![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
Jan. 26th, 2016 11:43 amChapters/Indigo had this a week and a half early. What follows is in intention spoiler-free.
This feels a bit like a coda to the Vorkosigan saga proper. The only people it doesn't present (by the end) in a "settled-down" state (except maybe glancingly) are Mark and Kareen.
It has something of the relationship to pastoral that space opera has to epic. There's a lot of general attention to"nature" (an alien nature, but nature) to the degree that one of the central characters becomes so focussed on it that formal studies in biology result. The main focus of the novel is on conversations, much as the pastoral form tended heavily towards dialogues (well, singing-contests). And like Daphnis and Chloe it has a couple of recognition scenes where children discover (things about) their parents.
I don't actually think that this is deliberate on Bujold's part; I think it more a matter of convergence than of design, but the parallels still say something about the novel.
Like every single one of Bujold's novels, this includes a romantic subplot, and like many of them, it is built around it. In this case, it is not entwined with any major plots of other sorts. (Actually, there is one tiny subplot which traces its way through the book, until a not-quite dea ex machina in the person of Kareen provides a resolution in the third last chapter, which can be said to run in parallel with rather than feeding into the main plot, and another tiny subplot which ends up being tied into the resolution of the second subplot. But both of these are, from the point of view of the book and of the principal characters, peripheral.)
Unlike some of her more recent Barrayarverse novels, this is clearly one that Bujold herself wanted to write -- the themes pick up other strands from her earlier work, especially the perspectives on maturity which underpin Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and (to some degree) Memory, the concerns with family which drive Mirror Dance, and the interest in romance as a structural model which inspired the Sharing Knife books. It also reads as a valediction to the whole universe, tying up a couple of loose ends and leaving the reader with a perspective on both Cordelia and Miles along an axis of domesticity.
Readers who want action will probably be disappointed -- the biggest crisis, physically, is an accident over in a few minutes which generates a number of injuries but no deaths. There are no antagonists. But it is well-crafted and readable: to its audience (which is very much not first time-readers: it depends on the readers having knowledge of Cordelia's and Miles' pasts for effect), it delivers a worthwhile, possibly valedictory, meditation on aspects of the series as a whole.
Personally, I would be more interested in seeing more Chalionverse stories: I find it irritating that Penric's Demon seems to be available only from sources which I do not use (Amazon Kindle, iTunes, and Nook), although I understand that an edition from Subterranean Press may be in the works.
This feels a bit like a coda to the Vorkosigan saga proper. The only people it doesn't present (by the end) in a "settled-down" state (except maybe glancingly) are Mark and Kareen.
It has something of the relationship to pastoral that space opera has to epic. There's a lot of general attention to"nature" (an alien nature, but nature) to the degree that one of the central characters becomes so focussed on it that formal studies in biology result. The main focus of the novel is on conversations, much as the pastoral form tended heavily towards dialogues (well, singing-contests). And like Daphnis and Chloe it has a couple of recognition scenes where children discover (things about) their parents.
I don't actually think that this is deliberate on Bujold's part; I think it more a matter of convergence than of design, but the parallels still say something about the novel.
Like every single one of Bujold's novels, this includes a romantic subplot, and like many of them, it is built around it. In this case, it is not entwined with any major plots of other sorts. (Actually, there is one tiny subplot which traces its way through the book, until a not-quite dea ex machina in the person of Kareen provides a resolution in the third last chapter, which can be said to run in parallel with rather than feeding into the main plot, and another tiny subplot which ends up being tied into the resolution of the second subplot. But both of these are, from the point of view of the book and of the principal characters, peripheral.)
Unlike some of her more recent Barrayarverse novels, this is clearly one that Bujold herself wanted to write -- the themes pick up other strands from her earlier work, especially the perspectives on maturity which underpin Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and (to some degree) Memory, the concerns with family which drive Mirror Dance, and the interest in romance as a structural model which inspired the Sharing Knife books. It also reads as a valediction to the whole universe, tying up a couple of loose ends and leaving the reader with a perspective on both Cordelia and Miles along an axis of domesticity.
Readers who want action will probably be disappointed -- the biggest crisis, physically, is an accident over in a few minutes which generates a number of injuries but no deaths. There are no antagonists. But it is well-crafted and readable: to its audience (which is very much not first time-readers: it depends on the readers having knowledge of Cordelia's and Miles' pasts for effect), it delivers a worthwhile, possibly valedictory, meditation on aspects of the series as a whole.
Personally, I would be more interested in seeing more Chalionverse stories: I find it irritating that Penric's Demon seems to be available only from sources which I do not use (Amazon Kindle, iTunes, and Nook), although I understand that an edition from Subterranean Press may be in the works.
