“April is the cruellest month,” according to the opening line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The logic behind this statement is that we have survived another hard winter by hunkering down and closing ourselves in on ourselves but that, with the onset of spring, both memories and desire now return. With them comes the painful realisation that it’s time to embrace the struggles of life once more as the whole cycle resumes again.

I’m tempted to joke that it’s due to climate change that in Hana Carolina’s engaging and emotionally intelligent novella, The Inescapable March, this moment arrives a month earlier. I think the choice of month is more deliberate, though—because the precise moment being described is what one of the novel’s two main characters, flamboyant travelling-actor Hyacinth, describes as “the wretched vestiges of winter” (p. 29). At the point when the novella opens—as dour warrior-mage Arran, from whose viewpoint proceedings are narrated, muses to himself—we’re not quite yet at the beginning of spring. The problem therefore is not that Arran can’t bear the pain of returning feeling but rather that he can’t even jolt himself far enough out of his resentment towards life in general, and of Hyacinth in particular, to even care. The two are friends who are attracted towards each other, but Arran has difficulty dealing with the emotional demands placed upon him by Hyacinth, who is an outrageous flirt with both men and women. Indeed, even while reflecting on how Hyacinth would have taken the brief hint of early-morning sunshine as an excuse to dress wholly inappropriately in layers of silk and an ornamental hat, and would by now be complaining bitterly about the cold, Arran is actually in the process of leaving him behind to die in the siege of a grubby little market town by an advancing army.

The reason that Arran knows that Hyacinth is going to die is that he has already seen it happen. More than once, in fact. Even as he thinks about it, he meets another version of himself riding in the other direction back to the town, before wearily turning round himself. Once there, he spells himself with magical strength before fighting and killing many soldiers, including one with a prominent facial scar, to cut his way back into the town and find Hyacinth amongst the panic-stricken crowds of townsfolk. However, with the effects of the spell waning, he is now exhausted and can do no more than hold on to Hyacinth as the two are crushed to death in the stampede against the locked town gates. Then, they wake up again in a bed in the town inn, exactly as they had at the beginning of that day in a brief moment of unexpected sunlight.

This is not simply a fantasy reworking of Groundhog Day (1993) in which the “march” of the hostile army is inescapable, however (though this is, of course, the other sense of the novella’s title). For one thing, we are never quite sure of the exact sequence of events: The third and penultimate chapter, “The End” is followed by Chapter 4, “The Beginning.” Even if we were such charlatans as to cut the book up in order to reassemble its constituent passages into chronological sequence, I’m not convinced that a linear timeline would emerge. Furthermore, there is also the question of how many times the novella’s events have happened to its characters before. At one point, we are told that Arran and Hyacinth first met a century ago. At several points we encounter the fortune teller Vadoma, who remains aware of what is happening and complains about being stuck in a liminal hell while having to watch her passing dalliance Richard—the soldier with the scar—“die a thousand times over” (p. 96). Later, Arran apologises to Hyacinth for making him “relive the most painful moments of your life a million fucking times” (p. 125). This is not just hyperbole. Both the scale of repetition and the refusal of linearity indicate a queer temporality that can’t simply be fixed by a couple of clever tweaks and a “happy ever after” ending.

The actual process of what is happening is explained to us early in the book, in a scene in which Arran is selling his magic to a woman who wants her husband not to have left her following the death of their son. As he explains to her, the spell will take her outside of space and time and enable her to replay scenarios endlessly until she gets the desired result. The husband won’t remember what happened: “He’ll only live through the final outcome you choose” (p. 25). There’s a telling moment when the woman maliciously asks Arran why he can’t fix his own life if it’s that simple. Then, after he has sat through the dizzying rhythm of hundreds of simultaneous interactions between woman and man, in all of which the husband leaves, she also asks him if the spell can be cast on someone who’s dead. To which he replies that he could only do that if he cast a spell on himself too:

“Many have tried. Most cannot change a thing. And being trapped in endless repetition, with death as the only certain outcome—that’s hell. I wouldn’t do that to someone, or myself.”

“Hell? That’s what you think hell is?” She let out a wet chuckle. “That’s just life.” (p. 28)

In the end, though, which is also the beginning, this is what he must have done—because the whole novella is concerned with Arran and Hyacinth, who is barely aware of what is happening, trying to escape from exactly such a liminal hell-life. But every time Arran tries to leave, with or without Hyacinth, he ends up coming back to the same place again and dying once more. It’s only when he asks Vadoma how they get out that she points out the problem, by replying deadpan, “Are you sure you want to?” (p. 94). Ultimately, The Inescapable March is about whether Arran will continue warping time forever because he can’t bring himself to face the truth, which is that he loves Hyacinth. However, to reach this point he has to overcome his own socialisation as warrior-mage and necromancer.

At this point, I should also mention that, despite this serious purpose, the novella is very funny in places. Carolina’s dialogue is sharp and the moments when Arran and Hyacinth engage in banter are especially delicious. There is also a great scene in which Vadoma reads the palms of Hyacinth, Arran, and Richard in sequence and to darkly humorous effect. It’s not difficult to imagine The Inescapable March as forming the basis for a “high-concept” episode in a big-budget fantasy television series: Gruff magical warrior, bisexual companion figure, fighting, magic, bedroom scenes and there’s even a song. (Obviously I’d love someone to actually make this episode!) What the novella foregrounds is how this kind of fantasy is not just great entertainment but also a kind of technology for making sense of our time and even altering it.

It seems clear to me that the rise of fantasy—which, following the global success of A Game of Thrones (2011-2019) has become one of the master-narratives of the twenty-first century—is shaping how people understand and engage with the society around them. Winter has come and brought a quasi-medieval power politics to Europe and America that would have seemed too crude to be believable twenty-five years ago. I could bemoan that state of affairs but that would be hypocritical given that I have been reading fantasy since childhood. I think all of us who are fantasy fans have to own it. But, in any case, I don’t want to disavow fantasy completely, either, because when it combines wit, humour, and magic as The Inescapable March does, while refusing the quick fix of happy ever after, it allows us to imagine worlds where life is not just a tedious linear repetition of nasty, brutish, and short days until we die. Or, to put it another way, queer fantasy allows us to escape “the wretched vestiges of winter” which make Carolina’s March even crueller than Eliot’s April.