What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Spoilers: I mean it!

  Orca alternates first-person points of view between Vlad and Kiera the Thief, who is revealed at the end to be Sethra Lavode in disguise. I’d never have guessed—even re-reading here, I don’t notice the things that give her away to Vlad, and generally I don’t see it in the other books. It doesn’t feel wrong, but … very odd. It makes sense of some things. There is a lot of “I teleported home” or “to a place where I could…,” which with the context is clearly Dzur Mountain, but which you can’t tell without. It’s more of that Agyar-shadow-space expectation-shaping by misdirection. Kiera/Sethra’s sections are narrated to Cawti—at least, mostly. She says she’s leaving things out, and we don’t know if she tells Cawti about her true identity. At the very end there’s one mention of the child Vlad Norathar—a child Vlad doesn’t know about, and with which she must have been pregnant at the end of Phoenix.

  Vlad is on top form throughout Orca, wisecracking, conversing with Loiosh, and after Athyra I was very glad to have his voice back. Yet as his parts are related to Kiera/Sethra and not to mysterious metal boxes or whatever, he’s different. Orca are capitalists and sailors. He doesn’t go on any ships, but he spends the whole book acting like an Orca, tangled up in business, trying to untangle the complicated business affairs of a dead Orca, Fyres, to sort out the property rights of a woman who is trying to cure Savn. The whole complicated property scam sounds remarkably like what happened to the U.S. mortgage market last year, which is impressive for a book published in 1996. It’s interesting—the whole plot of Orca is very interesting, especially as the implications widen and widen.

  Savn’s partial recovery is encouraging, but I do hope we see him again.

  DECEMBER 4, 2009

  84. Haughty dragon yearns to slay: Steven Brust’s Dragon

  Dragon was the first Vlad book to come out from Tor. It was published in 1998, a year after Emmet and I had met Steve Brust when he was guest of honour at Convocation in Cambridge, and when I first read Dragon I did wonder whether he’d written it this way deliberately to stop it being possible for me to read the series in internal chronological order. Dragon is not in the ongoing chronology, but set way back between Taltos and Yendi, with a frame story set immediately after Yendi. In addition to that, it’s told with the beginning of every chapter advancing one part of the story, while the rest of the chapter goes back in time. The book has three timelines within it—the post-Yendi interludes, the beginning-chapter advancing story, and the end-chapter advancing story. You’d think it would be as complicated as hell to read, but it isn’t, it flows smoothly and clearly, but very very out of sequence. This flow works largely because it’s carried by Vlad’s voice at its most brash and bouncy, and partly because it’s the story of a war. This is a different, but equally artificial, device from the cliffhanger-starter method Zelazny used in Doorways in the Sand but it gives me far less whiplash.

  Like Five Hundred Years After, Dragon gives us a story we’ve heard alluded to before, the Battle of Barritt’s Tomb. And again, Brust turns some of what we thought we knew inside out. The books do all stand alone, but I don’t know if Dragon would work as an introductory volume. It isn’t one I’d give someone to start out with, I think it probably works best for a reader already invested in Vlad and his story.

  Spoilers. There are a large number of Dragons around, but then there always are. There’s Morrolan and Aliera (and maybe Sethra), there’s Sethra the Younger, there are all the Dragons in the army and most of all there’s Fornia. I think there is always a characteristic member of the relevant House around, as well as Vlad acting like a member of the House. I’ve just realised that quite often it’s an enemy—the Sorceress in Green in Yendi, Loraan in Athyra, Fyres in Orca, etc. The only real exceptions are Phoenix and Teckla. In any case, Vlad definitely acts like a Dragon here—he wants personal revenge on Fornia and he joins the army and goes into battle. He develops a sense of honour, and he has fun complaining about the food and the rain and the boredom and the indiscriminate slaughter. Also, he talks about talking to Sethra about tactics and strategy and logistics. I remain very impressed that Brust does Vlad at different ages and life stages so well. In Orca we have an older, wearier, warier Vlad, here he’s young and ready for anything, quick to take offence, and not really frightened, yet Vlad does grow within the novel.

  Vlad sees what was probably the picture that ended the Athyra reign and started the Phoenix one, as mentioned in The Phoenix Guards, but of course he has no idea of the historic context of what he’s seeing, it’s just a picture to him—unless it is just a different picture of a wounded dragon protecting her young, but I think that would be a twist too many. It’s interesting to see him begin to run Morrolan’s security. Meeting Daymar is interesting too—and especially meeting him through Kragar. (I wonder how they met?) It’s nice to see a little bit more of Vlad and Cawti when they were happy, even if it is a very little bit. It’s interesting to see how Aliera got Pathfinder and got rid of Kieron’s sword. I loved Loiosh being the mascot and everyone feeding him, and I loved Vlad getting used to the awful food. The tricks Vlad plays, burning the biscuits and so on, are also neat. When I think of Dragon it’s the little details that stand out, along with Vlad’s long slow journey across a battlefield. This may be because the chronology of the book requires me to build a structure to hold it in my head to get the shape of the story, and after I’ve finished reading it, even if that was yesterday, it’s work to hold on to that structure.

  DECEMBER 8, 2009

  85. Issola strikes from courtly bow: Steven Brust’s Issola

  Issola would be the absolute worst place to start the Taltos series, because it is chock-full of revelation. The first time I read it I could feel my jaw dropping further and further as I read, stunned as things I’d wondered about and engaged in online speculation about were discussed and explained in detail and at length in a way I’d never suspected they would be. Issola contains more conventional fantasy plot and more revelation than all the other volumes up to this point put together. If this were an ordinary series, it would be a climactic book. As it is, it changes the shape of the possibilities of the series. In comments on my first post on these books, Carlos Skullsplitter asked, “Which will be most important to you at the end: the revelation, the conclusion, or the narration?” The answer to that would have been different before Issola, Issola changes everything. It’s set in what I’ve been calling the main continuity, sometime not long after Orca.

  Spoilers start here.

  Issola are heronlike birds. We’re told they sit full of grace and stillness and strike lightning fast when they see a fish, then return to stillness. The House of Issola are famous for their courtesy. Issola is framed as a manual on courtesy, and certainly Vlad is polite and considerate in it, and Lady Teldra tells him that he understands courtesy better than he thinks. The significant Issola is Lady Teldra herself, who we have seen previously only in Castle Black as Morrolan’s greeter, saying and doing the right thing on all occasions.

  The plot is relatively simple for a Vlad book: Morrolan and Aliera have disappeared, Sethra and Lady Teldra send Vlad to look for them, they’ve been captured by the mysterious Jenoine, Vlad rescues them, is captured, they rescue him, there’s a big battle with the Jenoine in which Verra and other gods fight with our friends, Lady Teldra is killed and becomes part of Godslayer, a Great Weapon made of her soul, Spellbreaker and a powerful morganti dagger. I called this “conventional fantasy plot” as shorthand above. Of all the Vlad books, this is the most like a normal fantasy novel. All of the other books have plots that are moved by comprehensible individuals, and some kind of mystery that Vlad is trying to untangle. Here the mystery is the Jenoine, and what we find out about them from Sethra (who ought to know and has no reason to be lying) near the beginning is all we continue to know of their motivation.

  There have been hints of the Jenoine before, but here Sethra sits Vlad down at great length and explains the Jenoine, the gods, and the
way the world works. With what’s said about “tiny lights” in Dragon, it seems quite clear that humans came to Dragaera from Earth, probably using some kind of Morgaine/Witchworld gate-type science but perhaps in spaceships, met the native Serioli, got entangled with the non-native, powerful Jenoine, and were experimented on (genetically and otherwise) to make them psychic and to make Dragaerans out of them. Sometime after that point the gods (and being a god is a job and a skill set) revolted in some way involving the Great Sea of Chaos and Dzur Mountain, and since then have been trying, mostly successfully, to keep the Jenoine out of Dragaera. Oh, and we also learn a lot about Great Weapons, and that Adron is in some way conscious in the Lesser Sea.

  I can never decide whether I like Issola or not. I find it unsettling—so much happens so fast, it leaves my head spinning. This sort of thing isn’t often a problem for me when re-reading. It’s one of the reasons I often enjoy re-reading more than reading something for the first time. But with Issola, I keep thinking next time I read it I’ll be able to relax into it, and that never happens. This is a book with some lovely lines, and some beautiful set-pieces, but what I remember it for is the sensation of standing under a trapdoor and having a load of revelation dropped on my head.

  DECEMBER 9, 2009

  86. What has gone before?

  Dear Lords of Publication, Glorious Mountain Press of Adrilankha (or any appropriate representative on our world): I am writing to assert my complete and deep agreement with Sir Paarfi of Roundwood on the subject of synopses of previous volumes at the start of subsequent volumes, to whit, they are an abomination, irritating to the writer, unnecessary to the reader, and a complete waste of carbon and trace metals. Paarfi said those who agreed with him should have the honour to address you in these terms, and so I do. Generally, that’s my position. I appreciate that summaries of the previous book are useful for people who aren’t going to re-read previous volumes before reading the new volume, but I am going to re-read them, so they’re of no use to me. I can also see that they’d be useful for people who randomly pick up sequels without knowing they’re sequels and then read them. I never do that. Well, I never do it knowingly. I sometimes do it by accident, and if I find out before reading it (for instance by seeing a “what has gone before” summary) I save it until I have found the first volume. And similarly if I know I want a book and I find a later volume, I keep it. My in-pile has had the second and third Doris Egan Ivory books sitting on it for several years, ever since I found them shortly after enjoying City of Diamond, and being told that Jane Emerson and Doris Egan were the same person. Sooner or later I’ll find the first book, and read them in order. There are plenty of books. There’s no hurry.

  Synopses are so annoying—nobody could like them, could they? Could they?

  Well, the rant against the practice that Steven Brust puts into Paarfi’s voice at the start of The Lord of Castle Black, the second volume of The Viscount of Adrilankha, is so spirited and charming, and so well expressed everything I feel on this subject that I nearly change my mind and feel the existence of this one wonderful synopsis justifies the whole procedure. It begins with a rant against the practice as “futile and self-defeating,” adds that “were any of the events of the previous volume such that they could have been omitted without severe damage to the narrative, we should have omitted them to begin with,” then goes on to give a perfectly serviceable summary of the first volume, enlivened with comments like “several other persons of whom the reader who has failed to read the first volume of our work will bitterly miss the acquaintance,” and then goes on to exhort the reader to write to Glorious Mountain Press expressing their agreement. In fairness to subsequent-volume synopses, I really have never liked them as a reader, but it’s as a writer that I’ve come to loathe them. This is because anything sounds stupid when summarised. I don’t know any writers who like doing them—though I suppose there may be some. But in my experience, being asked to do one leads most writers to mutter: “If I could have written this novel in a thousand words I’d have done that in the first place and saved myself a lot of work.”

  And so I most sincerely remain, dearest Lords of Publication of Glorious Mountain Press, your enthusiastic correspondent, Jo Walton.

  DECEMBER 14, 2009

  87. The time about which I have the honor to write: Steven Brust’s The Viscount of Adrilankha

  The Viscount of Adrilankha is a three-volume novel consisting of The Paths of the Dead (2002), The Lord of Castle Black (2003), and Sethra Lavode (2004). I’m writing about them together because it feels to me that they are best considered as one work, divided into a beginning, a middle and an end for bookbinding purposes. All the Paarfi books are loosely connected by continuing characters and a developing world, but these three are really one story.

  One of the things reading half a ton of Brust together does is make me realise how unquestioned the defaults of secondary-world fantasy are. Fantasy has a certain look and feel and style of conversation and tech level—and more than that, there’s an expected mood, an expectation of the kind of serious it will be. There are exceptions, of course, but they are just that. There’s no inherent reason why you can’t have swashbuckling musketeer-style fantasy with dialogue that flashes like rapiers, but you need to justify it, as you don’t need to justify a story of rivals for a medieval throne. As for the seriousness, there’s certainly funny fantasy but a great deal of it consists of making fun of the concept, not much of it makes you laugh aloud at the humour inherent in the situation. With Brust’s books, you laugh for the same reason a reader inside the world would laugh, even if you occasionally say “ah-ha!” with knowledge you bring from outside.

  This three-volume novel is best enjoyed as a historical novel set within the fantasy world of Dragaera. It’s historical accuracy is right up there with Dumas writing the nice and accurate history of France. Paarfi, the writer within the world, has a wonderful voice and a lovely way of putting things, he’s slightly pompous, slightly dignified, he tries to be accurate but gets carried away in his own enthusiasm. He’s a lovely person to spend time with as are his, and Brust’s, characters. I understand that not everybody will get excited over chapter titles variously explaining whether the battle going on is the ninth or tenth battle of Dzur Mountain, but if that sort of thing delights you, then you should certainly read these books. I’d still suggest starting with The Phoenix Guards though I see no real reason why these don’t stand alone.

  Mild spoilers.

  Historically, The Viscount of Adrilankha is the story of the end of the Interregnum and the re-establishment of the Empire. The three volumes divide neatly into “introducing all the characters and setting them in place,” “Zerika returns with the Orb and wins a battle,” and “re-establishing the Empire is more complicated than that.” On an emotional level they concern the coming of age of Piro, the son of Khaavren, and Khaavren coming to terms with that. There’s also a fair bit about the way Morrolan grows up, and the dealings of Sethra and the gods with the Jenoine. All of this works very well as story and history—and it has some splendid antagonists and excellent plotting.

  While the overall plot is effective and affecting, what I like most about these books is the little incidentals—the way Morrolan builds his castle in the air, for instance, sorcery can get it up, and witchcraft can keep it up. I was also charmed by the explanation for the never-ending party. There’s an ah-ha moment for those who have read Teckla when Aerich visits Tazendra’s home and finds a Teckla living there. The chapter titles are adorable. The plots are cunning, but it’s Illista ordering fish that sticks with me. I find Piro and his friends less appealing than Khaavren and his friends, but there’s plenty of the older generation here—and Piro’s dilemma with Ibronka answers something I’ve always wondered about, with regard to the Houses. Zerika’s passage of the Paths of the Dead, and all the debates among the gods, have to be taken as speculative on Paarfi’s part, not historical, but how interesting, after Issola, that a Jenoine nearly
got in. I do wonder why the Interregnum had to be so long. Nothing would have stopped Sethra organizing this as soon as Zerika was old enough, and as Piro’s about a hundred years old, why wait until Zerika was two hundred and fifty?

  DECEMBER 15, 2009

  88. Dzur stalks and blends with night: Steven Brust’s Dzur

  Dzur is definitely my favourite Vlad book and one of my favourite of all books. It begins with a visit to Valabars, the famous Eastern restaurant in Adrilankha, which has been mentioned since Jhereg but never seen before. This visit to Valabars frames and shapes the book, each chapter begins with a description of a course. Here we have grown-up, mature Vlad, with Lady Teldra by his side, no longer an assassin but back in Adrilankha, solving a small-scale mystery. This book is set in the main continuity, it begins mere minutes after Issola. We get to see most, if not all, of the ongoing characters of the series. As well as Valabars, there’s another thing that’s been mentioned in various contexts and turns up for the first time here. Brust’s on absolute top form in Dzur. It’s a delicious book and I love it.