about the narrator of radiant star.
obvious question: who is it? the narration really brings attention to the narrator. it's non-normative to the point of being distracting. hard to avoid asking this.
okay, so if the narration is raising this question for the reader, it needs to be for a reason. both the answer to the question (the identity of the narrator) and the reason the question is being raised (rather than the identity just being told to us in a straightforward way early on in the story) should be serving the story in some way.
interlude to say with many other authors i might stop at this point and go, well, the author just liked this narrative style. she didn't think about it that hard. it's not that deep. but because i've read the raven tower i know this author knows how to do narration. i know she knows how to use style as a tool to serve themes, plot, pacing, &c. and because i know that, i spent the whole book waiting for the mystery of the narrator to pay off. and it did not explicitly obviously pay off for me at the end of the book, but I Want To Believe. so let's make it pay off.
let's talk first about the information we do have about the narrator that could be used to narrow down possible candidates. observations about this narrator:
uses the singular first person (i/me/my rather than we/us/our)
is not ooioiaan, but professes to a personal familiarity with ooioiaa. also is not radchaai but again is personally familiar
addresses the reader directly. the reader is supposed to be neither ooioiaan nor radchaai
has a high degree of knowledge about each of the characters and their actions over the course of the story. knows in detail about an event involving several of the characters that happened days before the radchaai arrived on the planet
is writing centuries after the events of the story (it is able to say "it would be centuries before any governor of Aaa actually dropped any association with the Radchaai, at least in name" (last chapter))
doesn't say anything about the source of their knowledge of the events of the plot. was the narrator there? did they talk to the people involved? we don't know
does at times profess to not knowing something or only being able to speculate. which is very interesting. it would be much easier to handwave and say "how the narrator knows what a character is feeling when they're alone in their apartment is something we're supposed to suspend disbelief over" if the narrator did not explicitly tell us they aren't omniscient. but since the narrator does tell us that, we have to find an answer that explains how the narrator both a) knows the things that they know and b) doesn't know the things that they don't know.
so the narrator must meet two criteria: they must fit the seven observations above, and there must be a compelling reason for the author to choose to tell the story from their perspective specifically. and then also there must be a compelling reason for the author to not tell us that they are the narrator.
i don't think the narrator can be someone completely outside the story, and i will try to explain why. let's say i speculate that the narrator is a scholar or journalist who was in ooioiaa on some kind of field assignment in the aftermath of the radchaai civil war, and they're writing for an audience of folks back home in the non-radch system they originated in. they got their information by conducting extensive interviews with charak, zaved, jonr, niranhin, iono, shtel, justice of albin, and several others. perhaps they even have access to some technology that allows them to experience other people's memories. and let's say keemat's writings (available posthumously along with, or perhaps included in, their manuscript) elucidate much, but not all, of keemat's experience of that period. and somehow this narrator then ended up in a suspension pod for 200 years, giving them knowledge about both the immediate aftermath and centuries later.
okay, such a narrator i think would account for all seven of my observations above. but if this were the narrator...what would be the point? what would the existence of such a narrator bring to the story? AND why would the identity of such a narrator be kept a secret and the reader be made to puzzle it out? is THAT doing anything for the story? i can't think of a way for the answers to these questions to be satisfying, if the narrator is some random external perspective that didn't have anything to do with the people and events with which the story is concerned.
like, you can either have a prologue like "here is my history dissertation. signed, Some Rando" OR you can be all coy about a narrator who we actually do know and should theoretically be able to put together the evidence to identify. but you cannot both be coy AND have the narrator be some rando. not if you are a writer with such a deep understanding of the power of narration as a story tool that you are capable of writing the raven tower. if such a writer is going to draw attention to the narration, it has to be for a reason. not just, "this style is fun to write and read", but a reason that is native to the story, that serves the story, that exemplifies the story. when such a writer throws some narration at me that is waving a flag saying look at me look at me, i'm looking at it, and i have faith that there is going to be a reason she made me look at it. i'm assuming it's going to pay off. and for it to pay off, by the end of the book i have to be able to go "ohhhhh, so that's why the identity of the narrator was such a mystery." and having it be some rando historian does not elicit that reaction.
so then we're looking at existing characters. the only two characters i can think of that would have access to the kind of knowledge the narrator seems to have are justice of albin and the radiant star. this author has previously written books from the perspective of a troop carrier AI and a god, so there's precedent for either. (not that she could not also write a book from the perspective of a brand-new type of entity. she has the range.)
i would need to reread ancillary justice to refresh my memory on what aspects of a non-ancillary's experience a justice has access to - it can read vital signs, but can it read thoughts? and is that only for its officers, or also for annexed populations? and what can ancillaries access when the ship is away? because if the access an ancillary has to the interior experience of humans differs significantly depending on whether it's in contact with its ship-self, then we should be able to trace a change in the quality of the narration (level of detail, or degree of certainty) at the point when the ship leaves the system. or we need some way for the justice to access that information retroactively after it returns. well, we kind of need that anyway, to explain how the narrator knows about jonr's meetings with zaved and niranhin that happened days before the radchaai showed up...
what about the radiant star? we don't know enough about it to say what the bounds of its knowledge are, or if it is capable of observation and of in some way recording its thoughts to share with humans. (maybe it used the intermediary of a savant? a savant who had a shitton of unusually coherent visions?) this would be such a big swing that i feel it would also need to be made explicit if this were the narrator. because how else would we come to understand the significance of having this specific entity be the narrator? we need to know more about both the radiant star itself and about why the hell it would be telling this story to this audience in order for it to be an effective storytelling choice. and there would also need to be some reason for the mystery surrounding the narrator's identity. like, if the story were more concerned with whether the radiant star really exists or is really divine, having the narrator turn out to be the possibly-nonexistent possibly-mundane entity in question would have some bearing on the story. but the story doesn't really care about that. really the only reason i'm even entertaining this is the book's title. which is not sufficient reason.
so i end up thinking the only possible candidate is justice of albin. and then we return to my original questions. if JoA is the narrator, 1) what purpose does it serve to have this particular story told by this particular entity? and 2) what purpose does it serve to hold the identity of the narrator back from the reader? because remember, these questions were raised by the author, by the author's choice to include these asides written in first person to a particular demographic of in-universe readers. if the author is raising these questions, answering them should add something to our understanding of the story she is trying to tell.
justice of albin is an interesting component of the story because the narrator rarely mentions it, yet we can assume it is often present. no part of the story covers anything that happens on the ship when it leaves aaa. the experience of JoA is not given any priority in the narrative. the story does not seem to be about JoA, and it is easy to forget about it altogether, because in a story that shares the interiority of probably dozens of characters, from main characters down to the shopkeeper who sells food to jonr, JoA's internal motivations and reactions are almost a complete black box until the very end - and not in such a way to lead the reader to think, "wow, JoA is sooo mysterious," but rather in such a way that it fades into the background. the experience of JoA might actually be, in retrospect, too deprioritized in comparison to everyone else. if any other character were present as often as JoA, would we know more about them than we do about it? is the narrator keeping back information, just about this one entity? perhaps because it is that entity and it values its own privacy? or because it is trying to be a neutral third party and not inject itself into the situation it wants to report on dispassionately?
OR, perhaps, because it wanted us not to think of JoA as a person, so that we would understand how terrifying that laugh at the end was for the other characters? so that we would have to abruptly adjust our own conception of it as soon as we were given external evidence of its interiority? so that we would then have to sit with our own complicity in not thinking of it as a person before, when we were given what may have seemed like the opposite of evidence of interiority (repeated references to its "flat, expressionless" affect) and only a handful of clues that it does indeed have motivations other than obeying orders (remorse for stealing jonr's collection; stealing the images of radiance and lying about it)? especially when the narrator, in all their little asides to the reader, was so charming, so full of insight and sympathy and irony?
this is to me the best evidence for the identity of the narrator. nothing else comes close to retroactively reframing anything in the way that that laugh does. that would explain why the identity of the narrator was held back - it was to create that moment of recontextualization.
i have two problems with this. 1) i don't know that having this aha moment about ships/ancillaries/AIs/justice of albin being people is really hugely relevant to the themes of this book? like, it's certainly not irrelevant. i think the idea of what a person is (and how oppression interacts with personhood) is relevant in all of leckie's writing. but i don't know that i would say it is the main thing happening here. and 2) i think if you have read the ancillary trilogy, you are already going around thinking of JoA as, like, an analogue to breq. and you surely already think of breq as a person. so it is actually not that shocking to get to this reveal, which defeats the entire purpose of it. and maybe that's why i got to the end of this book and still didn't know who the narrator was...because that wasn't really an aha moment for me. maybe it wasn't supposed to be? maybe it was supposed to be enough for me to see how unnerved the radchaai characters were by it and how incapable they were of wrapping their minds around it. but that wasn't quite enough for me to make the mystery pay off.
or maybe i was supposed to get something else out of JoA being the narrator, but it went over my head? curious if others have thoughts on this.
the last thing i'll mention is the chapter titles, which are presumably (?) chosen by the narrator. another thing that's not revealed until near the end is that each chapter is named after one of the images of radiance. this could i suppose be evidence in favor of the radiant star as narrator, but it seems better evidence for JoA, who, after all, is the one who currently possesses the original version of the images. given the chapters are labeled with the contents of one of its collections, could we also think of the story itself as a collection of JoA's?
