What Makes This Book So Great (33 page)

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.

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.”