What Makes This Book So Great (30 page)

Then there are the Paarfi romances. Paarfi is a Dragaeran, which means he expects to live for at least a couple of thousand years. He’s writing historical romances set in his world, about real historical events and real people, much the way (and in the style) Dumas did in ours. The Paarfi romances (
The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black,
and
Sethra Lavode
) are (mostly) set years before the Vlad books, and deal with events that are backstory or history to Vlad. But some of the people, being Dragaerans, are still alive, and Vlad knows them well, whereas Paarfi is working from historical accounts. Paarfi’s good on getting titles and dates right, he understands how the Empire works, he’s also great at making up dialogue and motives. If Vlad and Paarfi contradict each other, for instance about the origins of the Interregnum, you have to consider that Vlad knows some of the participants well, but Paarfi will have looked things up. Vlad is Morrolan’s friend, and knows some things about him Paarfi doesn’t know, but Paarfi’s researches might have dug up some information about him that he never mentioned to Vlad, because Vlad didn’t meet him until four hundred years after the events of Paarfi’s books.

These books are all great fun, good adventures, you don’t have to read them looking for background-world clues. All the same, one of the things I love about them is the way you can absolutely trust that Brust knows what he’s doing, that his details add up, that he mentions a really good restaurant called Valabars a handful of times and finally takes you there in
Dzur,
that by the time you meet the Jenoine and the Serioli you have such a healthy curiosity about the hints dropped about them that you want to ring your friends and tell them there’s a Serioli! And it never falls flat. Brust pulls off bravura tricks of storytelling, revelations, secrets, backstory, complexities, and it’s never silly, never too much, never unbelievable. Although he’s been writing these books since 1983 they are consistent in feel, almost never contradictory, and build up a solid world.

So, onwards to the individual volumes!

NOVEMBER 17, 2009

74.
Jhereg feeds on others’ kills: Steven Brust’s
Jhereg

One of the things we disagree about in our house is series reading order. (Families in movies always squabble about whose turn it is to take out the garbage or wash the dishes. It must be very boring to be them.) However, generally where publication order and internal chronological (IC) order are different Emmet likes reading a series in publication order and I like reading them in IC order. (We first met on rec.arts.sf.written disagreeing about reading order for Womack’s Dryco books, so this is a long-standing difference of opinion.) I think I mentioned when I re-read the Miles books in publication order that I always normally read them in IC order. I used to do the same with the Vlad Taltos books until with the publication of
Dragon
Brust made that impossible. The reason I prefer it is that with reading in publication order you can see how a writer develops and how they develop their idea of where the series is going, but by IC order you can see how the characters develop when events happen to them in order. Pamela Dean once said that you should read Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books in order if you normally read chapters of a book in order. That’s how I feel. Reading them out of IC order requires building a structure in my head to fit the characters and events into, with “how we got from here to there” arrows and bars as part of it. But since playing with structure and making you hold things in your head is one of Brust’s things, here we go, publication order.

I have to say that
Jhereg
(1983) is a very satisfying introduction to the series and to the world. There are seventeen Houses of the Dragaeran Empire, and the series is intended to have a book for each House plus an introduction and a conclusion, making nineteen in all. In each book, there’s a significant character belonging to the House in question, and also Vlad acts in the way characteristic for that House. So in
Jhereg
he is hired to kill someone and it runs into complications.
Jhereg
begins with a little about Vlad’s early life and how he acquired a jhereg familiar—a poisonous flying lizard with human intelligence and psionic capability. It then plunges directly into the story, showing Vlad running his own area, happily married, with powerful friends, he accepts a contract for more money than he’s ever had before, we learn a lot about the world.

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.)