Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley, Melody Newcomb (Illustrator)

From award-winning author John Crowley comes an exquisite fantasy novel about a man who tells the story of a crow named Dar Oakley and his impossible lives and deaths in the land of Ka.

A Crow alone is no Crow.

Dar Oakley—the first Crow in all of history with a name of his own—was born two thousand years ago. When a man learns his language, Dar finally gets the chance to tell his story. He begins his tale as a young man, and how he went down to the human underworld and got hold of the immortality meant for humans, long before Julius Caesar came into the Celtic lands; how he sailed West to America with the Irish monks searching for the Paradise of the Saints; and how he continuously went down into the land of the dead and returned. Through his adventures in Ka, the realm of Crows, and around the world, he found secrets that could change the humans’ entire way of life—and now may be the time to finally reveal them.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Animals, Mythology, Historical Fiction, Historical, Speculative Fiction

442 pages, Hardcover

First published October 24, 2017

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.

Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)

Reviews

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intellectually, I know that the world is unfair. Somehow, though, that knowledge doesn't make it easier to accept the fact that John Crowley remains a relatively unknown and uncelebrated author. His writing never fails to sustain me, engage me, move me (not the easiest task, frankly), and, most of all, please me. Little, Big is my favorite book--no qualifications. It brings me more joy than anything else I've ever read. Now I'll have to figure out where Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr fits in my reading life, though I already know that it will loom large.

Ka is both like and unlike all of Crowley's previous novels. The prose is beautiful and assured, and I felt from the first chapter that I was walking in a Crowley universe. But the scale is much larger than anything he's written before--larger even than the four-book Aegypt sequence, which attempted to rewrite Western intellectual history. Ka tells the story of a crow who lives for a very long time--starting from the Iron Age (or perhaps even earlier) and moving through the near future. As such, the book offers a bird's-eye view of human civilization. But though the scale is epic, the focus is always personal. I think that's because Crowley isn't really interested in discussing the spread of human civilization. Instead, the book is really about two things that bind not only cultures but also individuals: Death and Story. The novel presents Story as both our primary weapon against the inevitability of Death and also as an interlocutor which allows us to accept Death on its terms. But don't be confused: the book is not somber at all. It's adventurous, hallucinatory, and very funny at times. And most of all, it's beautiful. Like all of Crowley's works.

Maybe I'm old fashioned for being satisfied by beauty, even for desiring it in the first place. Maybe that's why I'm one of the first to review this novel, even though it's been out for a few weeks already. Based on the lack of attention the book has received, it doesn't look like Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr will be the book to change Crowley's career and standing. But that lack of attention is the fault of the world, an essentially unfair place, and not the fault of this masterful novel.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Crowley’s writing is so graceful and lyrical and contemplative that his novels often feel like long elegiac poems masquerading as prose fiction. His latest, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr is quite possibly the most John Crowley-esque of John Crowley novels. It is a beautiful work of art – enchanting and reflective, rendered in stark images and hermeneutical musings on the nature of life and mortality. It is also relentlessly and frustratingly cerebral; intellectually and aesthetically satisfying but lacking any identifiable emotional core. It is essentially the history of western civilization as experienced by an immortal crow named Dar Oakley. As climate change wreaks havoc on the natural world, an injured Dar Oakley relates his life’s story to an unnamed human narrator, who filters it through his own experience with a recent tragedy. Dar Oakley’s biography is captivating, the narrator’s relationship to the crow and his tale less so. A thrilling and complex – if somewhat opaque – novel.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess one of the great things about reading John Crowley is that it never goes quite how I think it will – even when I have mixed feelings about his work. It’s impossible to deny that the man is brilliant, and a very talented prose stylist; alas, sometimes, his wordy pirouettes are just a bit too dizzying for my puny brain. But my husband loves him, and considering how many books I relentlessly pushed on him, it’s only fair that I follow his recommendations from time to time.

“Ka” is definitely one of his most approachable novels, and I enjoyed it better than some of his other ones. Maybe because the subject matter and approach spoke to me more than “The Solitudes” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) or even “Little Big” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) - which are brilliant books that nevertheless stumped me. “Ka” is more grounded somehow (which is ironic considering the main character is a bird!), so it’s strange magic felt like something more solid than I could actually hold on to and be carried along with, as opposed to something I couldn’t quite grasp, like Smokey or Pierce’s respective journeys.

Dar Oakley is the first crow to have been given a name of his own, and he was born so very long ago, when two-legged creatures he eventually came to see as People wore animal fur and warred over territories in strange forests. While trying to rescue his very first human friend, Fox Cap, Dar will stumble onto something very precious indeed, that will prolong his life and make him a witness of history unlike any other. The book is separated into sections that correspond with Dar’s human friends: a little shaman girl, a monk, a Native American medicine man, a blind psychic and eventually, the unnamed narrator – thus spanning most of the history of Western civilization. Obviously, it’s not a very detailed history, as a crow is not exactly an active participant in the runaway train of human events, but it is a fascinating way to observe certain moments that we feel familiar with.

The writing is beautiful, and the ideas Crowley explores are very interesting; I find it interesting too to think of the fact that a man his age decided to write a book exploring the various death-myths humans have believed in through history when he himself must be getting increasingly aware of his own mortality.

But alas, as I should have expected from Crowley, I care about plot a little bit more than he does, and therefore, occasionally wondered when something would happen to this damn Crow. Don’t get me wrong: stuff does happen, but it often takes a long time for events to unfold, to the point where it felt a bit anticlimactic to me. Dar travels to fascinating places, and visits the afterlife of many of his human friends, and I was charmed to see that each afterlife mirrors exactly what the human character expected it to be – an intriguing and thought-provoking idea for Crowley to play with. I also appreciate that he doesn’t anthropomorphize Dar: his character is clearly a bird, who has bird-thoughts and a hard time understanding why humans do their things – though he tries very hard.

If you’ve never read Crowley before, this is a good place to start: if this charms you, the rest of his catalogue will definitely be your cup of tea, but if you find it a bit dragging, well… 3 stars.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm conflicted about this read.

On the one hand, I think, with managed expectations, this is a delightful book. Mild, thoughtful, and almost always following the PoV of a special crow through the ages. One that has died, traveled the land of the dead, come back, and lives on and on. Sometimes Dar Oakley talks with men and women, sometimes he just has adventures, but they all tend to revolve around life and death.

I think it has a really good premise.

What I wanted was something more, however. More interesting conflicts, less average, run-of-the-mill adventures, and maybe less seemingly middle-aged-white guy musings. The thoughts on Christianity, or the reflections of the classic Greek stories aren't amazing. In fact, they're a bit timid.

Maybe if I had come across this as one of my first books into the wide world of wandering adventure through lots of time, without knowing and experiencing a hundred others that do the same thing as well if not better, I might have been amazed by this book.

As it is, I have, and other than following the admittedly pretty cool PoV of this crow through a vast stretch of time, with some admittedly cool mini-stories interspersed, I was profoundly meh'd by this novel. It's far from being bad, but it was... boring. To me. But that doesn't have to be the case for anyone else!

This IS perfect for anyone, however, who likes morality plays, good observations about Crows in real-life, and enjoys a sprawling, wandering tome of stories within stories... AND likes them done mildly, gently, and introspectively.

[Silvana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr is a work of art with a capital A. From the very first pages, I knew I was reading something extraordinary. A cross between magical realism and historical fantasy, this is told from the eyes of a two-thousand year old crow, as he flew throughout the history of man, the history of Ymr – our world, Ka – the world of the crows – and what lies in between, under, and beyond.

I truly never really paid attention to crows before this book. Their reputation as messenger of death, the death-black bird, seem to permeate in many histories including in my own country. Because of this book, however, I came to appreciate them more, one of the most intelligent animals out there. I spent hours falling into the rabbit hole of crow googling. Did you know crows can tell the difference between a man carrying a shovel over his shoulder and a man carrying a gun? They know to stay away from the one and the other one can’t hurt them. For Indonesians, did you know Indonesia has at least six different crow species? And our crows are exceptionally bright? Crowley did an extensive research for this book and it shows. How he integrated the facts of crows from biological traits to social behavior seamlessly into an engaging, magical tale is an achievement of its own.

CROWley (ahem) is also somehow successful in making an animal POV does not seem like a representation or allegory of men – which novels did often with their animal characters. There is no humanizing part. Dar Oakley is his own character, a crow, and he has his own, unique, endearing voice. Moreover, one of my favorite parts of the book is that the crow showed agency. Not just an observer, mind you.

History buff and myth lovers will enjoy this book. Dak Oakley tales brought me to many points of history; I lived with the ancient Celts, I witnessed the Roman legion in their bloody campaign, I traveled across the sea to the New World, I followed the homeward-bound victims of the Civil War, and I saw the bleak, diseased future of humanity. This book is divided into a few different era. Each era represents a journey. Every journey is different. Every journey is mythically-inspired and fantastically morbid. How could it not? There was a very thin line between worlds whenever Dar Oakley was around. The streams of human companions the crow had been engaged with across time and continent actually showed that Dar Oakley’s true companion is death. He croaks out "ka" (caw), which is also the ancient Egyptian word for the spiritual self that survives the decay of the body.

"Maybe not, said the Skeleton. But look at it this way. When you return home, you'll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you're dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you'll speak and act and be alive again."

Let me stop with that, since whatever I wrote here won’t do the book any justice. There were too many parts I love. Aside from The Scar, this is the best book I read this year, one of those five glowing stars that will shine the longest in my memory. It was truly a marvelous, achingly beautiful reading experience – also thanks to the lovely buddies I had in SFFBC, you know who you are :)

[Ctgt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories, Coyote said. Not to tell you something you don't already know. We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do.

In the near future, a dying man tells the story of Dar Oakley, a Crow who steals and then loses "the most precious thing in the world" and is doomed to eternal life. The deaths and rebirths of Dar begin in Iron Age and medieval Europe then jumps to North America with Native Americans, the Civil War and ends with a world in gradual decline.

I want to understand about the dead, how it is they are in more than one place at the same time, or in no place at all, which is perhaps the same thing.


The line between worlds

Life, death

Myth, history

Dream, reality

We seemed to go back the same way we came, but I've learned-just as Dar Oakley learned-that here you can never go back the way you came. That you never do anywhere. You only and always go on.

8/10

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5 stars] Hmmm, a guy named John CROW-ley, who's not too far from the end of his natural lifespan, writes a novel about crows and death. Coincidence?

I’ve appreciated animal-based fantasy novels over the years (e.g. Watership Down), and this one sounded like it had some literary qualities. It’s probably more in the realm of magic realism than fantasy, though, blurring the lines between the real world and a land of the dead, which is a place that, according to the storyteller, is really meant for the living. For us. As with much magic realism, meanings of the more fanciful events are left to the reader’s interpretation, as riddles of sorts, but the writing has a haunting beauty, as well as a playful quality, that I much enjoyed, even if it made me a bit sad.

The story concerns an unusually long-lived crow, who doesn’t have a name or much of a language of his own at first, but acquires both over thousands of years of interacting with and observing humans, passing both concepts on to his fellow crows. This crow, eventually named Dar Oakley, is born in pre-antiquity Europe, and comes to know the tribal people living there. He befriends a young girl, who later becomes the tribe’s shaman, and enters the world of the dead with her. Crowley plays a little bit coy about the beings and places in this world, showing it through the lens of Dar Oakley’s limited understanding, but it seems to match the mythology of the shaman’s tribe, who consider crows agents of soul transport. While there, Dar Oakley finds “the most precious thing”, a mysterious, unseeable object that confers immortality. He loses it in a forest and instead of passing to the shaman, the immortality goes to him.

So, Dar Oakley passes through the ages, revisiting the land of death repeatedly. He encounters the Romans. He becomes part of the life of a somewhat willful medieval monk, who enters a now more Christianized land of death through the same portal that the shaman once had, now inside a church. In teaching his fellow crows to associate humans with killing (and therefore food), he becomes even more unwittingly bound up with human death. The monk travels to Ireland and from there on Saint Brendan’s legendary voyage to within sight of North America. From there, Dar Oakley hops to that continent, and gets to know an indigenous tribe. Its mischievous storyteller, though, is always changing or embellishing Dar Oakley’s stories, and soon Dar Oakley isn’t sure of the truth himself. He falls in love, or the corvid equivalent, with another ancient crow, one with a few secrets of her own (as we see, certain characters will reappear in new forms). Later, he witnesses the American Civil War, and then faces off against a hateful crow hunter, who plays tricks with the psychology of crows that allow him to murder (as it were) thousands. But Dar Oakley has learned some tricks of his own. In our own near future, ravaged by plague, he meets the narrator, who tells this story, then seeks the land of dead for himself.

For all its somberness, there’s a lot of humor in the story, and Crowley has fun with the behavior and quirks of crows, who are often creatures of the moment, without the human capacity for planning and introspection, but nonetheless communicate (sample crow argument: “I’m mad! You make me mad!” “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m crazy mad!”). They also have a bit more groupthink than humans going on. “A crow alone is no crow”, after all. It gets them into trouble — “that’s not a crow!” calls Dar Oakley to other crows being lured into a trap by a fake cry. “But what if it is? What if it is!”, they call back, unable to resist instinct. Maybe it is a fault shared with us.

There are some interwoven themes in this novel: names, origins, belonging to a group, the desire for company, the power of stories, and — of course — death. There’s also some meta-ness, teasingly insinuated through the various not-quite-reliable storytellers. Dar Oakley relates his history to the narrator in a literal-minded crow way, but one realizes that somewhere along his journey, he’s learned to tell riddles. The “one most precious thing” isn’t quite what we’re first led to believe. In the land of death, “there is only one of everything, met again and again”.

In sum, this is a lyrical, melancholy, gently funny novel, full of significances both obvious and hidden. It’s about a universality of experience, a relationship with life — and its end — shared across time and cultures. We come to our own lands of death seeking the same things as others who have gone before us. Maybe crows, influenced, fed, and killed by us as they are, then absorbed into our mythos, have their part to play there.

If, like me, you’re drawn to novels that fall outside traditional genre boundaries (and/or are intrigued by crows), I definitely recommend this one. I also appreciated all the natural imagery in the story, which reminded me, in reading experience, of The Life of Pi.

[alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

a tremendous novel that seems doomed to be woefully underread. the transportive, evocative prose we’ve come to expect from crowley, superlative worldbuilding, an astute meditation on the power and role of storytelling, and a charming, at times heartbreaking, study of the morphing role of crows in myths and tall tales. one of my favorites of the year and probably my third favorite (after little, big and engine summer) from a wonderful writer

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

After having been to the Limestone Kingdom and magical Austin in my last two books, I thought this was the best choice, thematically. Well ...


We meet Dark Oakley, a crow (yes yes, I know the bird above is NOT a crow, but ravens are more prominent on the internet *shrugs*). We meet him back when he didn't have a name. We follow him when he is named, when he finds a world next to his own (Ka). We follow him when he travels from one world to the next, meeting horses, owls, boars, foxes, humans of all ages and more. Eventually, we watch him find his mate and steal the secret of immortality - and when he loses it again. Dar Oakley dies, is reborn without memory of his former life/knowledge, always regains the memory eventually, learns more from life to life, but always dies again eventually. Until ...
This is an Odyssey-ish quest through a number of realms that combines a number of mythological tropes and themes and characters. Coyote is in here too (just like in my previous two books).

The problem? The way these tropes and themes and characters were treated weren't anything new. Add to that the fact that the way the story is told is long-winded and just trickling along at too slow a pace. There is no rise-and-fall, there isn't any (or much) suspense, and while the realms change and therefore challenge Dar Oakley and his mate, I never felt challenged or surprised or ... much of anything.

I sometimes liked the philosophical examination of the nature of things (creatures) and evolution of stories as well as the book's point that we all ARE stories. As a bookworm, the thought that we are nothing without thought and memory (Hugin and Munin), without stories we tell and stories that are told about us, appealed to me. There is a saying that people cannot live on bread and water alone because we need stories to tell us HOW to live. Sadly, this story, despite its potential and the research into the social behavior of crows (the difference to ravens, too), didn't have much to say on that subject. It reminded me of the ramblings of a guy I'm trapped in a car with on a long-ass road trip through the middle of nowhere after I made the mistake of asking for a story because I know he's written a book. *lol* That sounds harsh, I know, but while I didn't DNF or scream with frustration, I was disappointed with how the source material was treated here, especially after the interesting foreshadowing we got in the book's prologue.

The writing also didn't blow me away. After a few people I know have called the prose graceful and lyrical and beautiful, I might have expected too much. I'm not sure. But the prose was nothing special in my opinion.

So while this wasn't truly bad, it was also nothing remarkable, sadly. So why 3 stars? Well, because I'm a sucker for corvids and mythology and stories about the nature of stories (thought + memory = stories), mythological creatures and us silly little humans smack in the middle of it all.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel about a crow’s view on human civilization. Maybe I should start with deciphering the title: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. Ymr is the real of humans, both living and dead from Norse (?) myths; Ka is its equivalent in the crows’ world; Dar Oakley is the name of the crow, who narrates most of the book.

The book starts with the author, who recently lost his wife, found a wounded crow and takes it home. In time the crow and the author develop a common tongue and the crow tells his story.

The crow story has four parts, starting from [1] iron age Albion, with Celtic/Norse populations, following with [2] early medieval monks, [3] north American Indians up to the US civil war and [4] the present day/alt or near future. Crows are materialists, “dead is dead” is their common refrain, but humans made them in their stories as death birds and crows have to take part.

The story mixes the wealth of information about real biology/behavior of crows, their supposed difference in views from humans (like ‘in every human language we talk about ways and paths and bringing and bearing things along them. We come to a fork in the road, a parting of the ways, we take a wrong turn. Crows never talk in that way. But if I couldn’t, I’m not sure I could tell a story, or recount a life. We are beings on the path, always wondering what’s beyond the next turning. Crows live in a wide, trackless space of three dimensions.’). And last but not least, their appearance in our stories.

Great prose, vivid story, clever ideas.

[Christopher Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking and beautiful, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr is a major achievement in writing from a master of the craft. The novel approaches in significance and power Crowley’s earlier masterworks like Little, Big and Engine Summer, while at once surpassing those novels in grandness of scale. This fine novel should be on everyone’s must read list, particularly if you’re a fan of beautiful prose and writing that has been honed to perfection throughout. It also should appear on the ever-present ‘best of the year’ lists for 2017—if it doesn’t, that will indeed be a crime.

[T.D. Whittle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I have only just discovered John Crowley this year and have read several of his books now. This one is my favourite. Philosophical, somber, poetic ... but maybe don't read just now if you've recently lost a loved one, or are grieving in general.

[Pavle · Rating 5 out of 5]

„We are still here.“

Čudno je što živi toliko razmišljaju o smrti – a mrtvi baš nimalo. Ponekad se čini da je to sve što radimo. Bar dok ne umremo. O tome je ovaj roman. O mestu sa druge strane svakog od nas, pa makar ono ni ne postojalo.

I o pričama.

Uvek sam pristrasan kada čitam, ali Krouli mi je posebno drag. Litl, Big je jedan od onih Romana koje pišem sa velikim početnim R, a ponekad i velikim V, kao u Velikih. I zato sam i ovaj roman, kao prvi njegov koji čitam što bi rekli in-ril-tajm, iščekivao kao leto u zimu i zimu u leto. Nije mi bilo svejedno – želeo sam da mi se svidi. I znao sam da hoće. Jer sve je ponovo tu: svet kao glina za igranje, liričan, nikad naporan jezik, melanholija koja je druga reč za atmosferu, likovi (ovde mahom životinjski) koji u par reči izgovorenih kažu više o ljudskoj prirodi nego ma koji traktat na temu. Krouli je poseban, nepravedno potcenjen, a o romanu još više govori to što sam apsolutno uveren da je ovaj roman njemu poseban. Da možda kao da je sve išlo ka tome da ga napiše.

Elem, neću još dugo. Ne valja. Ponešto treba i da se pročita.

Dar Oukli je vrana koja je „ukrala“ nešto ljudsko, koja kroz nekih dve hiljade i kusur godina pokušava da shvati šta je to smrt, šta su to ljudi, šta smo to svi mi. To radi tako što priča priču – bilo koju priču – kako je slušao priču. Živeo, živeo, i onda umro. Kako se i sam u nju uverio, tako što je posetio podzemlje, svaki put različito, svaki put na drugi način prepričano – svaki put podjednako stvarno. I na to se sve svodi. Na stotinu i jednu smrt, i jedan san, izmedju.

5+

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before the mountain at the world’s end was built on the river plain, before the high city there grew up, before most of the Ravens went away into the forests of the deep, before the People’s long rage to kill Crows, before Dar Oakley’s sea-journey into the West, before the Most Precious Thing was found and lost again, before the ways were opened to the lands of the dead, before there were names in Ka, before Ymr came to be and therefore before Ka knew itself, Dar Oakley first knew People.

Dar Oakley didn’t have that name then, or any name. It would be eons before Crows each had a name, as they do now; then, no, they had no need of them, they called those around them Father, Brother, Sister, Older Sister, Other Older Sister; those they didn’t know as relations, or forgot in what degree, were spoken of as Those Ones, or Others, or All of Them There, and so on. And since they had little to say about other Crows or very much need to talk about them when not in their presence, this was enough.

But without names it’s impossible to remember stories, and hard to tell them. So Dar Oakley will begin as Dar Oakley in this one.

This is definitely one of the best contemporary fantasies I have read. I think I like it considerably better than Little, Big, which I reread earlier this year. Little, Big is beautifully written and imaginative, but I found it emotionally unsatisfying. The one has all the good points of Little, Big, but I like the characters much better. (The novella Great Work of Time is brilliant, though. It is included in Novelty: Four Stories, or the later collection Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction.

Ka is the story of an impossibly long-lived Crow named Dar Oakley, told by an old man who knew him. Dar Oakley’s story begins in the ancient world, when he was a young Crow (it is always capitalized in the book) and ends in a post-apocalyptic world, with the decay of modern civilization that gives the book its subtitle. He has many adventures along the way, crossing the Atlantic with Irish monks, going to the land of the dead, and returning to our world. The Crow point of view is very convincing and well-researched, and definitely gives the book a distinctive voice. The book is divided into four sections, each for a different era. This is a story about death and time, and about ecology, and about stories, and about the immortality we find in stories.

He thinks about stories, how if they begin at all, then their ends are set, they can only happen one way: or is that so only with the stories Death tells in Ymr, about the beings there? Maybe such stories are told so that the living will learn, and learn again and again, that they'll never win anything from that realm…

…We're made of stories now, brother. It’s why we don’t die even if we do.

[Allison Hurd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dar Oakley is from Ka, the realm of Crows. Through association with People he discovers Ymr, their realm. From there, Crowley takes us on a journey through the ages of crow-based folklore. Death bird. Trickster. Omen. It's full of beautiful, poignant lines and replete with enough references to mythology and history to satisfy all sorts of readers.

And yet I never felt entirely swayed. This book is the sort you open and it has both atmosphere and an underlying purpose. It is trying to tell us something, to hint at a connection that will reverberate in our minds. I could feel this was what it ought to do. I'm afraid to say I never got the message. Maybe because I was rushed as I read it...but maybe not.

CONTENT WARNING: death, death of a loved one, genocide, torture, tons of body horror, random violence, suicide, violent racism, casual racism.

Things to love:

-The folklore and mythology. If you love myths and legends, this book may well be enjoyable just for that element. There's so much in here, you could have a whole discussion just on the different references in the book.

-Dar Oakley. He's quite a character. I loved getting this book largely from a Crow's perspective. The non-human narrator allows us to see ourselves as if for the first time. And there were a lot of funny or sweet bits that wouldn't have worked if the protagonist were human. Very well done.

-The prose. There were so many beautiful lines in this book that made me stop and think about death, belonging, and what is inevitable, really.

-The timeline. It was a cool use of the different myths and a myth into itself. Very fun.

Things that left me wanting:

-The pace. It is glacial. It all feels like it's hinting at something, and I loved when there were call backs but a lot of it felt to me like the author just sharing cool things he'd learned, rather than cherry picking the best bits to drive his message home. It also started to speed up. We agonized over the first part and each subsequent part seemed to lose more elements, until we just steamrolled over the present day part.

-The modern story line. I didn't get it and I'm not sure what it added. I'm actually not sure what the revenge story line added either.

-The opacity of the story. There was all this hinting, but I never got the answer to the riddle I was supposed to be contemplating.

-A few missed social beats. There were a couple points raised that made me think...hm...I'm not sure that says what you want it to say. I think it's good to be more largely inclusive and not to forget that people and their problems are universal and eternal, but I do feel pretty strongly that if we're going to mention it we have a duty to do so carefully. I'm not sure this was as careful as I'd have preferred.

-The end. Another ambiguous ending! Is that the hallmark of this era of fantasy? Must it all be uncertain or taut? Do we not put things to rest? Seems especially odd, in a book that asks that very question. Or maybe that was in fact the point.

In the end it was gorgeous and atmospheric, I'm just not sure I actually got a full story out of it, and it took me over a week of reading to be uncertain of that.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a big book, with a slow start, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to finish it anyway. I mean, crows! And I've been doing a lot of reading about what we're currently learning about crows, and about animal sentience in general, and apparently Crowley has, too, because he gets it right.

The mix of science, history, and fantasy/mythology reminds me directly of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History and also The Kin. The fantasy itself reminds me a bit of Neil Gaiman. Of course it can also be compared to Children of Time in a way, and The Mob. Then there's the premise that Dar Oakley has become immortal, and can give the reader a bird's-eye views of the past couple of millennia; that's been done plenty from a human's pov.

....Welp, I finished it. Still thinking about the frustrating ending.
Overall I did like the book, but can't quite recommend it unless you're already interested.
I'd recommend the others that I list above, instead... choose the focus that interests you.

I do love the fact that despite the fact that this is fantasy it still has the Sense of Wonder and What If that I read SF for. Crowley's crows are truly alien.... For example, they (in the book at least) may be smart, social, etc., but they really have trouble with hypotheticals and with the future. Not because they are 'lesser' but because it doesn't pay (in the Darwinian sense) to ponder such. Probably real crows are quite a bit like this, too.

Clever and lovely bits abound. Just one sample: A character reluctantly draws blood, then: "She threw the sword from her and climbed down and went to lie facedown on the rock ledge with her hands crossed over her head as though to hold it in place."

Lots of research, and/or a lifetime of squirrel brain, went into this novel. Two things that I didn't know: "... a tall whitewashed castle, with ground glass and mica in the wash to make it glitter in the low sun...".

Also white settlers in America called the forests 'untamed' and 'primeval' but actually they were impassable because they were regrowing after their caretakers, the 'former People' had been decimated and driven off.... Formerly the "People had burned the undergrowth to keep it down" but since the settlers neither did this, nor log selectively, they *made* the so-called 'wild' forests.

Btw, the blurb is awful. Don't decide whether to read this based on that.

[Daniel Polansky]

A view of humanity’s journey from the stone age to just beyond tomorrow, as told (sort of) by Dar Oakely, a magic, immortal crow. I like John Crowley a lot, even though I haven’t liked all his books. He’s brilliant and has a fine prose pen and most importantly (particularly in the thimble-sized genre in which he writes) he’s ambitious, his writing defying easy convention or simple analysis. Ka is a lot easier to get through than say, Aegypt, but still this is the sort of book which is going to turn off most genre readers by virtue of his scope and difficulty, while, probably, getting the usual short shrift from the literary types who can’t admit to liking speculative fiction unless it’s been written in a different language. Which is too bad because, while imperfect, Ka is a really strong book. The first 2/3 in particular are strange and original, at turns horrifying and beautiful, and Dar Oakley’s peculiar series of journeys through the worlds of men living and men dead are weird and creepy and exciting. It bogged down a fair bit once we reached modernity, both because the various subplots aren’t as strong and just generally I think because the idea had kind of run out of steam a hundred pages before we actually ended the book, but still this is a thoughtful, valuable take on the miseries of human existence and the endless unknowability of death. Also, lots of flying. Library, but I’d probably keep it until I have to move somewhere again anyway.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dar Oakley is a crow, first crow with a name of his own. Born 2000 years ago and has found immortality. He knows secrets that would change human existence and now he want to chare is knowledge. The book is written very beautiful and its a Dar Oakley is a very compelling character on his own. But I didn't fall i love with the story completely. My feelings only went luke warm with this but I did enjoy parts of it anywho.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

How wrong I was about this the first time I read it, or rather dropped it. This time the magic hit me early and never really let up. Certainly my favorite since the Aegypt series, and maybe even better than that. In a way it's the dark side of Little, Big - Faery replaced by Death, though a Death remarkably similar to Faery. And like Little, Big it charts the diminishing of magic - the eventual abandonment of the house in Little, Big, and the very end of humanity in Ka. Ka has a subtle slow-burn magic, in bird-like prose, appropriately, since it's narrated by a crow through an interpretation of crow language by a human. Many many sentences moved like a bird moves, moving the reader into the mind of a bird. I now look at crows differently, and I already thought I could somewhat understand them! So the book is deeply informed and infused by the intelligence of animals and nature, but the main theme is the Afterlife and its different conceptions by humans throughout history. Dar Oakley the crow, through lifetime after lifetime, acts as a guide to the Underworld, though he himself does not believe in it, or see the point of it. While I read it I tried to ferret out Crowley's actual beliefs/ideas of the Underworld/Afterlife, and came to the conclusion that for Crowley stories are nearly synonymous with Reality, and our stories change as we change, especially our stories of the Underworld/Afterlife, and so it changes with us; but it is real, and while the gateways to it have been lost with time, we now have access to it through dreams, which have probably been how we accessed it all along.

[Yuyine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je sais que certaines et certains d’entre vous sont très intéressé(e)s par ce livre mais qu’il vous effraie un peu. Je le sais car bien que très impatiente de le découvrir, l’aspect exigeant associé à son auteur me faisait craindre une oeuvre trop ardue à parcourir. Ses plus de 500 pages en une police assez serrée pouvaient autant être promesse de bonheur absolue que d’obstacle infranchissable. Aussi je vous rassure tout de suite: oui, sur certains aspects (réflexions philosophiques, références, etc.), Kra est un roman exigeant mais il reste très accessible dans le style ou dans le propos. Il ne convaincra sans doute pas tout le monde, à cause de son parti pris narratif aussi génial que déroutant ainsi que de quelques longueurs, mais il risque aussi de vous envoûter pleinement. Ce fut le cas pour moi. J’ai été happée par la plume, envoûtée par l’histoire et j’ai dévoré ce roman avec plaisir, tout en essayant de prendre le temps d’intégrer la richesse de ses enseignements. Inclassable, [...]

Pour lire la suite de cette critique, rendez-vous sur yuyine.be!

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dar Oakley didn't need to be told where he was. It was where they were while they were what they are...

This book is a work of beauty – there is no other way to describe it in my opinion. It is about death, about the mercilessness of life and nature, about legends that weave themselves through our existence from the beginning of humankind on.

John Crowley wrote a legend himself, full of enchantment and ease. Parts I and II are absolutely perfect, the end is wonderfully melancholic – only two chapters in part III seemed for me so out of the flow, that I virtually got grumpy while reading them. It angered me in no small measure that this book wasn’t perfect for me because of them. Those two chapters cost one star in an otherwise truly unique, skillfully written and deeply moving masterpiece.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a novel, but an opera. The story is just silly, but I went for the music.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 – 4.5 stars

I really enjoyed this one. As I noted in my recent review of his latest book, _Flint and Mirror_, I have not always been a fan of ‘newer’ Crowley and tended to return to his earlier works, but this was a particularly strong late Crowley in my opinion (better even than _Flint and Mirror_ which I enjoyed as well). It may indeed be the final ‘major’ work we receive from Crowley, and if so, I think he ended on a high note.

As the title suggests it is the story of Dar Oakley, whose perspective is certainly unique, for Dar Oakley is a crow. That description undersells him, though, since he really is more than a crow… one could perhaps opine that he is in some ways THE Crow. However that may be, he is a creature able to live many lives, dying in one generation and born again in a later one, eventually able to recall some, or even all, of his old memories. He is a witness to the ways of the People (humanity) in many of their times and places and is able to learn of their ways through his connection with a member of their community whose own special roles makes them sensitive to Dar Oakley’s unique nature: a Celtic singer and sage of the pre-Roman world; a monk and ‘saint’ of Christian Ireland; another singer and shaman of the Native American peoples before the advent of the white man, a poet and ‘somnambule’ during the American Civil War…they all have in common the fact that they are, in an important way, storytellers and the keepers of their people’s cultural identity and relationship with the dead. One additional figure, perhaps the most important of all, is the actual narrator or conduit for Dar Oakley’s tale: an elderly widower living in a world not unlike our own (perhaps most frighteningly in the fact that it seems to be lying on the edge of an apocalypse) who seems to lack any special role in his society…though one could argue that his society had jettisoned such concepts or functions long ago.

As Dar Oakley unravels his many tales through the pen of our narrator we see the absurd and contradictory ways of humanity throughout our societal ‘development’ through the eyes of Dar Oakley and the crows. Our most important (or at least distinguishing) characteristic would seem to be our willingness to kill each other and search to find meaning in the act. It is something which the crows fundamentally cannot understand, but for which they are uniquely grateful given the plenty that it provides for them. In many ways it is primarily a story about death and the world of the dead that continually interacts with the world of the living (and also sometimes with the yet unborn) linking past, present, and future in the creation of an otherworld that Dar Oakley knows as Ymr. Ymr is equal parts collective dream and ‘real’ place…at least for much of the story, and it grows and changes as human societies grow and change. Ultimately it appears to be the fruit of our ongoing attempt to find meaning in death. Is this world that is apparently created as a result real? Does it actually give meaning to the seemingly random and meaningless death inflicted upon us by both the world and ourselves? Or is it as ephemeral and absurd as our habit of wantonly killing each other?

Crowley uses these questions to explore the importance of language and belief to what it means to be human. Namely he asks if language, and the beliefs it both expresses and creates, produces our otherworlds? Is our soul eternal, but sent to the place we believe it will go? Do our beliefs as they grow and change also change the dead and the world they inhabit? It investigates how language shapes, or even *is*, our world…the realm in which we live. Not, perhaps, in a strong Sapir-Whorf manner, but in a more subtle way. Language may not be objective in its signification of reality, but neither is it arbitrary. We give it meaning and this meaning has truth and power that resonates (or at least *might* resonate) in some way with what we call reality. I was strongly reminded of Crowley’s investigation into the nature of reality, and how it can be molded and changed by belief, in his Aegypt cycle, as well as the ways in which otherworlds can interact with the ‘real’ waking world of humanity in _Little, Big_.

I’m not sure if Crowley has ever written what I would call a “happy” book, but this one was definitely tinged with both melancholy and frustration: melancholy at the loss that we suffer in our lives and frustration at the apparent futility of much of it. The very question of the actuality of the otherworld, of its possible contingence on our own beliefs and imagination, swings between hopeful and desolate. Are we doomed by our very nature to live foolish lives overshadowed by death? Is this death meaningless or not? Is even our very search for meaning merely a self-created illusion, or does it reflect a more fundamental aspect of the nature of reality? There are no easy answers to these questions provided by Crowley and I am uncertain how optimistic he is about any of them. That said, I don’t think the story is consumed by darkness or pessimism and I think the answers you come away with are very likely to be coloured by the beliefs you bring with you to the story.

Definitely check it out if you're a Crowley fan.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Executive Summary: This book wasn't really for me. It's more about the journey than anything else, and I found the journey full of lulls. 2.5 Stars.

Audiobook: I'm generally not a fan of authors reading their own work. I think this story might have been better with a different narrator. Mr. Crowley isn't bad per-say, but his voice is kind of soothing and when the story was slow, it was easy to sort of lose my concentration.

Full Review
There have been a few books whose point is the journey that I've liked, but those are few and far between. This one was OK, but I often found myself bored.

I love the portrayal of the crows, in particular the titular character. However I guess I don't find crow life very exciting. My favorite parts were some of the relationships that Dar Oakely had. In particular I liked his first real relationship with a human.

Often though I found I just didn't really care what he was up to. I think this is one of those books where you'll just love the prose and sort of slice of crow life, or you'll find it mostly boring as I did. Despite being well written, it just wasn't a great fit for me.

[Stacy · Rating 2 out of 5]

An elegantly written novel with a unique storyline, a combination sadly rare and to be valued. Then why only 2 stars? The book did not engage me, not a fault of the writer in this case. I wish readers could rate books in two ways, one based on the perceived quality, and the second on whether the reader liked the book. The two do not necessarily go together.

[Chris Chester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ka is a story about a crow. But equally, it is a story of death.

Dar Oakley, or Dar of the Oak by the Lea, is our main avian character. He seems at first a humble crow. Through Dar Oakley the (presumably human) reader comes to know and regard the humble crow and his social relationships and hierarchies, his mating behaviors and general perspective on life.

The universe changes, however, when Dar Oakley comes into contact with Fox Cap, the harbinger of a nascent humanity into the world of the crow. But equally, Fox Cap brings Dar Oakley into the world of humanity, assigning the humble crow the mantle of "death bird" for their proclivity for dead human flesh.

Dar Oakley himself becomes deathless, still seemingly a crow in his own right, but equally an immortal symbol for humanity as it grows and changes over the years.

It's never sketched out in minute detail, but appears to progress from a pre-Norman Celtic past to some kind of age of chivalry to the early days of settlement in the New World to the Civil War and ultimately beyond our current reckoning.

Dar Oakley is the one constant and he consistently finds himself shepherding humans beyond the pale into the lands of death -- or Ymr. Ymr itself changes its shape over time, seeming to conform to those whose attention and regard it's attracted, all the way to the novel's conclusion.

John Crowley's talent for crafting a plausible magical reality underpinning the real one is very much on display here. As with his other work like Little Big, it's really his restraint -- his ability to led the reader's mind paint in the spaces between his sentences -- that allows the novel to soar.

I sometimes wondered, even as I read Ka, whether my affection for his fiction isn't just a veiled form of narcissism, where what I'm celebrating is more my imagination than Crowley's prose. Certainly it feels that way when I read reviews from people who had trouble following the thread of the narrative. Surely I am just better at painting in the mental gaps?

But I don't think that's it. To be sure, Crowley's style is not well engineered for a popular audience. The fact that his work isn't more widely known despite persistent output and sterling quality seems to speak to that.

I think it's just something about his style that aligns with a certain kind of reader. In a sense, he's a lot like Dar Oakley, the seemingly mystical figure that is able to guide me beyond the portal into Ymr. I'm glad I don't have to stay, but so too am I glad I have someone to lead me there.

[Stephen Richter · Rating 3 out of 5]

It ain't no Watership Down. Bird Lovers will love it, but I am not a fan of the crow having a group of the miserable beasts who hang out on the telephone lines pooping on my car. This book never kicked into gear for me. Like a hike that you are glad you did it, but there was not anything interesting enough to ever do the effort again.

[Tatyana Naumova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Скорее грустный, чем волшебный Краули

[Josh S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr is a genuinely strange book. The book is ostensibly the stories of an immortal (maybe?) crow over thousands of years, as it and its fellow crows first encounter the humans of Europe and then later America and modernization. The single theme that recurs in these stories is that crow's - the eponymous Dar Oakley - frequent journeys to what seems to be a strange other realm, seemingly inhabited by the dead. All of these stories are told by Dar Oakley to an old man in the modern day world who is mourning the recent death of his wife to disease.

The result is....well, uneven would be the wrong word. Many of the stories told in this book are interesting, often heartbreaking, and yet they're kind of all over the place. Some of these stories include the journeys to the realm of the dead which seems to be the constant theme throughout the book, while others are just Dar Oakley and the crows learning to adapt to more modern humans coming around them, and the result is less than the sum of its parts, leaving me feeling like I'm not sure what the overall point of the story was.

My Full Review of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr can be found here: http://garik16.blogspot.com/2018/08/s...

[Mell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough book to rate, but uniquely and often beautifully written, and memorable.

I was frequently moved by the amount of emotion conveyed by both the Crow and the various shamans/sensitive souls to whom he is attached. Dar Oakley is an outsider, and feels deeply. He witnesses human kind's folly and destruction, and learns a great deal about the world.

But long stretches of this book also drag along. Several trips into the Underworld feel repetitive, and Dar's syntax and crow descriptions of human objects and actions are sometimes wordy and confusing. Some passages were lyrical, but others were dull and worth just skimming.

I'm definitely glad I read this novel, which is unlike any other I've encountered. 3.5 stars