The Raven Tower (Leckie)

This is an engaging read with interesting characters, a well-thought out world, and an unusual narrative voice. Minor spoilers follow.

I see this frequently referred to as a Hamlet retelling, but it isn't, quite, and it is carefully structured to support other older stories.

Generalized to a level which matches the novel, the Hamlet story tells of a young man who came home to find that his father was missing or dead - presumed dead, at least - and that his father's killer, a close relative, had now taken over his father's position. He takes his revenge, but the consequences are not good...

Hamlet is not original in its bare bones. The basic story of Hamlet is essentially the story of Orestes; it is what Shakespeare makes of the details which differentiates it. (And the Hamlet story's claim to originality before Shakespeare, in Saxo Grammaticus and Kyd, seems to be the subplot of shamming mad (as W. S. Gilbert had it[1]).)

Joyce perceived an isomorphism between Hamlet and the Telemachiad as well, and built it into Ulysses. So that's two classical ancestors of Hamlet.

Variants continue to be popular. Cabell had a version hearking back to the older version of the story (not that Cabell was precisely popular in that retelling). Lewis makes a form of the situation the springboard of a very different plot. Stoppard gives us a cross between Shakespeare and Beckett. Disney makes it a beast fable and gives it a happy ending.

Leckie's story is about as close to the Choephoroi as it is to Hamlet. No remarrying of his mother; the parallels to Horatio, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern all can be generally spotted but have different characterizations and narrative functions. The prince is more impulsive and less philosophical. Events unfold accordingly. It's still an effective story, but it is not the poised and melancholy story of Hamlet.

On the other hand: once there was another story about a man who was betrayed and had his freedom taken from him. Eventually he escapes and brings vengeance on those who were his enemies...

This has no major classical antecedent, but the idea is very old. Odysseus' homecoming, killing the suitors who gave been wasting his property and threatening his family, has elements of it. The Joseph story is an averted form of it, with reconciliation replacing revenge. Perhaps its greatest form in English is Samson Agonistes.

The archetypal version of it is quite late: The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas takes full advantage of the possibilities of the device using a long and tortuous plot to build up to a climactic recognition scene. From there, the device passed into melodrama.

Leckie's novel follows this pattern as well, but with a couple of small twists, coordinated so that the climax of the Hamlet/Orestes plot meshes with that of the Monte Cristo plot, and the book ends with an echo of Samson.

The structural echoes do not end there, however. There is yet another story that shapes the book, more a fairy-story than a myth: that of the person or, sometimes, family or tribe, who manage to take captive a supernatural being, and derive benefit from it, for a while. (This is a special case of the general warning: do not call up what you cannot dismiss, the sorcerer's apprentice moral.) This never ends happily, either because the benefits they receive are themselves two-edged or because eventually their source of magical support gets free, with predictable consequences.

It's not until late in the book that this plot comes to the fore, and its actual climax is a little beyond the end of the story, though perhaps more effective for being anticipated rather than seen.

[1]Some men hold
That he’s the sanest, far of all sane men–
Some that he’s really sane but shamming mad–
Some that he’s really mad but shamming sane–
Some that he will be mad, some that he was
Some that he couldn’t be. But on the whole
(As far as I can make out what they mean)
The favorite theory’s somewhat like this
Hamlet is idiotically sane,
With lucid intervals of lunacy.