What Makes This Book So Great (17 page)

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.

Barrayar
is about being a parent. So is this. Miles is in one sense Mark’s parent, and so are Aral and Cordelia, trying to find a way to cope with a new grown-up and screwed-up son. Mark has to learn to have parents, and a home. “For the first time in his life, he was going home,” he thinks as he returns to Barrayar at the end.
Mirror Dance
is about finding identity—not only for Mark, but for poor amnesiac Miles as well.

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.

Cetaganda
is about Cetaganda, the mysterious empire that has, thus far in the series, been seen only as a mysteriously aggressive enemy. It’s first mentioned in
Shards of Honor
(1986) when Cordelia thinks her camp might have been trashed by Barrayarans, Cetagandans or Nuevo Brasilians—maybe we’ll see some of those one day. We then hear that there have been three wars between Cetaganda and Barrayar, and later encounter Cetagandans, always as bad guys. They are the invaders in
The Vor Game,
and the prison guards in “The Borders of Infinity.” They’re pursuing Admiral Naismith across London in
Brothers in Arms
(1989), and we know they have painted faces, ghem-captains, and itchy trigger fingers. In
Cetaganda
we find out a lot more about them … and unfortunately, I don’t find them that interesting.

One of the things I’ve noticed on this re-read is that the amount I like the books tends to be directly proportional to how much Barrayar there is in them. It seems that the thing I really like about this series is the Barrayaran roots. So that’s my new complaint, not enough Barrayar. The book starts with arriving on Cetaganda and ends with leaving it. That also means we don’t see any of the familiar Barrayaran characters except for Miles and Ivan, though Illyan is referenced.

However, my original complaint about
Cetaganda
when I first read it was that it doesn’t have any Admiral Naismith or Dendarii Free Mercenaries—Miles is Lieutenant Vorkosigan all through. So not only do we not have any of the familiar Dendarii characters, but there’s no Miles duality to make it interesting either. And compared to the Miles I just left in
Mirror Dance,
Miles at twenty-two seems strangely shallow, without everything he has learned since—and the same goes for Ivan. I don’t think this is a complaint because I wanted a MilSF adventure and got a mystery. It’s more that I wanted a novel and got a romp. This is particularly noticeable in publication order.

The stakes are also fairly low in this book. We know Miles and Ivan escape pretty much unscathed. What happens to them is amusing enough, but that’s all. There’s no real possibility of a Cetagandan explosion, because we know it didn’t happen. We know they did attack Marilac, and seeing the complacent Marilacans beforehand is one of the nice touches.

What else do I like, apart from the Marilican Embassy? Ivan and the anti-aphrodisiac and the consequences of him getting away with it. Yenaro, the descendant of the General who failed to defeat Barrayar, who is a perfumer. The garden with the luminescent frogs who sing in chords. Miles getting the medal and saying he won’t wear it unless he needs to be really obnoxious—which looks forward to the scene in
Memory
where he wears all his medals. Ghem-Colonel Millisor calling in from
Ethan of Athos,
which I had totally forgotten about until reminded here.

I don’t find the Cetagandan political setup very plausible, and worse, I don’t find it very interesting. The same goes for the actual mystery and solution, which I’d half-forgotten. I don’t like Miles’s desire to keep information to himself and be a hero charming, in the context of what’s going to happen when he, as Elli puts it at the beginning of
Mirror Dance,
runs out of hairs to split with these people. I don’t much care for the supernatural beauty of the haut ladies floating around in their bubbles. (“Mutants on purpose are still mutants.”)

The duality here is between sincere (if rough around the edges) masculine Barrayar and highly civilised (if not all the way over into decadent—that kitten tree!) feminine Cetaganda. It’s interesting that there’s more to Cetaganda than a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, but did they have to be quite this effete? This depth of Cetaganda is setup for
Diplomatic Immunity
(2002), but I don’t like the Cetagandan bit of that either. Maybe it’s just me and everybody else loves Cetagandans, the haut and the ghem?

It may be worth noting here that despite coming after three consecutive Hugo-winning novels this was not even nominated for a Hugo, as discerning Hugo-nominating Bujold fans, far from being mindlessly adoring of everything she writes, noticed that this was a minor work.

APRIL 13, 2009

44.
This is my old identity, actually: Lois McMaster Bujold’s
Memory

Memory
(1998) is in my opinion the worst place to start the Vorkosigan saga, because it is a sequel to all the books that have gone before it. I know that by saying this I’ll be prompting several people who started with it to say that no, it absolutely hooked them, but even so, I think you will get more out of
Memory
if you come to it with knowledge of the earlier books, and the most if you come to it with all of the earlier books fresh in your mind. It contains some very sharp spear points on some very long spears.
Memory
was nominated for a Hugo but did not win, and I suspect that might have been partly because it is so very much a sequel. (It was a very strong year, though. There are three of my all-time top favourite books on that ballot.)

The themes of
Memory
are temptation and elephants.

This is the book where everything Miles has been getting away with from the beginning catches up with him. The text—the universe—has always been on Miles’s side. He has always been right, against all odds, he has always won, he has always got away with things. It hasn’t been without cost, but he has always got away with everything. He’s been incredibly lucky and he’s even survived death. It’s been the kind of life that real people don’t have, only protagonists of series with the author on their side. In
Memory,
it appears at first that Bujold has stopped being on Miles’s side. The first part of the book is really grim, and really hard to read. Then the plot begins, and it gets really distressing. I’m not safe to read
Memory
in public because it always dissolves me into a pool of tears. Then Miles wrestles temptation two falls out of three and wins, and wins through. The whole book is about Miles’s identity, Miles’s split identity as Naismith and Vorkosigan, Miles’s discovery of his own identity, his own integrity.

Sasha, reading the first part of
Memory,
still ten years old, asked me if Miles ever got off the planet. I deduced from that that he wanted Miles to run off to the Dendarii, and when he’d finished reading it I asked if he was sorry Miles hadn’t made that choice. “Jo!” he said, furious with me, “The one thing you can’t give for your heart’s desire is your heart!” After that, I let him read whatever he wanted, because once you know that, you can’t go far wrong.

The elephants are an underlying motif, they keep cropping up. I thought about tracking all of them this read-through and decided not to bother. Somebody has probably done it. There are a lot of them. The temptations—well, there’s the central one of Miles’s temptation to run off back to the Dendarii. The first time I read it I, like Cordelia, would have bet he would go. But the centrality of his Barrayaran identity, of what he’s fighting for, goes back to “The Mountains of Mourning” (1989), and the central turning point of
Memory
is his visit to Silvy Vale, where nothing has been standing still. He’s tempted again afterwards, he’s tempted, not to say bribed, by Haroche. Miles resists the temptations, he comes to his central (and much quoted) realisation that “the one thing you can’t give for your heart’s desire is your heart.” The author is still on his side, he finds integration and integrity, and he gets to be an Imperial Auditor—which might work slightly better if we’d ever heard of them before, but never mind.

Haroche though, Haroche was tempted and gives in. The Haroche plot totally fooled me the first time through—of all the books in this series with mystery plots, this one is the best. All the clues are hidden in plain sight, it all makes perfect sense when you’re re-reading remembering exactly what they are, and so does the reason you didn’t see them the first time. The whole plot is brilliant. And the way it’s interleaved with the themes and the incidentals is incredible. I would be in awe reading it, if I wasn’t always in tears. The plot is against Illyan, who we have seen constantly in the background since
Shards of Honor
(1986) and who now comes into the foreground. I don’t think for a moment that when Bujold wrote about his memory chip in 1986 she thought “and in 1998 I can write about it breaking down.” This isn’t that kind of series. I like Illyan. The description of his disintegration remains very distressing. The first time I read it I actually broke down and sobbed on the line, “Ivan, you idiot, what are you doing here?” Yesterday, on a bus, and expecting it, I just had tears in my eyes. The whole section is almost unbearably brilliant.

There’s a lot of romance in this book. There’s Gregor’s marriage plans, Galeni’s marriage plans, Ivan proposing to Delia and Martya Koudelka on the same day, Alys and Illyan, Miles and Taura at the beginning, Miles and Elli Quinn giving each other up at the end. That looks forward to the other books in the series, where romance becomes increasingly a theme.

Cetaganda
(1995) is the last of the books to be written out of order. The series preceding
Memory
was written all over the place, chronologically. From
Memory
on it marches straight forward, one book succeeding the next, chronological and publication order are the same.

I’ve talked about the different ways the series begins, and I’ve talked about the way all the books stand alone and recapitulate important information so you don’t necessarily have to have read the other books. I started this re-read thinking about how this is a series that got better as it went on, instead of starting with a brilliant book and declining. I think a lot of what made it get better was starting with adventures and a deeper level of realism than adventures normally get and then going on taking those adventures seriously and making the realism more and more realistic. There’s this thing where a reader accepts the level of reality of fiction as part of the mode, part of the “givens” of the text, the controlling axioms. So we don’t really think that a seventeen-year-old could create the Dendarii out of bluff and illusion, but we go along with that because we get enough details, and because the emotional level of plausibility is there, and the cost is there—Bothari, and Elena, and Naismith not being Miles’s name. And by
Memory,
the mode is different, and what we have is a psychologically realistic novel about the psychological cost of having got away with all of those things for so long.