Same cod-antique setting, (basically) the same protagonist, same chaste love-mostly-hate gender dynamics, but Parker uses A Practical Guide to Conquering the World to subtly upend the formula of Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It and takes the Robur novels to an unexpected, almost-mystical coda. The novel is definitely flawed — our narrator Felix is at once the most developed character in the book and yet even more of a cipher than Notker and Orhan, and Parker's thematic aims feel muddled — but there’s a real delight in seeing too-familiar ingredients put to such different use.

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There’s actually very little in the first quarter of A Practical Guide to justify its existence after How to Rule definitively wrapped up the story of The City. We immediately have another snarky, clever Robur outsider paired with an opinionated woman who serves as his Greek chorus and enabler, and although we’ve moved from maybe-Byzantium to I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-China, there’s a worrying familiarity to the pattern of official mixups and near-arrests and comic coincidences that kick the action off just like they did in the last two books. We seem to be treading water here, and not particularly gracefully: our hero has a recurved composite bow, he’s in touch with some angry nomads, the title mentions world conquest, it’s all just pretty…obvious.

But to Parker’s credit, this all appears to be by design. The lucky coincidences and cheeky anachronisms aren’t just sprinkled on, they’re piled on in such heaps and mounds that even the densest characters can’t help but notice that Felix isn't just fortunate, his luck is monstrous. Or divine. Or both. Overpowered bows and implausibly disciplined nomadic troops and really glaring fourth-wall-breaking cultural references aren’t just quibbles for reviewers to go after, they’re actually the central problem of the narrative.

Once it’s clear Felix’s plot armour has shoulderpads that have shoulderpads, the book shifts from his actions (which are clearly going to succeed, it’s just a question of how) to focus more on the ripples he creates in the world around him. Parker is characteristically sardonic here, gleefully documenting instances of naked opportunism and craven bandwagoning, but he mixes in a surprising amount of sympathy for the idea that the all-conquering Felix might truly be an agent of some kind of supernatural will. There’s no one historical analogy here, but it’s hard not to see echoes of the early days of Islam alongside the Mongol conquests and Alexander the Great and Paul Atreides.

To be honest, Parker doesn’t seem certain what he’s getting at with all this. Is it that God / gods really exist, with a special providence for the incredibly violent, imperialist Robur state? Or at least that Hegel’s world spirit has a bit of a thing for them? That Great Men Are Real and he’s tired of pretending they’re not? That any sufficiently improbable history is indistinguishable from magic? That historical truth is a delusion so why not just go along for the wacky ride?

The answer is left as an exercise to the reader, which is probably the only way to go with such heady material. I do wish Parker had taken a page from Wolfe (truly the master of unstable narratives by deceptive protagonists) and left a little more space for doubt though: for all the caustic skepticism he lashes over events, he doesn’t welcome the idea we should seriously question our Robur narrators, perhaps because they are such obvious extensions of Parker's own authorial voice. Still, it seems unfair to fault the magician for trying to distract you while pulling off such an odd, unusual trick.