What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  The way the characters are introduced as friends, and the way they work as friends, is excellent. We’re going to see in earlier-set books, these relationships beginning, we’re going to see Vlad a lot less confident, and then in later-set books we’ll see him develop a conscience. Jhereg’s a good introduction and also a good story. This was the first Vlad book I read—I’d previously read Brokedown Palace and The Phoenix Guards, which is a much less good introduction to the world. I can remember thinking with the overcast that perpetually covers the Empire and the way the Cycle works that now I got it.

  If you haven’t read these, Jhereg is a fine place to start.

  Spoilers from here on, potentially for everything except Iorich, which I haven’t read yet.

  Chronologically, Jhereg comes about a year after Yendi and pretty much immediately before Teckla.

  Thematically, Vlad spends the book trying to assassinate a member of the House of Jhereg, thus acting like a Jhereg and with the book revolving around a Jhereg. There’s also the acquisition of Loiosh in the prologue and of Rocza at the end, providing plenty of jheregs.

  The actual plot of Jhereg is extremely neat. Mellar has been plotting for several hundred years to destroy the Houses of the Jhereg, the Dragon and the Dzur. He’s doing this because he’s a mixture of all three and feels underappreciated by all of them. His death at Jhereg hands in Castle Black really would accomplish what he wants. The shape of the book is really the shape of Vlad working out what’s going on. The pace of revelation is excellent, both for the Mellar plot, the world, and the revealed backstory about Vlad’s soul and the beginning of the Empire. The information about that and the Interregnum directly contradicts Paarfi, and I’m going with Vlad’s account direct from Aliera’s mouth here. I also very much like the way everyone has to go around Morrolan’s code of honour and the Jhereg code of honour—the idea that they’d recover from a war in ten thousand years, but if they lost their reputation they’d never recover.

  Despite trying hard, I can’t see any setup here for the unhappy marriage in Teckla. There’s some in Yendi, but here I don’t think it’s Vlad being oblivious—I’m not seeing it either. Cawti would like to work, sure, but that’s all. I remember when I first read it liking very much that there wasn’t a romantic subplot—romances and divorces are common in fiction, people who are quietly happily married all through a book are notably rare. Oh well.

  Neat little things: Vlad’s vision, including Devera. We know what almost all these bits are now?

  “There is a cry of ‘charge’ and five thousand Dragons come storming at the place the Eastern army is entrenched.” (Dragon)

  “Making love with Cawti that first time—the moment of entry even more than the moment of release. I wonder if she plans to kill me before we’re finished and I don’t really care.” (Yendi)

  “The Dzur hero, coming alone to Dzur Mountain, sees Sethra Lavode stand up before him, Iceflame in her hand.” (Dzur)

  “A small girlchild with big brown eyes looks at me, and smiles.” (Devera getting everywhere as usual—possibly specifically from Tiassa?)

  “The energy bolt, visible as a black wave, streaks towards me, and I swing Spellbreaker at it, wondering if it will work.” (Issola)

  “Aliera stands up before the shadow of Kieron the Conquerer, there in the midst of the Halls of Judgement, in the Paths of the Dead beyond Deathsgate Falls.” (Taltos)

  I’ve always wondered how much of the whole story he knew before he started it and how much he’s making up as he goes along, and this implies “lots.” It must take a lot of confidence to make a first novel the start of a nineteen-book series.

  Other cool things: it sets up an insoluble problem and then finds a very satisfactory solution to it. Also, Brust is doing a thing where he has a wisecracking assassin professional criminal and you accept him as a good guy. He’s setting that up for undermining later, but it’s worth noting the way he takes genre conventions here (as with Agyar) and uses them to mess with your head.

  NOVEMBER 21, 2009

  75. Yendi coils and strikes unseen: Steven Brust’s Yendi

  Yendi (1984) was published a year after Jhereg but is set a year or so before it. If I hadn’t read them bound in one (phenomenally ugly) volume I’d have assumed I’d picked them up in the wrong order. But indeed, Brust’s plan in writing a series was to choose immediately to go back and fill in a volume of earlier events. That’s risky, as the reader who reads in publication order knows how it’s going to come out. Brust doesn’t rely on suspense for tension, but rather on the interest of the twisty plot. You know Vlad’s going to survive and win and get the girl—but there’s a general expectation of that anyway in the kind of book this purports to be.

  Vlad’s voice, hard-boiled and cynical first person, has been compared to Zelazny, and also to classic American hard-boiled detective fiction, but Vlad isn’t a detective, he’s a criminal. Nevertheless, in both Jhereg and Yendi he solves mysteries. The plot in Yendi is complicated and twisty, as you might expect—yendi the animal are kind of heraldic poisonous snakes.

  I think Yendi would be a perfectly reasonable place to start the series.

  Spoilers for Yendi start here. Actually, a general spoiler policy on these posts. I haven’t read Iorich yet, and neither have most other people. Please don’t spoil it. When I read it, there’ll be an Iorich review, and it will have a spoiler section. Until then, no spoilers in comments please. However, spoilers for any of the other Dragaera books are fine. I’m going on the general assumption that you’ve either read them all or don’t care.

  Vlad in Yendi is notably younger, brasher and less confident, but still himself. That’s quite impressive. Not all writers can make that work. Apart from the fact it’s set before Jhereg and has Vlad’s meeting with Cawti, Yendi doesn’t play games with time. We know Vlad’s going to be married to Cawti the second we see her—even before we hear her name, because we were told about how they met. We know Vlad’s going to win the Jhereg war and get an enlarged area. What keeps us reading is finding out how, which is itself a twisty Yendi thing to do.

  As for Cawti, the whole “killing him first and then falling in love” is done very well. Here we do see setup and warning signs for the relationship and for the situation as of Teckla—most noticeably Vlad thinking of Cawti as a female version of himself, and Vlad leaping to conclusions about her and about himself. They fall in love awfully quickly and with really insufficient thought—but that’s how people do. We see Noish-pa for the first time here, though he was mentioned in Jhereg. There couldn’t be a nicer happy ending.

  Everything is still upbeat and light, even with the hard-boiled tone. With the plot, re-reading, it’s obvious that every time the Sorceress in Green is mentioned Vlad assumes she’s an Athyra and Morrolan doesn’t get the chance to correct him. She is in fact the Yendi of the title—and as well as her long plot, Vlad spends much of the book plotting and trying to figure out plots. The whole situation with Norathar is interesting—and it’s also interesting that Brust doesn’t really make much use of Norathar in the series. She’s been Cawti’s partner, but she’s very much kept in the background.

  I like Yendi, it’s sufficiently like Jhereg that it satisfies my “give me another cookie” craving and sufficiently different to be interesting.

  NOVEMBER 23, 2009

  76. A coachman’s tale: Steven Brust’s Brokedown Palace

  Brokedown Palace (1986) was the first Brust I read. I’d heard him well spoken of online, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to pick up the extremely ugly British edition of the first three Vlad books, and this was in the library. It was an unusual place to start with Dragaera, but not a terrible one. It’s a very odd book, and it was very odd of Brust to write it after Yendi and before Teckla. It’s set in the East, in Fenario, and you wouldn’t know it was Dragaera at all except that it clearly is. It’s written like a fairy tale—and it is punctuated with things written even more like fairy tales. It draws on Brust’s Hungarian
background, and it’s connected to the Grateful Dead song “Brokedown Palace.”

  I really like this book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, but it’s so dreamlike and odd that I find it very difficult to talk about coherently. It’s like trying to pick up fragments of mist. Brilliant book. Very weird.

  The story is about a family of brothers who live in the kingdom of Fenario, on the borders of Faerie. The eldest, Laszlo, is the king, and he beats up the youngest, Miklos, because Miklos mentions that the palace is falling down. Dying, Miklos slips into the River that flows out of Faerie, and one of the great powers of the land. Then he meets a talking horse and after that it gets weird. The book is a fairy tale about brothers, death, life, renewal, magic, love and keeping norska. (Norska are rabbits. Rabbits like the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I instantly recognised that as a norska the first time I saw the film.)

  This book is undoubtedly a fairy tale. It’s also undoubtedly set in Dragaera which is easily seen as science-fictional. The orange overcast that covers the Empire is here as the “hand of Faerie” and in the same way the magic here is infinitely more magical. There’s a lot less of it. In the Vlad books, people routinely make psionic communication and raise the dead. Here a bit of magical healing is very unusual. But what there is, isn’t taken for granted, isn’t routine, is magical, perhaps even magical realist—there’s a taltos horse (which raises questions about why Vlad is called “taltos”) that can talk, there’s a tree that becomes a palace, and a river with an agenda. All the magic in the Vlad books can be categorised, repeated, relied on. Here, none of it can.

  I find myself reading it now with double vision. Looked at one way Miklos goes into Faerie and labours for two years and comes back as a wizard. Looked at another he goes into the Empire, becomes a Teckla, gets a perfectly ordinary connection to the Orb and learns a little sorcery. There’s the whole thing of killing Verra and stopping sorcery from working. It’s a very weird book, and I suspect it contains some keys to the universe if only I could see them clearly. Certainly, standing here I never had any confusion about the overcast, that the Furnace is the sun and that you never see clear sky.

  The book starts with the legend of Fenarr, which is seen from the Dragaeran side in The Phoenix Guards. This is clearly the same incident, the same set of events, seen through that doubled vision—from the Eastern side it’s ringed about with fantasy, mist, legend, magic, from the Dragaeran side it’s a clever bit of diplomacy. This may have something to do with the length of time an Easterner lives. Fenarr is a legend in Fenario, but “Lord Kav,” with whom he arranged the peace, is still alive.

  It doesn’t say so in the book, but I have heard as extra-canonical information that Brigitta’s baby (the one people will have to look out for) is Cawti. Interesting if true, and a bit mind-boggling.

  NOVEMBER 24, 2009

  77. Frightened teckla hides in grass: Steven Brust’s Teckla

  The first time I read Teckla (1987) I hated it. Hated it. I like it now, but it took quite a lot of time for me to come around to it.

  Teckla is set in the same fun fantasy world of Dragaera as the first two books of the series, but unlike the romps that are Jhereg and Yendi it’s a real downer. The animals the House of the Teckla are named after are mice, and the Teckla are the peasants and proletarians of the Empire. The book takes places chronologically immediately after Jhereg and it is about a proletarian uprising among the Teckla and Easterners (humans) of South Adrilankha. It’s about ordinary people getting caught up with the Jhereg and the nasty side of assassins—it’s no fun at all when it’s killing ordinary men and women who are threatening the profits of organized crime. It’s also about the messy end of a relationship. It’s about passing and being proud or ashamed of what you are.

  What I hated about it was that it was grim and depressing and realistic in a way that turned the first two volumes inside out. That’s what I now appreciate about it. Teckla provides some necessary grounding, some chiaroscuro to the palette of Dragaera.

  Spoilers.

  Brust really uses his American-Hungarian heritage in these books. The Easterners, Fenarians, have Hungarian names and Hungarian culture, and he also uses Hungarian mythology and ideas about magic and witchcraft. But it’s not only that, it’s also the whole thing of being an immigrant in a wider culture, either getting trapped in a ghetto or getting out and despising those who don’t. Vlad is a third-generation immigrant. His grandfather came from Fenario and lives in the ghetto, his father got out and aped the Dragaerans he lived among, and Vlad is uncomfortably caught between cultures. He knows he can’t really be a Dragaeran, but he has a Jhereg title and there’s the whole question of his soul that came up in Jhereg. He’s uncomfortable with all this, and when Cawti gets involved with the revolutionary group he gets uncomfortable about that. There’s a lot here that demonstrates understanding of what it is to live on the underside of a rich culture and the kind of things people do about that.

  Vlad spends a lot of this book literally hiding, and being frightened and miserable. As Yendi was the beginning of his marriage with Cawti, this is the end. This is a closely observed example of one of the ways a couple can split up—Cawti is more interested in what she’s doing in South Adrilankha than in her marriage, and Vlad can’t won’t and doesn’t want to change. She has moved on and left him behind, and what he wants he can’t have—if the Cawti of his imagination was ever real, she’s gone.

  The Teckla of the title is probably Paresh, who tells Vlad his life story at length. This is one of the most interesting bits of the book, how Paresh, a peasant, became a sorcerer and a revolutionary. Vlad isn’t solving a mystery here, as in the first two books. He tries to deal with a problem, and finds some answers, but the conclusion is at most only a deep breath—the real conclusion is in Phoenix. (If there were any sense to the multiple volumes, Teckla and Phoenix would be bound together.)

  None of Vlad’s noble friends from the earlier books appear here. Morrolan tries to contact Vlad once, but we don’t see any of them and they’re barely mentioned. This is in keeping with the general Teckla tone of the book, and the general depressing tone too. It would be livened up with some of Morrolan and Aliera’s sparkling dialogue. There’s not much that sparkles here at all.

  The peasants are unhappy, the urban poor are unhappy, they’re getting organized—that’s really unusual for a fantasy world. It could be described as socialist fantasy, and it’s certainly informed by a Marxist worldview—which we learn in Phoenix is the view from the wrong world. That isn’t how things work in Dragaera. (So clever he should watch out he doesn’t cut himself.)

  Teckla has a fascinating organizational structure. It’s the usual seventeen chapters, but the book begins with a laundry list—a list of clothes sent to the laundry with instructions about cleaning and mending them, and each chapter is headed with a little bit of that list like “remove bloodstains from cuff,” and in that chapter you see how the cuff got bloodstained, or how the cat hairs got onto the cloak, and so on. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that done before or since.

  NOVEMBER 25, 2009

  78. How can you tell? Steven Brust’s Taltos

  Taltos (1988) is set before all the other books in the series, or at least all the books written so far. It’s a great place to start, especially for people who like reading by internal chronology. It’s also a very good book, one of the best. It’s surprising that Brust preferred to circle back and tell this story instead of finishing the story he’d started in Teckla, but I’m sure he had his reasons. Taltos is the story of how the young Jhereg assassin Vlad Taltos grew up, met some of the friends and colleagues he relies on in the earlier written later-set books, and how they get him embroiled in larger events and have an adventure.

  Spoilers, including a spoiler for Orca.

  Taltos is the first of the Vlad books to have a weird structure. The book is ordered in seventeen chapters, as usual, but each chapter begins with an account of Vlad doing a
spell that, if written chronologically, he does in the last chapter. Each chapter also contains a flashback to Vlad’s childhood and youth—these are in chronological order in themselves, but not in terms of the overall story. There are two threads, Vlad growing up and Vlad’s buttonman going to Dzur Mountain and the consequences of that. That’s three threads with the spell. Fortunately this is all held together by Vlad’s voice and by the interest of the events.

  Reading in publication order, the reader is already aware that they succeed in rescuing Aliera—Aliera is a major character in the later-set books. However, seeing Vlad meeting Morrolan and Sethra and Aliera, and discovering something about the Paths of the Dead, is so inherently interesting that this doesn’t matter at all. Also, if you read the books in chronological order, you get Taltos and then Yendi (well, you used to), which gives you two books in sequence in which a new Dragon Heir is discovered. This way, they’re well separated.

  Taltos is very much about Vlad as a human, and what it means to be an Easterner among Dragaerans. It’s also strongly about Vlad doing witchcraft. If “taltos” has the meaning that “taltos horse” has in Brokedown Palace, then it definitely has something to do with innate magic. Vlad creates a spell to move an object.