Another mammoth instalment in a series which really shouldn't be as good as it is; given the way it jumps from sword lesbians to the pitiless machinery of colonialism to catastrophe averted by the power of trust, I sometimes found myself wondering, why does this not feel more jarring? Baru Cormorant, her name still inexplicably amputated from the UK title, has a plan to bring down Falcrest, the empire which slowly and sneakily took over her homeland, constricted its people within pitiless definitions of sin and hygiene. Except it's a plan which she doesn't entirely know herself, and which will soon go out of the window anyway, because one of the series' great strengths is the way that just as in real life, the other characters don't politely wait around for the protagonist to enter the scene – they have their own agendas, working against her or with nary a thought for her, which intersect and interfere and generally get in the way. Meaning it probably wasn't ideal how long it took me to get through this, or that as much as I abhor the more Luddite excesses of anti-ebook rhetoric, there is definitely a length of novel past which I prefer a nice hefty chunk of paper. So yes, there were times where I was damned if I could remember which side(s) a particular character was on, affecting to be on, unwittingly aiding...but for the most part, even if I couldn't readily recall the why of a particular reversal, I was still having fun, and that's the main thing, isn't it? If fun is quite the word for a story with this many tumours and lobotomies. Indeed, you could see in the growths which give the Cancrioth their terrible power, or the unwieldy gigantism of their mighty ship the Eternal, something of a synecdoche for the books in which they appear.

Signalling its deep resistance to neatness, The Tyrant opens on a flashback within a flashback, and the sentiment "She'd done it. She'd succeeded catastrophically." This is in keeping with the knack the series has always shown for lines which you wish weren't so pithy and quotable, because in any decent world there would be no occasion to quote them, and one could happily shut them away upon finishing the latest volume:
"Falcrest has cut your people, cut off lips and balls and fingers and tongues, and you cannot get justice. You cannot wait for history to turn in your favor. But at least there is revenge, which is like justice the way saltwater is like fresh."
Or:
"Cancer is the aristocracy of the body. It captures the means of production for its own use. It convinces the body to serve it, and delivers nothing in return. If it grows too much it brings the whole body down."
At one point here, Dickinson even takes a brief and unaccustomed step into the meta, offering the following conversation:
"We should sell this as a novel, shouldn't we?"
"But it's all true."
"Exactly why it should be a novel! The frame of fiction allows the reader to...adjust their comfort. If they want to trim away a few of the more extreme points, write them off as artistic exaggeration, well, we give them permission. And if they want to imagine things went further, that we are hiding the juicy bits...well, we equip them to imagine."
(Though, while I'm sure AO3 would offer multiple examples to the contrary, I'm not quite sure where we'd imagine more. Despite her many crimes, betrayals and mutilations, only two-thirds of the way through this third volume in the series does Baru get turned down for the first time in her life)

The main engine of the story remains an impending renewal of the clash between Falcrest and the Mbo – nations nicely pitched to broadly stand in for the Western colonial powers and the colonised of our own world, without ever mapping directly enough to make proceedings a cheap allegory. Also, I suspect, they allow Dickinson to get away with more. In recent years I've seen the label of 'anti-colonialism' applied with apparent sincerity to the Aztecs and, even more spectacularly, to a Moorish slaver fighting against the Reconquista. Here, though, no faction is saintly; Falcrest may have plans of trade and, through trade, conquest, but the Mbo also plan assimilation, albeit in an ostensibly less aggressive fashion: "We do not want! We give, and we are satisfied! Falcrest will come to us to get what they want, and we will bind them to us, and in the end they will be Mbo, too!" And when places do throw off the yoke of Falcrest rule, the results are as mixed as they've been in our own world. Baru all the time witnessing the excesses and atrocities committed in the empire's name and the name of overthrowing it, and trying desperately to find a way to bring down an empire without murdering millions and immiserating more.
(It was perfect/awkward timing that I rewatched Life Of Brian while reading this, meaning a couple of scenes here did get the mental shorthand of 'What has Falcrest ever done for us?')

That's the macro level. At the micro, we get all sorts. There's impostor syndrome: Baru, having become one of Falcrest's Cryptarchs while still pretty much feeling like she's winging it, meets their mystical cancer cult opposite numbers and realises that on some level, they are too: "This man was one of the immortal Cancrioth, secret rulers of the thousand-year Mbo? He seemed just as bewildered and petty as any duke of Aurdwynn." Though I suppose that has its macro implications too: given the way conspiracy theories have curdled lately, I do feel it important that if a modern fictional plot has conspiracy elements, the secret rulers of the world should nonetheless still ultimately be shown as a clueless shambles. The really scary ones, of course, being the ones who don't know they don't know. An increasing component here is the ideological struggle between Falcrest's Cryptarchs, which very cleverly avoids lapsing into 'they're all the same', or 'this faction are just a slightly tamer version of that one'. Rather, there are two completely different philosophies jockeying for power – but they're both awful. And yet, also presented in such a way that, rather than being caricatures, one can understand how they seduce people:
'"I want to describe everything in a sentence, of course." His calligraphic face relaxed with the thought of it, became clean and easily read, and the word upon it was joy. "How else am I going to change the letters and numbers, one by one, until I find a way to make everything work right?"'

And so the plates keep spinning, enemies making common cause, further would-be subversives unveiled to the extent that in places I thought it would go full Man Who Was Thursday – though set against that, always the uneasy question: if the faces beneath grow to fit the masks anyway, how is that distinct from the triumph of the Masquerade? The masks which define Falcrest's establishment, of course, feeling every bit as horribly topical as they did when I read the previous volume in 2020. Then, it wasn't conceivable that the book had been retooled to fit the times. A year on...well, who can guess whether the world-ending plague was always bat-borne? Whether we always had the scene in which a complacent fool insists handwashing will see it off? Certainly, at its bleakest The Tyrant feels very 2020s. One of the key players is Tau, raised all their life with a profound belief in the Mbo philosophy of trim, of the connections between people and the power of behaving decently. Who now realises that if the Cancrioth were operating behind the scenes the whole time, doing dirty deeds to protect the Mbo, then does that mean virtue accomplished nothing after all? "Everything I have ever cared about is taken from me. I will never be a real person again." "I've been cut out of trim. I cannot be connected to other human beings." This plotline can't all have been a late addition, it's far too integral. Leaving the question, why is it never the cheerful books that turn out unwittingly prophetic? "Fuck this world, the eater of children. Fuck what we've all become."

Not that it's all that grim, thank heavens. Yes, it often is, and we're never far from the horror of a whole people's world being forgotten, at least from the inside, or the sorrow of realising how much of one's own world is now lost to memory. But life, even at its grimmest, has moments of humour and life which pseudo-realist grim'n'gritty denies, and so do these books. There are pure sitcom moments, and lovely little lightbulbs of worldbuilding (kangaroos, in a fantasy novel? But why not, when nobody bats an eyelid at them having horses?). All the same, one can't entirely blame Dickinson for the unabashed honesty of his afterword: "I cannot promise exactly when the next and final one will be read. These books are deeply draining to write, and, increasingly, they feel like a negative-sum process, an engine that accepts labor and produces self-doubt, loneliness, and the harshest internal criticism." So I'll probably have even less idea what's going on by then but, assuming our civilisation fares a little better than some in his subcreation, I'll still look forward to reading the conclusion.

(Netgalley ARC)

My problem with Book Two of the Baru Cormorant series was that I had loosely forgotten much of the first book and it was remarkably dense as a continuation, well I didn't have that problem her, it only being a couple of weeks later. But also there was a sense that in the Monster Baru Cormorant Dickinson was still throwing balls in the air - here he is finally catching them. Perhaps not as much as I would have liked expecting this to be conclusion, but as much as characters are slowly being brought back to reflect on the action of the previous books and decide whether or not they are on Baru's side. Or should I say Barhu, as a rather audacious plot twist occurs about a third in which certainly plays on some of the previous barbarism and - strangely - manages to claw back some of the sympathy we may have slowly been losing for our traitorous, monstrous not quite tyrannical lead.

It was interesting to read in the afterword - so usually full of thanks for a writers community - that he is struggling with the scale and tone of the books and that this one was really hard. I think some of the adventure bits here are the clearest writing he has done, and there is still plenty of grotesque invention (not least the Cancerioth - with characters such as The Eye and The Womb). There was a sigh when another layer of secret operatives were posited, but I think that is just onion skins within onion skins as in the final novel all the balls will have to be caught and not least whether or not the whole juggling act was the right thing to do all along.

I enjoyed The Tyrant Baru Cormorant more than the Monster, a think partially because I had that follow on, but also because I think the struggle Dickinson had also improved his prose. It still waivers from dense and idea heavy, to introspection that is either repetitive or a bit lumpen. But I think there is a clearer idea that he doesn't have to hide so much from the readers to reveal down the line, and to trust us that we can be party to the overarching plans and the betrayals. Its still a bit jarring toe remember our lead is in her early twenties, and the number of people who fall in love with her seems increasingly unlikely as her history of betrayal and intrigue glows and she keeps picking up significant injuries (not least her lobotomy scar. I am however back on track with the series, Baru is still one of the most fascinating protagonists I have encountered in fantasy for a while, and the big picture themes (particularly about models of colonialism and racist theories which underpin them) is still frighteningly ambitious.

DNF @ 25%

I think I need to reread the whole series another time when I have more brain power to offer this series. I loved the others, but I've been struggling a lot with this one. Going to give it a try another time (possibly in audio) and I'll come back and edit this when I do.

Giving a high rating as I ADORE the rest of this series and I'm sure I'll love this too when I try again.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for providing an e-ARC of The Tyrant in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
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Wow! Just. Wow.

Going into Tyrant, I did not think it would surpass The Traitor Baru Cormorant and nor did I expect it to so thoroughly expand upon the chaos of Monster. More than happy to say I was surprised on both counts.

Tyrant follows Baru directly after the events of Monster. The narration switches between events proceeding Monster and a conversation between Cairdine Farrier (Itinerant) and Baru sometime in the unspecified future. This format sounds confusing but is very well distinguished and quite easy to follow. I particularly loved guessing how events in the 'past' were being referenced in the 'future' conversation and trying to figure out if a major event occurred or not.

If you're afraid of not being able to recall the events of Monster then you have two ways of remedying that. The first, and the point I recommend, is to re-read Monster before beginning Tyrant to feel the full emotional punch of the story. The second will work if you don't have much of a time gap between reading Monster and Tyrant: Dickinson has helpfully gone over the events of Monster in the least info-dump-y manner throughout the first half of Tyrant.

Tyrant is essentially a character-driven book. That's not to say it doesn't have an engaging plot. What I mean is that Tyrant is the centerpiece in the journey of Baru's character development. All of the chaos of Monster was very much necessary to serve as a buildup to Tyrant. Calling the cast of side characters such does not do justice to Dickinson's ability to flesh out everyone in his stories.

It's really hard to point out the things I loved without giving away major spoilers.

Here are a few tasters for what's to love in Tyrant (without spoilers):

- We learn more about the Oriati concept of trim, while also seeing it play out in all its complexity.
- We learn about the ties between Farrier (Itinerant), Cosgrad Torrinde (Hesychast), Tau-indi Bosoka (Federal Oriati Prince), Abdumasi Abd and Kindalana (Federal Oriati Prince).
- You will learn to love Xate Yawa if you don't already (how can you not love her character already?!)
- Same as above but for all navy personnel we come across in Tyrant.
- You are NOT prepared for the ending! I 200% guarantee that!

What I will say is that Tyrant is now my favourite book in the quartet. It is also a story that can be enjoyed by those who have never thought to venture into this side of colonist fantasy. It does, however, come with plenty of content warning including graphic gore, racial slurs & comments, and many more.

I cannot even begin to put into words my anticipation for the final book in what is now the occupier of the first spot in my favourite fantasy titles!

Overall rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 stars!

I was delighted to have the opportunity to read The Tyrant a little bit ahead of the paperback release, this series is one that caught my eye right at the start of my days on the bookish internet and each time a new book comes out I just know I'm in for a wonderfully weird, emotionally devastating time.
The Tyrant is the third book in this series but do not make the mistake I did of thinking this is the final book - I got to the acknowledgements only to discover this is in fact a quartet - though there may be quite a wait for book four. That would have been very easy to check and would have probably changed my ideas about the pacing of the book so I'm writing this review with that in mind!
This book is longer than the previous two books in the series clocking in at around 750 pages paperback - and initially, I found it very hard work. This is the kind of story with multiple POV jumps across one chapter and with very long chapters which is not always the right...rhythm for the way that I read? I would say it took me until around the halfway point for me to fully settle into that rhythm - so bear that in mind if you're the kind of person who likes to dip in and out of this book.
I will also recommend that you reread the first two books in the series, or at least familiarise yourself with the broader plot points because I don't think I would have understood much if I had not done so. The book does include a guide to the key players but I think to get the best emotional payoff you need to be able to remember where Baru has been up until this point.
I think this book builds on the weirdness of the second book wonderfully, particularly in the opening third of the book. Discovering the Cancrioth was always going to be a little odd but I was surprised by how vivid I found some of the descriptions in those sections - perhaps not for those with a weak stomach.
This series has never been afraid to show the worst of empire (and of humanity) and this book is no exception. Certainly, I would still include hefty content warnings for Eugenics, Homophobia, Violence and Plague/Chemical warfare. In some ways, I find this very interesting particularly as a critique of empire in general. I was also pleased to see a return to some of the economic themes of the first book which take a bit of a backseat at times - I personally find economics as confusing as I might find sorcery but seeing things play out in a fantasy setting and getting to see the problem solving (and problem causing) creates some of my favourite moments within the series.
I don't know that these are books that everyone would enjoy, this book, in particular, is quite difficult to read both because of the length and density and because of the themes. However, I am fully committed to finding out just what happens to Baru and how her story ends so I guess I'll be joining the wait for book four!