Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Because I do not participate more than absolutely necessary in the ecosystem of the Big South American River I had not had access to Bujold's Penric stories until the publication of the anthology volumes by Baen this year.

I have now read them and feel as though I ought to make some sort of assessment of the reading experience.

Bujold's great strength has always been the ability to engage the reader's interest early and strongly in the central character she is tracking, and that ability is on full display here.

There's not a lot of new worldbuilding at the foundational level. Where the three novels set in the Chalionverse were centred around the Daughter, the Bastard, and the Son, this set of stories is well within the ambit of the Bastard; we learn little new of the Mother or the Father, or even of the other gods. At a less foundational level, there's lots of new detail of polities not previously seen in a time not previously visited. (Desdemona has a lot of mundane memories from previous sorcerers, but demons do not seem to have knowledge of their prior world, or if they do they do not share them.)

Looking back, most of Bujold's major works, the peaks, involve a thoroughgoing change of life for her characters - Cordelia is going through one in Barrayar, Miles in Memory, Miles and Ekaterin in Komarr/A Civil Campaign, Mark and Miles in Mirror Dance, and the same is true of the central characters in the three Chalionverse novels. Here, only the first story really fits that mold (for all that Penric does move around, his essential function and identity are not subsequently challenged). Some of the people he interacts with are going through life-changing experiences, but only one of them is reasonably central, and a viewpoint character, and that change is set firmly within the context of a romance story arc.

The fates of no empires lie in the balance. Rulers are off to one side, occasionally encountered, never central. These stories are deliberately limited in scope, with traits of mystery, espionage, and romance as generic markings in many cases.

On the other hand, they make pleasant pandemic reading, short visits to another place with different concerns, written to a human scale.

This is an engaging read with interesting characters, a well-thought out world, and an unusual narrative voice. Minor spoilers follow.

I see this frequently referred to as a Hamlet retelling, but it isn't, quite, and it is carefully structured to support other older stories.

Generalized to a level which matches the novel, the Hamlet story tells of a young man who came home to find that his father was missing or dead - presumed dead, at least - and that his father's killer, a close relative, had now taken over his father's position. He takes his revenge, but the consequences are not good...

Hamlet is not original in its bare bones. The basic story of Hamlet is essentially the story of Orestes; it is what Shakespeare makes of the details which differentiates it. (And the Hamlet story's claim to originality before Shakespeare, in Saxo Grammaticus and Kyd, seems to be the subplot of shamming mad (as W. S. Gilbert had it[1]).)

Joyce perceived an isomorphism between Hamlet and the Telemachiad as well, and built it into Ulysses. So that's two classical ancestors of Hamlet.

Variants continue to be popular. Cabell had a version hearking back to the older version of the story (not that Cabell was precisely popular in that retelling). Lewis makes a form of the situation the springboard of a very different plot. Stoppard gives us a cross between Shakespeare and Beckett. Disney makes it a beast fable and gives it a happy ending.

Leckie's story is about as close to the Choephoroi as it is to Hamlet. No remarrying of his mother; the parallels to Horatio, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern all can be generally spotted but have different characterizations and narrative functions. The prince is more impulsive and less philosophical. Events unfold accordingly. It's still an effective story, but it is not the poised and melancholy story of Hamlet.

On the other hand: once there was another story about a man who was betrayed and had his freedom taken from him. Eventually he escapes and brings vengeance on those who were his enemies...

This has no major classical antecedent, but the idea is very old. Odysseus' homecoming, killing the suitors who gave been wasting his property and threatening his family, has elements of it. The Joseph story is an averted form of it, with reconciliation replacing revenge. Perhaps its greatest form in English is Samson Agonistes.

The archetypal version of it is quite late: The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas takes full advantage of the possibilities of the device using a long and tortuous plot to build up to a climactic recognition scene. From there, the device passed into melodrama.

Leckie's novel follows this pattern as well, but with a couple of small twists, coordinated so that the climax of the Hamlet/Orestes plot meshes with that of the Monte Cristo plot, and the book ends with an echo of Samson.

The structural echoes do not end there, however. There is yet another story that shapes the book, more a fairy-story than a myth: that of the person or, sometimes, family or tribe, who manage to take captive a supernatural being, and derive benefit from it, for a while. (This is a special case of the general warning: do not call up what you cannot dismiss, the sorcerer's apprentice moral.) This never ends happily, either because the benefits they receive are themselves two-edged or because eventually their source of magical support gets free, with predictable consequences.

It's not until late in the book that this plot comes to the fore, and its actual climax is a little beyond the end of the story, though perhaps more effective for being anticipated rather than seen.

[1]Some men hold
That he’s the sanest, far of all sane men–
Some that he’s really sane but shamming mad–
Some that he’s really mad but shamming sane–
Some that he will be mad, some that he was
Some that he couldn’t be. But on the whole
(As far as I can make out what they mean)
The favorite theory’s somewhat like this
Hamlet is idiotically sane,
With lucid intervals of lunacy.

This is the third and final installment in Cameron's Masters and mages series; reviews of the previous volumes may be found here and here.

The thematic and narrative arc of the entire work has been towards the avoidance, if not quite the renunciation, of violence, and particularly killing, as a means of resolving disputes. As such this third volume faces a challenge: how to present the climax of a high-stakes plot while remaining true to the theme.

It does so by consistently declining direct fight-to-the-death confrontation in ways which raise the immediate risks. In other words, it's a series of gambles with high stakes: the empire and rhen the world: the latter involving direct conflicts with principalities and powers. Most of the fighting is against extremely powerful adversaries, combining arcane and more prosaic forms of engagement, with a large admixture of strategy.

Aranthur continues to move in the direction of becoming a lightbringer; some of the things he learns cast the early events of the series in a different light. The degree of success they have can be traced directly to his willingness to do well, to trust and communicate with entities whom others reject, and, finally, to release the bonds of those unjustly bound.

The novel evades the standard pattern of defeating a great evil in an apocalyptic showdown, or even a Tolkienian end of an age; it's clear that in many ways the result of all the conflict plus a world which still incorporates good and evil, if only at a reduced level of risk - for the present - even if the immediate prospects are upward rather than downward.

This is an effective end to a good trilogy.

The problem with reviewing Lent is that the hinge of the plot occurs halfway through the novel, and would constitute a spoiler, so one has to talk around it. At the reading / signing I picked it up at, her selection was well enough into the book but carefully just before the hinge point.

The first half of the novel is an outwardly fairly accurate historical narrative about Savonarola, from his viewpoint (tight third person). Internally, it's varied by the fact that Savonarola can actually see demons (and banish them) and has fairly accurate foreknowledge of a number of things in the immediate future.

(I'm pretty sure that, quite aside from the fantastic / supernatural elements, the historical Savonarola didn't think like that, either, because, essentially, nobody in the Fifteenth Century did. This is a regular problem with no general solution in historical novels; to make a character sympathetic the author has to be ahistorical. Or they can choose to have only unsympathetic characters, which would have destroyed this particular book. Or they can just have a take-no-prisoners approach and display characters as positive with all their period faults; Dunnett tends towards this last path, but not many authors do. Or they can choose a central character who really does seem to be radically unusual for their time, like Alfred the Great (cf. GGK's The Last Light of the Sun). Let's just note that there is a real debate about whether Savonarola should be viewed positively or negatively; and that he really did have affinities and friendships with contemporary humanists. There's even an ongoing argument whether he should be beatified. So the thrust of the characterisation is not wildly off-base.)

The second half of the book has been compared to the movie Groundhog Day, with multiple reruns of history. In the universe of this book it's certainly possible to change history, with different popes, different monarchs (in one iteration Richard, Duke of Gloucester is a mercenary leader in Italy rather than King of England), and different lifespans for some important historical figures. It just won't stay that way from a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. It's also about a learning and growth curve on the part of Savonarola. And it provides a mechanism for full apocatastasis, which is to this novel much as the Republic was to Thessaly.

There are clearly some versions of apocatastasis which are heretical; there are others which may be orthodox, though even those get some traditionalists hot under their clerical collars. (Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? is a carefully reasoned defense of a version compatible with orthodoxy; despite von Balthasar's pre-eminence it provoked angry reactions from traditionalists.) One of the problems with full apocatastasis is that change is possible only in time, and change is required for repentance; it has been speculated (among those who speculate about these things) that the fallen angels fell in the instant of their creation, with no Miltonic war in heaven. Origen (who believed in apocatastasis) also thought that the whole temporal framework postdated the fall (he's an early example of reading Genesis allegorically).

As with the Platonic-universe-with-Greek-gods of the Thessaly books, this particular form of the Christian universe is a delivery mechanism for a story in Jo's hands; the orthodoxy of the presentation is rather peripheral, and of no great concern to her. But it's worth noting that the fact that some very acute minds have defended it renders its compatibility with our lived experience more plausible, along WSOD lines.

If I had to sum up the book in a couple of lines, it would be as careful stage-setting followed by a fun roller-coaster ride. As always, Jo's prose is clear and accessible, her characters engaging, and the ideas worth paying attention to.

Cameron inverts the plot structure of Cold Iron for the middle book of the trilogy: where the previous book broadly was focussed on conflicts within one city, with those conflicts finding expression in duels, Dark Forge is a travelogue with the conflict finding expression on full-scale battles. Likewise, where the first book is temporally flat, showing Aranthur's modern world, the second has key foci which are artifacts older than the empire and in some cases older than humanity.

Thematically, and on the level of the bildungsroman which underpinned the first volume, it continues the arc of Aranthur's both figuring out what is actually going in around him and discovering the limits of the martial skills - both magical and mundane - which he has depended on until now. With knowledge and experience, his choices become more difficult and ethically complex.

Cameron's use of languages of the real world to map the differing languages of his sub-created one ensures consistency at that level of world-building, although some effects of that had me getting small flashbacks to Flashman's various adventures in the Indian subcontinent and the Kizil Kum. Other than that, the details revealed in this book are well integrated.

This book moves at a run, and returns home to uncover a whole new level of crisis, setting up the third book for an even more complex struggle. It is not meant to be read on its own, and should be read as the central part of a single book - it points towards a payoff which is beyond its own scope.

Well worth the read.

I suspect that until now, Graydon's Commonweal books have been the equivalent of a deep breath before a dive, a setting up of the conditions for the real core of the story arc of the series.

Until now, a reader's view of the Commonweal has been conditioned by carefully narrow viewpoints, who for various reasons take the exercise of substantial militant power matter-of-factly, and have little reaction to the presence of the Twelve.

With Under One Banner we finally get to see the world from an informed regular (and Regular) viewpoint.

We also get to see how the Second Commonweal is diverging from the First.

One theme of the book is transformation so great as to be viewable as the death of the former state in becoming the latter state. It leads off with Eugenia, who is very near to a probable final death and escapes it due to sorcerous intervention of a scale sufficient to make a clear disjunction between her former self - a reflection in some ways of the First Commonweal - and her latter self, "artificially ancient and merciless", who can provide effective service to the Second. There are other instances; one becomes gradually aware that this applies in some sense to the Second Commonweal itself.

I suspect that this is the real beginning of the real roller-coaster ride of the series. It terminates the Reems arc which began with The March North, is set in the wake of The Fight Below the Edge, and starts to put in place the constitutional and military changes needed to get the Second Commonweal into the future.

From this point of view, it looks like an arc dealing with the birth and maturation of the Second Commonweal as a whole.The Fight Below the Edge, under this view, is a pebble which starts a whole landslide moving - and the events shown here are the first cascade of change.

We get new perspectives on the Shot-Shop, Chloris' cousin Mel, Blossom, Grue, the Independent Order, one of the Twelve we haven't seen yet, the Empire of the Spider, and Clerk Francis, last seen musing about a disconsolate unicorn.

The ride is worth it. If you haven't read the former books in the series, it's recommended before diving into this one. Graydon's post provides locations where it may be procured.

There's a long history of meta-level commentary in literature - plays like Twelfth Night where characters remark about how their action resembles, or exceeds in unlikelihood, the plot of a play, or novels where the telling and the events are tangled up, like Tristram Shandy.

SF/F has its own meta-traditions. Some are in continuity with that of more general literature - Illuminatus! has both a character inside reviewing the book (negatively) and a character who realizes, in the middle of the third volume, that he's in the middle of a novel. (It also has a narrator who doesn't know who he/she/it is.) Others, though, are peculiar to SF/F, like the refraction of fandom through SF (Bimbos of the Death Sun, Deep Secret), or the use of the portal fantasy in contexts where the characters are aware of the conventions governing the world into which they are dropped (in some cases, as with The Secret Country, mistakenly so). Harold Shea (after some confusion at the very beginning) knows the works he's visiting, and the Fillory of The Magicians is fairly close to the stories the narrator grew up reading.

More elaborately, there are fantasies which send up plot token fantasies (Dark Lord Of Derkholm bounces off Jones' prior Tough Guide to Fantasyland) and space operas which send up cliché space opera (Erickson's Wilful Child).

The best known recent book of this sort is Scalzi's Redshirts, which both sent up Trek-style plot conventions and allowed characters to become aware that they lived inside a fictional narrative.

One can think of Frey's The Untold Tale as a sort of paired bookend at the fantasy end of the spectrum, along one axis, with Redshirts: both of them are about the relation between the characters in a Tolkienian sub-creation and the writer, and both choose a case where the work is an example of, not to put too fine a point on it, cliché-driven hackwork.

However, the parallel is only partial. Frey's book also takes on fannish attitudes towards texts and characters, includes a running stream of commentary which comes out of the tradition of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, refracts recent debates about harassment at cons and diversity in SFF, and wraps all of this in an inverted portal fantasy (i.e. the viewpoint is that of an inhabitant of the secondary world and not of the visitor from our own).

Or not quite our own. The whole conceit turns on a set of novels which seem to occupy about the same social space as Harry Potter does in our world; and they, assuredly, are not part of our world. It's still pretty close, though; there's even a (cleverly explicitly unattributed) reference to James Nicoll's quote about English worked in. (James in turn reviewed the book, but did not refer to the reference to himself).

The novels do not (as far as I can tell) have prominent close parallels in our time; they look very much like a cross of cliché heroic fantasy (with plot coupon structures reminiscent, to that degree, of Silver on the Tree, The High King, or Percy Jackson) with a mediaeval romance's quest structure.

Let me make it clear, before the following, that I liked this book. I intend to read its sequel. That bring said, I have some issues with the book that nag at me.

First, it tries to do too much. The conceit of a portal fantasy story "from the other side" is distinct from a critique of inept or stereotypical formulaic fantasy. Both are distinct again from the "clay speaking to the potter" theme, or the critique of aspects of fandom, or the concern with agency and repression. Its not that one has to have one single focus, by any means, but the sheer number of tasks the narrative takes on makes it blurry, less focussed than it might have been.

Secondly, it's told using the historic present in the first person. There's a very long history of the historic present in the third person going back to the classical world, but in the first person it's essentially the mode of a pub story ("So I go into the room, and I see it's empty, and the package I'm looking for is on the table..."). As such, it's disconcerting, even though there's a thematic reason for it (it highlights interiority which is presumably absent from the published books, and from their general kind of story, at that). Eventually enough exposure renders it transparent; but while Frey's prose is reasonably good, it's not at the level which makes having one's attention shifted from the story to its textuality an actual pleasure.

Finally, there's a great big chunk of missing mechanism; and given that this was originally written as a stand-alone novel (the author then was offered a three-novel contract) I wonder very much whether it will end up being addressed. To wit: it is made very clear, on one hand, that this is not a case of an author tapping into knowledge of a general pre-existing world; it's very clearly shaped by his imagination. No mechanism is even gestured towards why the works of his imagination should have the power to call anyone from our world into them, nor why they should have enough substance to enter our world and live comfortably there. Is this some special gift of the author's? Is it true of all secondary worlds (if it is, it's the equivalent of perpetual motion, an ability to pull being out of nothing)? Is there an infinite continuum of worlds, a sheaf of which will match any given literary work (the Harold Shea model)? Is the "our world" of the story radically different from our own in other ways (Eris is real, and this is a joke on her part)?