upon Time. Its been a long time coming, and has a lot of expectations to live up to. And, you know what, for the most part it does a great job of meeting or even surpassing those expectations! It's the end of our journey with Hadrian Marlowe, sometime aristocrat, sometime arena fighter, sometime military commander, occasional agent for a universal force of creation, and a proud father.  That journey has been...eventful. Full of spiritual revelations and physical torments,  full of friendships, many of which ended in bloody circumstances. Full of comrades-in-arms, and the love (and loathing) of family, adopted and otherwise. Hadrian has been a busy boy, but his end, or at least the end of his story, is finally here. I've been trying to get people to read this series since way back in 2018 , and I'm unashamedly enthusiastic about the world and the characters, so seeing the end of the line is, for me, bittersweet. 

Still! We're here to talk about if the book is any good or not. And, perhaps surprising no-one reading this...yes, I think it is, actually. Equally unsurprisingly, I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you're already up-to-date on the series. This is the conclusion of thousands of pages of world-building, character relationships and Deep Lore(tm); if you walk into this book with no idea what's going on, you're not going to have a good time. Stop. Go and read Empire of Silence instead, and come back when you've caught up. OK? The rest of you....look, I assume you're here because you're fans. You stuck with it through the more esoterically spiritual pieces, and the occasional bouts of misery and torture, and all the way through blowing up a bunch of cool stuff, and the end of the story of more than one of your favourite secondary characters. And you want to know whether Ruocchio sticks the landing, or if you're going to be yelling about this series at your friends next time you're out for a beer, and declaring the whole thing to be bullshit.

I can't speak for you, but I have been talking about this book over beer, but only to tell people that it's a damn fine wrap up to the series. So yay!

We get more Hadrian Marlowe here. A man who has suffered deep loss, made into an avatar for forces, for lives, for singularities whose essential nature he struggles with, from time to time. A metaphor for faith? I think so, yes. As Marlowe struggles to accept his own place in things, the sacrifices that his role demands from both those around him and himself, one can see a metaphor for the divine. Well, it's not quite a metaphor, since Marlowe reaches out for that idea quite explicitly, at one point having a discussion about divinity with one of his comrades-in-arms, trying to map from his Absolute onto their understanding of the world. There's shades of C.S. Lewis here, and it can be a bit heavy-handed in the prose, but I found Hadrian's internal struggle with the idea of his responsibility as an avatar of everything to be quite compelling. The effort to show us his journey through the liminal, secular spaces and into a more tranquil understanding of his own truth pays off because it's been built over the entire series - we've seen the man Marlowe is now, built form the ground up. It still feels like a bit much, a bit on the nose, but I can see what Ruocchio is reaching for in the story he's trying to tell, and it mostly works, and when it does, it's a powerful story of self-discovery and spiritual and mental change. And to be fair, if it sometimes feels a little preachy, it's not only that. Hadrian remains a compelling, flawed protagonist, an unreliable narrator seemingly often uncomfortable in the role he finds himself playing. And that shines through, it gives him some, well, humanity as a protagonist. If he's a hero, of sorts, out of legend, he's also a man trying to figure out what is right, and indomitable in his desire to see his duty done.

And the world. Well, the universe really. It's been built over the course of the series, a cavalcade of distinct cultures, mostly human (or...human approximate), with some deeply alien aliens thrown in for good measure. It's a rich tapestry, with a history lurking in the background that I'd love to hear more about, but what we *have* promises stories on top of tall tales on top of legends. And you can see that universe shift and twist and change as the story comes to a close, things are fundamentally different, things will never be the same, and the consequences of that, the ripples of that all feel real.

And the story...I'm not going to speak to it more than I already have, but I will say that it has some vicious emotional lows, and some wonderful highs. There's passion and truth and joy and more than a splash of sorrow in there, and it's going to make you feel for sure. And the ending...well, I think it works. I think Hadrian's story ends how he'd want it to, and not least because he's the one apparently writing his own story. This has been a fiercely human, thoughtful, explosive journey, and the end is fiery, honest, and compelling. Go, read it - you won't regret it.