What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  It’s clear to see how the object itself, the god’s blood that Kiera gives Vlad, lets Morrolan escape. It’s less clear why Kiera/Sethra gave it to Vlad with such vague instructions. Surely it would have been more useful for her to tell him to take it. I’m not sure what odd rules Sethra is playing by—I don’t know if it’s possible for us to understand. Maybe making Vlad work it out for himself is part of it. Similarly, seeing Vlad without Spellbreaker makes it clear how powerful sorcery is and how much Spellbreaker does for Vlad.

  Taltos is one of my favourites of the series. I like Loiosh, I like the stuff about Noish-pa, I love the way people in the Paths of the Dead keep being surprised they’re alive and Vlad keeps asking them how they can tell, I like the first meetings, especially with Lady Teldra and with Morrolan. I like the way Vlad doesn’t understand why Verra is so pleased Aliera’s soul has been found. (It must have been an awful shock for Verra when Aliera’s body and the Orb showed up.)

  NOVEMBER 26, 2009

  79. Phoenix rise from ashes grey: Steven Brust’s Phoenix

  Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like when things are going wrong—your wife is ready to leave you, all your notions about yourself and the world are getting turned around, everything you trusted is becoming questionable—there’s nothing like having someone try to kill you to take your mind off your problems.

  Phoenix (1990) completes the story begun in Teckla and starts a whole new phase of Vlad Taltos’s life. It’s the story of how Vlad Taltos the Jhereg assassin is sent on a mission by a god, and everything changes. It’s written in the general form of a “how to assassinate” manual, and yet it’s the furthest from that pattern of story of any of the books so far. I don’t know if it would be a good introduction to the series—I suspect not, I suspect that it works best if you already know the characters. For the first time, we meet Zerika, the Empress. For the first time we get to see somewhere outside the Empire. It’s a different kind of book. Did anyone start here? Did it work? I really can’t tell.

  This is the first one I have in a nice edition—the British publishers gave up after Taltos, perhaps surprised that nobody bought books with such awful covers.

  If you hate Teckla, you may hate Phoenix too, but I never did. Unlike Teckla it has many saving moments—“where I come from, we call this a drum.” There’s trouble between Vlad and Cawti, there’s an Easterners and Teckla uprising, but that isn’t the whole focus, the book doesn’t get sunk into it.

  The phoenix is a bird, mythical in our world but presumably real in Dragaera, though we’re never shown one. It “sinks into decay” and “rises from ashes grey.” Vlad seems to believe that nobody is born a Phoenix unless a phoenix is passing overhead when they’re born, but in the Paarfi books we see ordinary members of the House of the Phoenix, they just almost all died in Adron’s Disaster. The Cycle is in the House of the Phoenix and Zerika (the only living member of the House of the Phoenix, a reborn Phoenix rising from the ashes) is Phoenix Empress. It’s hard to say what it’s like to be a Phoenix apart from being Empress, what they’d be like in another House’s reign. If it’s true that as Alexx Kay has calculated the Cycle will turn in 61 years, perhaps Vlad will still be alive to see. In any case, Zerika is the Phoenix that the book mentions, and for Vlad to behave like a Phoenix means putting the good of the Empire above his own concerns. Vlad’s constantly sacrificing himself for something or other in this book, and ends by betraying the Jhereg to the Empire and going into exile.

  Brust must already have been gearing up to write The Phoenix Guards when he wrote Phoenix. There are a number of mentions of how things were before the Interregnum, which has never been mentioned before, and one mention of Paarfi himself, when Cawti is reading one of his romances. My favourite of these is when Vlad and Cawti have a choice of crossing the city by weary walking or nauseating teleporting and they wish that there were another option, like the carriages people used to have before they could casually teleport everywhere. The amulet Noish-pa makes Vlad against the nausea caused by teleporting, or “crossing fairyland” as he puts it, is one of my favourite moments—the nausea has been established and taken for granted and it turns out that there’s been a way to fix it all the time.

  I tend to think of these books as having progressing time and gap filling. In progressing time, Phoenix is the last of the books in which Vlad Taltos is an assassin based in Adrilankha with an organization and an office with a secretary (genuinely shocking betrayal by Melestav, after so long) and Kragar coming in unnoticed. Vlad’s spent a lot of time away from the office in the books, but that’s always been there behind him. There is a sense of death and rebirth about Phoenix, endings and new beginnings. Whatever Vlad is in the subsequent books, he’s not that.

  In chronological order it would be Jhegaala next, and I’ve never read them like that. (Next time!) In fact, onward to The Phoenix Guards, and thence Athyra.

  NOVEMBER 27, 2009

  80. I have been asking for nothing else for an hour: Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards

  The Phoenix Guards (1991) is a novel in the mode of The Three Musketeers. It’s set in Brust’s world of Dragaera, but almost a thousand years before the Vlad books. The Vlad books are hard-boiled wisecracking first person, the Paarfi books are long-winded romantic omniscient. The Phoenix Guards is delightful. Four young (barely a hundred years old) Dragaerans travel to Dragaera City on the accession of the Phoenix Emperor Tortalik with the intention of taking up positions in the newly formed Phoenix Guards. They are of different Houses but they’re all young and enthusiastic, they love honour, adventure, dueling and swordplay. They share an immense zest for life. Khaavren is an honour-loving Tiassa, Tazendra is an impetuous Dzur, Aerich is a thoughtful Lyorn who likes crocheting, and Pel is a devious Yendi. They fight crime! And they have adventures! And the adventures are related by a historian who insists he is sticking to the facts, which does seem doubtful from time to time.

  I think Paarfi’s style, as well as being infectious—an infection that I am endeavouring to the best of my ability to resist for the purposes of this article—is something people either love or hate. I love it. Give me chapter titles like “In which the author resorts to a stratagem to reveal the results of a stratagem” or “In which our friends realise with great pleasure that the situation has become hopeless” and I am happy all day. If you like the style this is a lighthearted adventure about four high-spirited friends bantering and dueling their way into trouble and out of it again, and I recommend it highly. I read this before I read the Vlad books, and there are things about the world that were utterly opaque to me but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

  For those who pretend they have no objection to spoilers, and on the general assumption the reader has done themselves the honour of reading the books …

  So, with Brust’s having given us Vlad and alternated between novels in the main continuity and novels set earlier than Jhereg, and throwing everything into confusion with Brokedown Palace, I think it’s reasonable to say that nobody could have expected this Dumas pastiche. It isn’t a retelling of The Three Musketeers in Dragaera, it’s more something inspired by the concept of The Three Musketeers and Sabatini mixing with a solid fantasy world to come up with something totally original. This was Brust’s first book for Tor, though he continued to publish with Ace as well for a few more books.

  As far as the world of Dragaera is concerned, it gives us another angle, and it tells us a lot about life before the Interregnum, when things Vlad takes for granted like revivification, psionic communication and teleportation were incredibly difficult. It’s a very different world, and yet it’s recognisably the same world, with the Houses, the Cycle, and glimpses of the science-fictional explanations underlying the fantastic surface. Of all the Khaavren romances, The Phoenix Guards has the least historical relevance. The battle of Pepperfields, and the peace that Khaavren (“Lord Kav”) makes with the Easterners, is the same battle that we see in Brokedown Palace, from an utterly different perspecti
ve. (Reading these two first made me think this was a lot more significant than it turns out to be.) We meet Adron, five hundred years before his famous rebellion and disaster, and Aliera is born—announced by Devera.

  I go through the Vlad books like cookies, gobbling them as fast as I can, grabbing another as soon as I finish the one in my hand. Brokedown Palace is like a baked Alaska, hot and cold at once, and very puzzling. The Phoenix Guards is like a warm croissant with melted chocolate and strawberries, you can’t gulp it down like a cookie, you have to savour it, but it’s an utterly delicious confection.

  NOVEMBER 30, 2009

  81. Athyra rules minds’ interplay: Steven Brust’s Athyra

  Athyra is a complete departure from the rest of the Vlad Taltos series, in that it isn’t in Vlad’s voice. All the other Vlad books up to this point, whatever order they’ve been written in, have had Vlad’s first-person wiseass voice to carry them along. Yendi starts: “Kragar says that life is like an onion, but he doesn’t mean the same thing by it that I do.” It goes on to do wonderful things with that simile, the Dragaeran Houses, life, and it connects through the whole book. You can’t trust Vlad to know about things, or even necessarily to tell the truth—he’s not so much unreliable as shifty, and he has his own agenda. But you can rely on his storytelling to carry you through anything. So when I picked up Athyra it was a shock to find myself in third person, and the point of view of a young Teckla boy. Athyra was the second book of this series, after Teckla, that I hated the first time I read it. It grew on me—indeed, it grew on me much more than Teckla, which is always difficult to read. Athyra is now one I really admire, and I like it for the change in perspective as much as anything.

  Viewed away from the context and expectations of the rest of the series, Athyra is an exceptional fantasy novel, and I almost wish I had read it first. Savn is a peasant boy of about ninety, of an expected lifespan of a couple of thousand years. The book gives us a good view of his life in his village. He’s embedded in his life, his village, his friends, his apprenticeship to the doctor, the harvest, his parents and sister. The village makes sense. The way the magic fits into his worldview is different from anything we’ve seen in Dragaera and yet it’s smooth and easy. Savn’s a great character. He’s curious and intelligent. Without the other books, the story of Athyra is “mysterious stranger comes to town and turns everything upside down.” The other point of view is Rocza, and she’s also done brilliantly—Loiosh with his wisecracking is a great foil for Vlad but even with “Two dead teckla on your pillow” and “Can I eat him now?” he’s too human, he’s been brought up with Vlad from an egg. Rocza is plausibly an intelligent animal.

  Writing the lines from the Cycle as headings for these posts, I’m surprised to find I know some of them, and this was one. I have never consciously set out to learn them, but some of them are very memorable. Also, some Houses are very significant in the series. We’ve seen a lot of Athyra before Athyra. I had a lot of expectations about meeting some wizards. Well, we do, but not in the way I expected. The Athyra in Athyra is Loraan, who we thought had been killed in Taltos. Vlad acts like an Athyra very directly—he philosophises a great deal, and as he tells Savn, Athyra use people, and Vlad uses Savn. Vlad’s been using people all along, but not quite like this.

  “There are two types of Athyra, some are mystics who attempt to explore the nature of the world by looking within themselves, and some are explorers, who look upon the world as a problem to be solved, and thus reduce other people to either distractions or pieces of a puzzle and treat them accordingly.”

  Vlad does both of these things in this book. The first time I read it, I wondered if it wasn’t out of character, and then I started wondering if Vlad showing typical characteristics of each of the Houses in each book wasn’t all acting out of character, and what it means about character that he does. I think that’s one of the benefits of seeing him from outside here, because one of the things about first-person voice is that it’s very convincing, whatever it says. Vlad philosophising here sounds like Vlad talking about the simile of the onion, he isn’t out of character at all, he just has a multi-faceted character. Maybe the Houses were a Jenoine experiment in dividing character, or maybe people think they ought to have the characteristics of their House and concentrate on that—which is why Kragar left but is still a Dragon.

  I love the bits that wouldn’t work as well if this were a standalone book, the bits where the reader is privileged to know what’s going on with Vlad and the jhereg, and Vlad and the Jhereg, where Savn isn’t. That’s done beautifully. This is also the first time we see Vlad’s missing finger and hear the first of his lies—or rather misdirections—concerning how it happened. At the end of Phoenix we see him heading off to a new life, and this is our first view of him in it—from outside, and considerably battered.

  The thing I still hate about Athyra is the end. After spending a whole book with Savn and coming to really like him, it’s unbearable to see his mind broken that way. If it wasn’t for that, this would be one I’d look forward to reading.

  Onwards to Five Hundred Years After, that’ll cheer me up!

  DECEMBER 2, 2009

  82. What, is there more? Steven Brust’s Five Hundred Years After

  Five Hundred Years After is a direct sequel to The Phoenix Guards but the interesting thing about it is what a different kind of book it is. The Phoenix Guards is an unabashed romp, this is quite a serious novel—after all it is the story of something known to history as “Adron’s Disaster.” As The Phoenix Guards is very loosely based on The Three Musketeers, this is even more loosely based on the sequel, Twenty Years After. But while The Phoenix Guards is about equally rooted in Dumas and Dragaera, this is much more a work of Dragaeran historical fiction, and a kind of meta-commentary on the whole concept of historical fiction.

  It is a commonplace for a historical novel to deal with an event with which the readers are familiar. Readers may not know the details of the French Revolution, or the Civil War, but when they pick up a novel about it they’ll know at least that heads will be lost by, on the one hand aristocrats, and on the other King Charles. It’s possible for the writer to use that knowledge to draw upon historical irony to underline the story. It’s a very unusual thing for a fantasy novel to do, because the reader doesn’t have that background—usually in genre fiction the writer has to feed the reader the context along with the story. Brust gets away with it here because we’ve been hearing about Adron’s Disaster since Jhereg, and anyone who has read the books up to this point does know of the event in general outline. I have no idea what Five Hundred Years After would look like to someone who hadn’t read the Vlad books. I wanted to read it as soon as I’d finished The Phoenix Guards, but Emmet (who, you may remember, vastly prefers reading in publication order) absolutely insisted that I had to have read at least Jhereg first. I think it would have been a very different experience, but what I wouldn’t have had is the interesting experience of historical inevitability informing a fantasy novel.

  All of the ingredients of The Phoenix Guards are here, but the tone is much less carefree. For much of the book Khaavren is lonely and alone, he is united with all his friends at once only at the end. There’s a feeling of inevitable doom hanging over everything, until at last doom strikes.

  In a flash, in an instant, all were gone, as was the Palace and all the landmarks and buildings by which the city was known and for which it was loved, as well as those others, all but unknown yet landmarks in their own way—the Silver Exchange, the Nine Bridges Canal, Pamlar University, the nameless cabaret in the Underside where Lord Garland had conspired with his daughter, the equally nameless inn where, upon entering the Guard five hundred years before, Khaavren had killed a man named Frai. All of these were now gone forever, preserved only in the memories of those who had seen them, or in such works of art as happened to depict them—of all the buildings and artifacts by which the city was known, only the Orb itself was preserved.

  The
Phoenix Guards is a comedy and Five Hundred Years After is a tragedy—yet it’s a tragedy told in comic mode. Paarfi remains as funny as ever, with his asides and manner of speech. The inimitable banter is as good as ever. Khaavren finds true love, and all the friends miraculously escape the calamity. Of all of this I’m least satisfied with the romance; it is (as Paarfi acknowledges) perfunctory—when all the other characterisation is so good, Daro remains a cypher. I also find the villains less interesting than in The Phoenix Guards.

  Of course Paarfi contradicts some of what we thought we knew about Adron’s Disaster, and gives us another angle on it entirely. That Aliera and the almost mythical Mario should be having a relationship is news, and the way the disaster came about isn’t at all what Aliera told Vlad in Jhereg. Aliera wouldn’t have talked to Paarfi—but he’s undoubtedly right about all the checkable details.

  Paarfi wrote this several years after the events of the Vlad novels as we have them, in the reign of Norathar. He was writing as early as the time of Phoenix, because Cawti reads one of his romances. He therefore lives after the Interregnum, at a time when sorcery is vastly more powerful, teleporting others or oneself is common, and telepathic communication is trivial. It’s strange that he writes about Sethra’s teleport as something astonishing and unheard of and as if he’s expecting his readers to be astonished by it. David Goldfarb suggests in the Phoenix Guards thread:

  I have a strong suspicion that magic wasn’t quite so difficult nor rare during this period as Paarfi portrays it. I think Paarfi doesn’t like magic, and rewrites his histories to downplay it. That would explain a lot.

  DECEMBER 3, 2009

  83. Orca circles, hard and lean: Steven Brust’s Orca

  Orca was the first Dragaera book I had to wait for—all the others up to this point were out when I started reading. This is one of the ones I loved straightaway. It’s set in what I’m calling the main continuity, following on fairly directly from Athyra—by which I mean that I’d be very surprised if there were a book set between them. (I wouldn’t faint from astonishment, because honestly, Brust has surprised me so many times in this series and made it work that I wouldn’t put anything past him.) I was going to say that Orca would be a terrible place to start, and certainly it contains spoilers for everything up to this point, as well as many fascinating revelations and reversals, but I don’t know, for some people it might be a great introduction to the series. These books are so smart and complicated and subtle, I’m really glad that they sell well. Whenever I feel irritated with the concept of genre fantasy I think of the success of the Vlad books as evidence that you can get away with doing something different and exciting with it.