October novel-reading

[garran]

Stubbornly, there is some.

William Gibson, Spook Country
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

This batch highlights what is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in my method with these posts, or at least it will if a particular regular commenter asks about the book that I expect them to, because I read that book way back at the beginning of the month, and now my impressions are much vaguer than they were at the time. I can probably find something to say, though.

Comments

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Say, Andy, what did you think about... THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD! OH! SURPRISE!

I want to know about Spook Country too though.

[garran.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

Okay. The Privilege of the Sword is a Twenty Years After sort of sequel to Swordspoint, which as can be seen I read immediately before (since the two were actually released very close to 20 years apart realtime, I'm sure that from a longtime fan's point of view I am an unconscionable cheat for not getting around to it until I wouldn't need to wait at all for Privilege afterward). Katherine, the protagonist, is summoned to the unnamed capital city by her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine; she daydreams about a very traditional young lady's introduction to society, but the Duke, being Mad, proposes to dress her in trousers and train her in swordsmanship, heretofore an exclusively masculine occupation. I liked Swordspoint a lot -- it was clever, well-executed, and charmingly atypical -- but Privilege won me over totally, so much and so viscerally so that I've been kind of at a loss as to how to write about it.

So here's a review that's a little more skewed to the stuff I can talk about analytically than was my actual reading experience. A lot of what made it wonderful for me, I think, was the way that it played off of and expanded on the first book; especially, the changes that Katherine effects just by being there. Where everyone in Swordspoint was to varying degrees brutal, politically sophisticated, and mentally unbalanced, Katherine is naive, straightforward, and naturally decent; her voice is sufficient to shift the genre from bloody and decadent fantasy of manners to coming of age YA, albeit without the safety mechanisms that ordinarily function in that genre to keep sex and violence out of the view of the story proper. And she is a hero, upset by injustice and strongly motivated to correct it, in the way that nobody in Swordspoint can be said to be (though some of them have personal codes). As well as its making her likeable to me, in a way that more morally cautious protagonists are only ever merely interesting, it's also fascinating to watch the way that her enemies, and her uncle's, continually make missteps in predicting what they will do because they have failed to consider this difference in motivations. Her heroism, and his madness, mean that neither can be counted upon to prioritize in ways that others in their aristocratic social world take for granted.

Her presence also allows the book to function as a feminist rebuttal, and isn't it wonderful to see an author writing that sort of answer to her own work? Partway through reading Swordspoint it occurred to me that, although this was a book with a lot of sex in it (though few if any sex scenes) and not a lot of heteronormativity, since it's an important worldbuilding detail that it's not considered surprising or outre for men to have male lovers, I hadn't seen any acknowledgement of the possibility that women might sleep with one another. On consideration, I decided that this was probably due to two factors: first, that all of the POV characters (with one brief exception that I can recall) were male, and so they probably weren't in a position to see that this was going on; second, that all the sex in the book outside of the main couple is political, as much about power and social advantage as it is about attraction, and these things are concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the men. (There is one politically potent woman in the book, but even she wields her influence through the men she sleeps with, maintaining a respectable veneer of disinterest in politics.)

[Continued in reply]

[garran.livejournal.com]

Katherine is a woman, and the main POV, and so we do get to see a lot more of what the woman's world of the city is like (including, yes, confirmation that there are lesbians). She is also a female swordsman, which means that she has a sort of direct agency unprecedented in nobles of her sex. She can act on her own behalf -- or, as she chooses, on that of others -- in the city aristocracy's system of redress-by-duel, instead of relying on male relatives to choose whether to take insult. Her public honour is her own to control, and her opinions, and her outrage, have corresponding weight (though not an overwhelming weight; not enough to render her certainly safe, or her grievances certainly addressed. The sorts of victories Katherine is able to win fall, I think, under "small but important"). Just as she reveals the city's social womanhood, she is also a challenge to it, indicating, and clumsily working for, the possibility of justice where injustice is.

More generally, speaking not specifically of Katherine but still of the interaction between the books, I am a sucker for those scenes in followups where we encounter a character that we, the audience, know and like, and revel in our understanding of just how the unsuspecting newer characters are about to be surprised or impressed. (See also: Bujold's Komarr.) -- Or those where a character learns something, or sees something, about one of the older characters that they can't have the context to understand, but which the reader does, or other things of that sort, where a mythology is first established and then used to effect. At this, and at embracing its romantic fantasy tropes without sacrificing any of its general savviness or complexity in the process, The Privilege of the Sword excels.

I think this is the book I read this month that I am most likely to reread.


-Andy H.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a spectacular recommendation. I've had Privilege sitting on my bookshelf for two months but haven't yet cracked it; I didn't realize it was a sequel to anything. So do you recommend reading Swordspoint for the oh-just-wait thrill of re-meeting old characters, or reading it second as a progression from YA to decadent adult fantasy?

[garran.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest taking them in order; I do recommend Swordspoint in its own right, so it's not like you'd be reading it just to catch up, and -- although each has a main plot that is basically self-contained -- there are some story threads that continue over both. Reading Privilege first would also spoil certain outcomes and revelations in Swordspoint that I thought were both neat and unexpected.

(There is actually another book, The Fall of the Kings, co-written with Delia Sherman and set a few generations after Privilege; I tried to read it a couple of years ago and bounced off pretty hard, and have been trying to decide whether I think that the context of these books is liable to change that verdict. I probably will give it another try.)


-Andy H.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

I forgot all about this conversation, then FINALLY read Privilege over my Christmas trip and had a very similar reaction to yours: it "won me over totally, so much and so viscerally so that I've been kind of at a loss as to how to write about it." I am going to have to write my own review, now that the 24-hour get-some-distance period has elapsed.

Anyway, I've been running around telling all my friends who ever liked the Tamora Pierce books that they HAVE to read this one, and no they can't borrow my copy, I have to read it again.