What Makes This Book So Great
Page 12
Feudalism is an interesting system, and one not much understood by people these days. Bujold, despite being American and thus from a country that never had a feudal period, seems to understand it deeply and all through. Vor are a privileged caste on Barrayar, a warrior caste, but this gives them duties as well as privileges. Miles standing freezing with the techs who refuse to endanger their lives, unnecessarily cleaning up the fetaine spill, is a man under obligation. Similarly, Gregor, who has tried to walk away from it all, accepts his obligations at the end. Gregor, with supreme power, is the most bound of all. (And he wishes that Cavilo had been real.) He isn’t a volunteer, and yet by the end of the book he has volunteered. It’s a game, an illusion, and yet it’s deadly serious. In The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles uses it to swear liegemen left and right, here we see how it binds him. And that of course feeds back to “The Mountains of Mourning,” which shows us why it is actually important, at the level it actually is.
The Vor Game looks like a sensible safe serieslike sequel to The Warrior’s Apprentice: it’s another military adventure, it’s another conflicted Barrayaran plot, and Miles saves the day again. It’s the first book in the series that does look like that—and pretty much the last one too. What Bujold is setting up here is Mirror Dance. To make that book work, she had to have not only Mark from Brothers in Arms, she also had to have all this grounding for Miles and Gregor and the Vor system.
I started this post by mentioning that it was Bujold’s first Hugo-winning novel. People who don’t like Bujold talk about her fans as if they’re mindless hordes of zombies who vote her Hugos unthinkingly and because she’s Bujold. This is total bosh. When she writes something good, it gets nominated and often wins. The weaker books, even the weaker Miles books, don’t even get nominated. I think she’s won so many Hugos because she’s really good and because she’s doing things that not many people are doing, and doing them well, and thinking about what she’s doing—and because what she’s doing is something people like a lot. I think the system is working pretty well here.
APRIL 7, 2009
41. One birth, one death, and all the acts of pain and will between: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar
Barrayar (1991) is where the Vorkosigan books stopped being really good and lots of fun and became brilliant.
I started this thinking about series that improved. What has improved by this point is everything: the writing, the plotting, the depth of background, the significance of the issues, the characterisation—and remember that Shards of Honor was already well ahead of expectations on most of these things.
Barrayar is a direct sequel to Shards of Honor. It should be a story with no tension, because we already know what happens, if we have read anything about Miles at all. “I was a casualty in Vordarian’s Pretendership before I was born!” he thinks in The Vor Game. This is that story. But despite knowing what’s going to happen—Vordarian will start a civil war, Cordelia’s unborn baby will be harmed by a gas attack, the baby will survive with teratogenic damage—it’s an incredibly tense book, especially near the end.
It’s very interesting to read a fast-paced science fiction novel about motherhood. There are fewer of them than you might think. Indeed, considering how much death there is in SF, there’s not as much birth as you might expect. When there is birth it’s usually high-tech and detached, and even then it’s usually written by women. Here we have pregnancy and birth up close and surprisingly exciting. It is important—giving birth, giving life, does matter. If Ethan of Athos is making the point that reproduction isn’t just for girls, Barrayar is really making future birth central and significant.
Someone mentioned that Bujold overshot the end of Shards, and that makes sense. It would be interesting to know how far that went. However it was, she must have rewritten that overshot. Shards has a lot of unexpected political and emotional honesty, but it’s a first novel and it’s written relatively clunkily. Delany talks in The Motion of Light in Water about the expected rhythm of prose and how you can go with that and use cliches and go along with the expected flow of language, or how you can push back and vary it and do things against the expected beat to make it syncopate or harmonize. On a prose level, Shards slides along with the expected thing every time. The language is in charge. By Barrayar, Bujold was entirely on top of language and pushing it for all it would do stylistically. There’s a scene early on where Cordelia’s at a party and she thinks that on Beta there would have been cameras and everything would have been done for the camera angles, but on Barrayar:
The only recordings were made by ImpSec, for their own purposes, which did not include choreography. The people in this room danced only for each other, all their glittering show tossed blithely away in time, which carried it off forever; the event would exist tomorrow only in their memories.
The insight’s the important thing and she could have had the insight in Shards, but here the mature Bujold is dancing with the language as well as the ideas.
From a series point of view, she was going back and filling in some more. She wrote Brothers in Arms and left the Mark plot dangling there for years while she did the necessary setup for Mirror Dance. This is the opposite of the standard series thing where the first book has all the ideas and the other books try to repeat or extend them. Far from writing something just like the last thing, or something more about mercenary adventures, she went right back to the beginning and wrote this slow-starting firecracker book about motherhood. And it won a very well-deserved Hugo. Oh, and it contains the awesome “Shopping” scene, which isn’t in context funny at all, to me, because Cordelia is right on the edge there, she isn’t putting up with any more from Barrayar at that point, she’s almost as mad as Bothari. It’s a great scene though.
This is the book where Piotr gets the character development he deserves. Miles and Ivan are both born. (Ivan’s birth is one of the most nail-biting moments in the book.) We see Gregor as a small child. Alys Vorpatril, who has been mentioned but barely developed, gets a lot of development, setting her up for the position she holds in the rest of the series. One of the very clever things Bujold manages is making people seem as if they’ve been there all along. Alys has been mentioned briefly as Ivan’s mother, when we find out about the rest of her job it just seems as if it wasn’t mentioned because it wasn’t important, never as if it’s being shoehorned in. The same goes for the Koudelka daughters, who drift into the series in Mirror Dance, as a direct consequence, I’m sure, of Drou and Kou’s romance here which probably had no existence before Barrayar. But they don’t feel tacked on. Bujold has a genius for making things flow, for expanding her sketches into bas-relief and then three-dimensionality without any visible jerks. (I have to go back and change things to get this to work. I could never make it work over multiple volumes in cold print.)
Barrayar is about Betan Cordelia being swallowed by Barrayar. It’s also about Barrayar adapting to her, by giving her spaces it doesn’t believe are important, like the education of the emperor up to the age of twelve, like the marriage of a grocer’s son and a corporal’s son in the Imperial Residence, like the importation of uterine replicators and technology to choose the gender of your children.
My son, Sasha, has a joke about the three standard plots being “Man versus Man,” “Man versus Plan,” and “Man versus Canal.” Most of the Miles books could perfectly sensibly be categorised as Man versus Plan. Barrayar has a certain amount of that, but it’s also Man versus Canal—the way technology changes things. There’s more technological change and sociological change and the effect technology has on society, and economics, and the effect economics has over time, in these books than in anything else I can think of—and it passes almost invisibly, perhaps because so much of it is classifiable as “girl stuff.”
I gave Barrayar to a friend who had read The Handmaid’s Tale and wanted to know more about this SF stuff, and she loved it, after initially having terrible problems with the cover. This isn’t a “guilty pleasure” type read,
this is as good as it gets, speculation and consequences and action and significant human issues. Whatever it looks like, we can put this with Le Guin and Delany and Vinge, this is a book that should make us proud of our genre.
APRIL 9, 2009
42. All true wealth is biological: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance
Mirror Dance (1994) is my favourite of the Vorkosigan series. It’s the third Hugo winner of the series, and Bujold’s third Hugo Award–winning novel in a row.
It’s a very long book. It doesn’t look any longer than the others, but it’s 560 pages, in contrast to Barrayar’s 386 and The Vor Game’s 342. It needs to be longer, because a lot happens in it.
Mirror Dance is a direct sequel to Brothers in Arms (1989), though it could be read alone. (All of these books except Memory (1996) could be read alone.) It’s Mark’s book, though Miles is in it, it’s the story of how a nameless clone became Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. It’s about identity and survival and better living through multiple personality disorder. It’s surprising and brilliant, it does things you wouldn’t think any series book could get away with, and the pacing is astonishing.
The best thing about the book is Mark, becoming a person. The most astonishing thing is that Miles spends half the book dead. In Brothers in Arms, Mark was another doubling of Miles. Here he is trying hard not to be. Also, Miles is hyperactive, brittle-boned, and charismatic. Mark is none of those things. Mark is short but solid, and he has been trained as an assassin.
In the beginning, Mark again poses as Miles and this time successfully takes a Dendarii ship, Bel Thorne’s Ariel, and a battle group, Sergeant Taura’s Green Squad. His plan is to rescue fifty clones from Jackson’s Whole. The clones are being grown for life-extension purposes—not their lives, the lives of their originals, who will have their brains transplanted into the clone bodies, while the clone brains, personalities and all, are classed as “medical waste.” This is a really horrible process, analagous to nothing in the real world, but entirely plausible as just the sort of thing unethical rich people would do. In this book we see Jackson’s Whole in revolting close-up detail—again, Bujold makes me feel the details would have been there all along if only I’d been focusing on them.
Miles comes back to the Dendarii happy and confident; his only problem is that Quinn won’t marry him. He collects some cryo-revival cases, cleverly setting us up with more detailed information on cryo-revival than we’d had before, though it has been mentioned right back to The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986). He goes to the fleet, only to find the Ariel gone. He rushes off in pursuit. Meanwhile, Bel has figured out that Mark is Mark, but goes on with the mission for its own reasons. The mission goes horribly wrong, Miles arrives, rushes down to rescue Mark, and is killed.
The first time I read this, I was totally shocked when I got to Miles’s death. Nothing had prepared me for it, not Murka in “The Borders of Infinity,” not the body he hides under in The Vor Game, not any of the other deaths Miles has been close to. Death is there in military science fiction, death is right there but your protagonist always has a hairsbreadth escape. It’s very hard to emotionally believe that one could really die oneself, that the world could keep going on but you wouldn’t be in it, and point-of-view characters in fiction get this same special protection, especially after you’ve been reading about them for books and books. By the time Mirror Dance came out, I’d caught up to the rest of the series, this is in fact where I started buying them as they came out. And I was online, yes, it was 1994, that’s when I went online. I remember seeing (and not reading) “Mirror Dance (spoilers)” threads on rec.arts.sf.written and not being able to wait for the UK edition. Anyway, Miles’s death is another example of those things you just don’t expect.
Miles stays dead for a long time. When you’re reading about Aral and Cordelia trying to deal with Mark as the potential next Count Vorkosigan, the first time you have to ask yourself whether you are going to have to deal with him as the potential protagonist. I like Mark. But I was terribly worried about Miles.
When Sasha was ten, he read (in internal chronological order) all the Miles books up to Brothers in Arms in about a fortnight. He then wanted to read Mirror Dance, and I wasn’t at all sure about it. There’s some very disturbing stuff in it, and I wasn’t sure if ten was old enough. I am all in favour of there being books appropriate for adults and not children, and I think it’s the parent’s responsibility to make sure kids don’t get upset by things that are likely to really upset them. “Maybe you should wait on this one until you’re older,” I said. He hadn’t just read half a ton of Miles for nothing. “How about if I read the ones about Cordelia, then?” “Great!” I said. “Because after I’ve read them, I’ll be older.…” I gave in, but when I gave him Mirror Dance I said that if there was anything that upset him I was there to talk about it. He came downstairs at seven o’clock the next morning. “Jo! Miles is dead!” “I told you there were upsetting things in that book.” “He does come alive again, doesn’t he?” “… Yes.” “I’m not going to school today.” “Why not?” “How can I go to school while Miles is dead?”
Miles does indeed come alive again, though not without cost. But there’s a great big chunk of the book when he’s dead, and it’s actually the most interesting bit. Mark goes to Barrayar and meets his parents and Gregor and Illyan and Kareen Koudelka. He stops trying to be Miles and starts to discover who he is himself. He joins in the search for Miles, having learned Miles from a different perspective and grown ready to value him. “All true wealth is biological” is what Aral says when he thinks he’s dying. Mark doesn’t understand it for a long time—he means you cannot buy love, or friendship, or family, and he is at that point thinking Miles is permanently dead, inviting Mark to be family.
All the books up to this point have contrasted the feudal masculinity of Barrayar with the egalitarian femininity of Beta Colony. Mirror Dance puts the integrity of Barrayar against the conniving of Jackson’s Whole. Bujold has always been good at giving characters the virtues of their flaws, and for that matter, the flaws of their virtues. It’s easy to hate Barrayar in Barrayar, but here we see what is most attractive about it, and we see it begin to heal Mark, or find a way for Mark to heal himself, to become Mark.
When Mark decides to return to Jackson’s Whole to rescue Miles, the story goes back to Miles, but Miles newly awakened and amnesiac. Miles is endearing trying to figure out where he is, what’s going on, and how to get on top of the situation. But it’s all very tense. We remain in Miles’s point of view for long enough to get used to it, then alternate between Mark and Miles as Mark is tortured by Ryoval and Miles is kept prisoner by Bharaputra. Mark waits for ImpSec to come, or the Dendarii, they’d have come for Miles … and horrible things are done to him. But he heeds Aral’s advice and does not sell himself to his enemy in advance, and he manages to kill Ryoval and escape. (The torture sequences, and the psychological effects of that, brilliantly done as they are, are what I actually thought unsuitable for a ten-year-old—in fact he had no problem with them, I think the most distressing aspects probably went over his head.)
A note on the pacing here—Bujold never uses suspense for its own sake, but the sequence of information of what we know when about Miles, and about Mark and Ryoval, is very cleverly done, not just in what it leaves out but in when it gets us information.
At the end of the novel Mark has beaten Ryoval, has beaten Jackson’s Whole, and Miles is alive but fragile. The two of them are a lot more equal than they have been, and they have become brothers.
There are two moments in Mirror Dance that brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it, and they’re one for each of them. The first is when Miles gets his memory back and he thinks immediately of Bothari: “Oh sergeant, your boy really messed up.” I don’t know why I should find that so heart-stirring, but I do. The other is when part of Mark, in dissociation, talking to himself, shyly thinks that Aral is a killer too. I just find that incredibly touching.
On re-reading, the first part, up to Miles’s death, has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. The shadow of “remember you must die” falls across all what we see of Miles being happy and relaxed. Mark isn’t given a name, in his own thoughts, because he doesn’t yet have one in his own mind.
I find it a very difficult book to analyse. It’s so good, and so immediate that it sucks me right in, it’s hard to stand back from it at all.
APRIL 10, 2009
43. Luck is something you make for yourself: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cetaganda
I don’t like Cetaganda (1995). I’ve never liked it. I often skip it on re-reads, to such an extent that re-reading it now was almost like reading a new book. (There’s a disadvantage of re-reading as much as I do in that there are series where the books I don’t like become, in time, the ones I like the best because they’re the ones that retain freshness after I have the ones I like memorised. I can see Cetaganda getting on that list along with Five Red Herrings and Our Man in Camelot.)
Cetaganda is a very slight book, to have been written between Mirror Dance (1994) and Memory (1996). It’s set two years after The Vor Game (1990). It features Miles and Ivan going off to Cetaganda to a diplomatic function, where they get into trouble and out of it again. It’s notable in being the first of the series apart from Ethan of Athos (1986) that’s definitely a mystery and not a military adventure, and I suppose that’s the logic in binding it with Ethan of Athos and Labyrinth as Miles, Mystery and Mayhem. Or maybe not. Most of the reprint compilations make perfect sense to me, but this not one.