Reading roundup: Kushiel's Legacy
Been to Oregon, seen snow, came back home.
And now, to wrap up 2006 reading and kick off 2007:
41. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
1. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen -- I started reading these books because, in the course of ASOIAF discussion, adelynne mentioned Jacqueline Carey, and I had no idea who that was, so I looked her up on Wikipedia, and then the following day ran into some books of hers at the library. So, serendipity, right?
I feel somewhat conflicted about these books. On the one hand, the story is fairly engaging and the worldbuilding is quite neat. I'm not a huge fan of the "alternative historical fantasy" sub-genre (or whatever it's called), but I do like it when it's done well -- I liked the Crown of Stars series, Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic and Lions of Al-Rassan, Dave Duncan's King's Blades books -- ooh, and Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker, too, to cross the pond. And the worldbuilding in Carey's Terre d'Ange (fantasy France) and surrounding places is quite solid, the overall mythology/religion, and the structure and traditions of the Thirteen Houses of the Night Court, and also has some neat or whimsical touches -- such as the sangoire cloth, the whole thing with marques (guild tattoos, essentially), or the fact that the mortal scions of the angel Annael smell of apples at times of high emotion or stress, for instance.
There is a lot of complicated intrigue -- which was OK, I guess, and I might have been more impressed if I hadn't read this right on the heels of ASOIAF, who does intrigue better than anyone else, probably. But I had a rather hard time following it all in the first book, getting lost in the multitude of names -- while in the second book, it felt almost like Carey was trying to make up for that by overexplaining. I think the reason that I had trouble keeping all the masters of intrigue, suspects, and puppet-masters straight is because the characters were not particularly memorable. Oh, they are described fondly, and their holdings and positions and costumes and hair and visages and what not are elaborated on at great lengths -- but they themselves are bland and not very interesting, and therefore easily forgotten. I think this is the difference between GRRM, who can keep a cast of hundreds more-or-less distinguishable, and Carey, who... can't, even with a significantly smaller cast.
That wasn't my fundamental problem with the books, though. My fundamental problem with the books was Phedre.
She is the protagonist, and the first-person narrator. And she makes me want to slap her. A lot. And she's a Mary-Sue. One of those extra-special, one-of-a-kind Mary-Sues, whom everybody falls in love with, and who ends up at the center of all events, solving all problems, and who is such an incredibly self-involved, arrogant person that just... arrgh! Also, she is an "anguissette" (something like a masochist combined with a nymphomaniac, I guess, at least to extrapolate from Phedre's behaviour), the only one in living memory, and trained as a courtesan/spy, so she spends a goodly portion of the book practicing her craft. And, sure, that's daring and novel and edgy and all that, but it really felt like this was being made a bigger deal of than it made sense. Everybody wants a piece of her, everybody falls in love with her, and every useful person seems to have an S&M kink and therefore Phedre can barter her services for something or use the opportunity to ferret out state secrets. One night with her transforms a man, she is a legend in her own time, oh, and she is brilliant at languages, and breathtakingly beautiful (of course!), and lots of other things, too. *gag* (I did like her a little better briefly in the second half of Kushiel's Chosen, when she finally confronts some things I'd been wishing she would open her eyes to -- but the effect of that wears off quickly, and my feelings for her returned to the previous levels.)
Phedre also has what seems to be the typical D'Angeline attitude of superiority towards all other races -- because, see, D'Angelines have angel blood ("ichor") in their bloodlines, and are thus universally pretty. And superior to everyone, duh. I would like to believe that Phedre's despicable attitude is the effect of an unreliable narrator, and that she is oblivious while the author understands that her nation of Mary-Sues is a bunch of conceited peacocks, rather thanobjectively all that -- but I kinda doubt it, actually. Because representatives of all the other nations stammer and blush and nearly pee themselves in excitement at seeing a D'Angeline in their midst -- or, at least, seeing Phedre.
So, yeah, I hated Phedre. And every time she said about another character "and I loved him all the better for it," I hated that character a little bit more. Which is how I ended up hating Alcuin almost as much as I hated Phedre. I'd have normally like Hyacynthe the Tsingano (Gypsy), but, again, association with Phedre decreased my favour. Which is not to say that I disliked *every* character in the books. I liked Grainne and Eamonn (the lords of the Dalraida -- who are meant to be Irish) and Drustan (Cruarch of the Picti) well enough, but I don't think they count as characters, really -- more as representations of their nations. I was intrigued by Waldemar Selig, and also Isidore d'Aiglemort, and rather liked Childric d'Essoms, Quincel de Morhban, and especially Barquiel L'Envers. Possibly because these characters, relatively speaking, don't fall over themselves fawning over Phedre quite as much as everybody else does. And also -- and I'm not really sure why Phedre's regard didn't change this -- maybe it's because she treats him like shit throughout most of two books -- I ended up rather liking Joscelin. What can I say -- I have a weakness for super-capable warrior types. But I do think he is WAY, WAY too good for Phedre. Also, while I thought the whole thing between Phedre and Melisande was way overwrought, I did think the framework of the relationship was very interesting -- though, personally, I would have enjoyed seeing it rendered less dramatically and a trifle more deeply.
Besides characters, there are not huge but persistent stylistic things that bothered me. The prose gets quite purple in places. There are long, long descriptions of what people are wearing, and Carey (or Phedre) are way too fond of trying to convey emotions like shock, anger, despair, etc. by describing people's eyes flying open, or tension lines appearing on their faces, or them shuddering, or whatever. And also, of describing their hair frequently and at great length. It got kind of laughable, actually. There are also verbal "tics" that are shared by multiple characters (but not *all* characters), which was just kind of odd. And also, for some reason Carey kept using "somewhat" instead of "something", more or less consistently -- and I really don't know what it was supposed to do, but what it did is make me want to keep count of the "somewhats" which stuck out every time they appeared in the text. But there are bits that are keenly observed and well put, and some low-key humour that works pretty well, so it's not like it's painful to read.
The pacing didn't work for me very well in some places -- action scenes are not punchy enough because they're overdescribed, and the plot as a whole dragged in places -- but there are also stretches of exciting action that I was very reluctant to put down -- the latter scenes in Skaldia in Kushiel's Dart and the whole multi-tiered denouement in Kushiel's Chosen (although I did feel it was kind of weird that epilogue bits started creeping into the second book about 50 pages from the end). But I did think the final confrontation scene in Chosen was very nicely done -- from a visual persepctive, and pacing, and even what little dialogue is in it.
Because the action takes place in many different palces, divisions of language are important, and the language in which conversations are taking place is noted throughout, and bears some significance. There was one bit associated with that which first drove me nuts, but then I made it make sense to me and kind of even enjoyed it thereafter. In Kushiel's Chosen there are Illyrians -- geographically, they are pseudo-Yugoslavs, I guess, and I honestly don't know enough about Yugoslavia to tell whether they were really Yugoslav-like, or (the way it appeared to me) generic/smudged South-Western Slavs -- certain names, hairdos, etc. reminded me of Ukraine, but they may be shared with Yugoslavia as well, I don't know. Anyway, this Illyrian character spends a lot of time speaking Caerdicci (~Italian), and he says things like, "I will go there, I." Which, very distracting -- partly because, random pronouns all over the place, but mostly because I kept trying to figure out *why* he would talk like that. And eventually I came up with the explanation that in Caerdicci (presumably, if it really is Italian) that initial pronoun would be implied in the verb (andro`), and so the initial pronoun would actually be dropped -- and this is true of all tenses (whereas in the Slavic languages that I know, this is only true for some tenses). So, speaking Caerdicci, he knows he doesn't need to use the initial pronoun, and he doesn't (just the appropriate verb form), but then he gets to the end of the sentence/clause, and he still hasn't put a pronoun in, and that just feels *wrong*, so he stick it in at the end -- which sort of makes sense, as Slavic languages (again, ones that I know) have more flexible word order than most. So, after I came to this conclusion, the "I will go, I" encounters were still distracting, but now in a positive way. I have no clue whether this is indeed what was intended, or if I just managed to come up with an explanation for this verbal weirdness that sort of fit the facts and worked for me... but there you have it.
There is one fairly random thing that bothered me (probably more than it should have) in Kushiel's Chosen. There are several "historical fantasy" peoples represented in Carey's world -- you've got the ~Germanic/Nordic Skaldi, the ~Italian/post-Roman Caerdicci, the ~Celtic Picti of Alba and Eire, the ~Gypsy Tsingani, and the aforementioned ~Yugoslav Illyrians -- and you've also got the Yeshuites, who are, unsurprisingly, the Jew-equivalents. Except, for some reason, they are Messianic Jews and believe that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah. I am, frankly, boggled by this.
See, the D'Angelines worship Elua, who is, convolutedly, the child (or, more precisely, product) of Yeshua, the Magdeline, and Mother Earth -- and is thus the grandchild of the One God. The various other ethnic groups believe in fairly appropriate "pagan" gods -- it looks like Jupiter is worshipped in Caerdicci (Italy), the Skaldi worship an Odin-figure, and there's reference to a Macha-figure in the mythology of Eire. So... um, why ascribe beliefs in no way indicative of the (main) historical group to these fantasy Jews?
I can sort of see the worldbuilding reason, if I squint. Since the other countries are pagan, and the sophisticated D'Angelines have skipped over Christ to worship the post!Christ!Elua -- and yet Christ *is* recognized as a figure of divine origin -- well *somebody* has to worship him... and I guess that task falls to the Yeshuites. And it's also helpful in terms of plot, because these Yeshuites are out actively converting at least one person, which actual proponents of Judaism never do -- but it still pisses me off, a bit. I mean, going to the trouble of giving these people actual Jewish naming conventions and sidelocks and script and quoting actual Hebrew -- but changing a fairly central tenet of the very thing that defines this group -- their religion -- is, kinda... I dunno.
I'm almost certainly overly touchy on the subject of fantasy Jews -- because, for instance, the Tuukos in Sarah Zettel's Isavalta novels, who are also a kind of fantasy-Jew-type also bothered me more than they should have. On the other hand, I think the Kindath in Kay's Lions of Al-Rassan (and, briefly, elsewhere in the same world setting) -- were very decently done.
So, there is another book of this trilogy, Kushel's Avatar, which I will try to read if it returns to the library, and then another trilogy (a sequel to this one) set in the same world that I might check out if I come across it -- although I've heard that the Kushiel series goes downhill after the first two books. There is also something by Carey that I've seen described as "LotR from the point of view of the villains" (and That : Lotr :: Paradise Lost : Bible), which sounds intriguing, but, frankly, I kind of doubt she could pull that off well, even setting comparisons to Milton aside.
And now, to wrap up 2006 reading and kick off 2007:
41. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
1. Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen -- I started reading these books because, in the course of ASOIAF discussion, adelynne mentioned Jacqueline Carey, and I had no idea who that was, so I looked her up on Wikipedia, and then the following day ran into some books of hers at the library. So, serendipity, right?
I feel somewhat conflicted about these books. On the one hand, the story is fairly engaging and the worldbuilding is quite neat. I'm not a huge fan of the "alternative historical fantasy" sub-genre (or whatever it's called), but I do like it when it's done well -- I liked the Crown of Stars series, Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic and Lions of Al-Rassan, Dave Duncan's King's Blades books -- ooh, and Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker, too, to cross the pond. And the worldbuilding in Carey's Terre d'Ange (fantasy France) and surrounding places is quite solid, the overall mythology/religion, and the structure and traditions of the Thirteen Houses of the Night Court, and also has some neat or whimsical touches -- such as the sangoire cloth, the whole thing with marques (guild tattoos, essentially), or the fact that the mortal scions of the angel Annael smell of apples at times of high emotion or stress, for instance.
There is a lot of complicated intrigue -- which was OK, I guess, and I might have been more impressed if I hadn't read this right on the heels of ASOIAF, who does intrigue better than anyone else, probably. But I had a rather hard time following it all in the first book, getting lost in the multitude of names -- while in the second book, it felt almost like Carey was trying to make up for that by overexplaining. I think the reason that I had trouble keeping all the masters of intrigue, suspects, and puppet-masters straight is because the characters were not particularly memorable. Oh, they are described fondly, and their holdings and positions and costumes and hair and visages and what not are elaborated on at great lengths -- but they themselves are bland and not very interesting, and therefore easily forgotten. I think this is the difference between GRRM, who can keep a cast of hundreds more-or-less distinguishable, and Carey, who... can't, even with a significantly smaller cast.
That wasn't my fundamental problem with the books, though. My fundamental problem with the books was Phedre.
She is the protagonist, and the first-person narrator. And she makes me want to slap her. A lot. And she's a Mary-Sue. One of those extra-special, one-of-a-kind Mary-Sues, whom everybody falls in love with, and who ends up at the center of all events, solving all problems, and who is such an incredibly self-involved, arrogant person that just... arrgh! Also, she is an "anguissette" (something like a masochist combined with a nymphomaniac, I guess, at least to extrapolate from Phedre's behaviour), the only one in living memory, and trained as a courtesan/spy, so she spends a goodly portion of the book practicing her craft. And, sure, that's daring and novel and edgy and all that, but it really felt like this was being made a bigger deal of than it made sense. Everybody wants a piece of her, everybody falls in love with her, and every useful person seems to have an S&M kink and therefore Phedre can barter her services for something or use the opportunity to ferret out state secrets. One night with her transforms a man, she is a legend in her own time, oh, and she is brilliant at languages, and breathtakingly beautiful (of course!), and lots of other things, too. *gag* (I did like her a little better briefly in the second half of Kushiel's Chosen, when she finally confronts some things I'd been wishing she would open her eyes to -- but the effect of that wears off quickly, and my feelings for her returned to the previous levels.)
Phedre also has what seems to be the typical D'Angeline attitude of superiority towards all other races -- because, see, D'Angelines have angel blood ("ichor") in their bloodlines, and are thus universally pretty. And superior to everyone, duh. I would like to believe that Phedre's despicable attitude is the effect of an unreliable narrator, and that she is oblivious while the author understands that her nation of Mary-Sues is a bunch of conceited peacocks, rather thanobjectively all that -- but I kinda doubt it, actually. Because representatives of all the other nations stammer and blush and nearly pee themselves in excitement at seeing a D'Angeline in their midst -- or, at least, seeing Phedre.
So, yeah, I hated Phedre. And every time she said about another character "and I loved him all the better for it," I hated that character a little bit more. Which is how I ended up hating Alcuin almost as much as I hated Phedre. I'd have normally like Hyacynthe the Tsingano (Gypsy), but, again, association with Phedre decreased my favour. Which is not to say that I disliked *every* character in the books. I liked Grainne and Eamonn (the lords of the Dalraida -- who are meant to be Irish) and Drustan (Cruarch of the Picti) well enough, but I don't think they count as characters, really -- more as representations of their nations. I was intrigued by Waldemar Selig, and also Isidore d'Aiglemort, and rather liked Childric d'Essoms, Quincel de Morhban, and especially Barquiel L'Envers. Possibly because these characters, relatively speaking, don't fall over themselves fawning over Phedre quite as much as everybody else does. And also -- and I'm not really sure why Phedre's regard didn't change this -- maybe it's because she treats him like shit throughout most of two books -- I ended up rather liking Joscelin. What can I say -- I have a weakness for super-capable warrior types. But I do think he is WAY, WAY too good for Phedre. Also, while I thought the whole thing between Phedre and Melisande was way overwrought, I did think the framework of the relationship was very interesting -- though, personally, I would have enjoyed seeing it rendered less dramatically and a trifle more deeply.
Besides characters, there are not huge but persistent stylistic things that bothered me. The prose gets quite purple in places. There are long, long descriptions of what people are wearing, and Carey (or Phedre) are way too fond of trying to convey emotions like shock, anger, despair, etc. by describing people's eyes flying open, or tension lines appearing on their faces, or them shuddering, or whatever. And also, of describing their hair frequently and at great length. It got kind of laughable, actually. There are also verbal "tics" that are shared by multiple characters (but not *all* characters), which was just kind of odd. And also, for some reason Carey kept using "somewhat" instead of "something", more or less consistently -- and I really don't know what it was supposed to do, but what it did is make me want to keep count of the "somewhats" which stuck out every time they appeared in the text. But there are bits that are keenly observed and well put, and some low-key humour that works pretty well, so it's not like it's painful to read.
The pacing didn't work for me very well in some places -- action scenes are not punchy enough because they're overdescribed, and the plot as a whole dragged in places -- but there are also stretches of exciting action that I was very reluctant to put down -- the latter scenes in Skaldia in Kushiel's Dart and the whole multi-tiered denouement in Kushiel's Chosen (although I did feel it was kind of weird that epilogue bits started creeping into the second book about 50 pages from the end). But I did think the final confrontation scene in Chosen was very nicely done -- from a visual persepctive, and pacing, and even what little dialogue is in it.
Because the action takes place in many different palces, divisions of language are important, and the language in which conversations are taking place is noted throughout, and bears some significance. There was one bit associated with that which first drove me nuts, but then I made it make sense to me and kind of even enjoyed it thereafter. In Kushiel's Chosen there are Illyrians -- geographically, they are pseudo-Yugoslavs, I guess, and I honestly don't know enough about Yugoslavia to tell whether they were really Yugoslav-like, or (the way it appeared to me) generic/smudged South-Western Slavs -- certain names, hairdos, etc. reminded me of Ukraine, but they may be shared with Yugoslavia as well, I don't know. Anyway, this Illyrian character spends a lot of time speaking Caerdicci (~Italian), and he says things like, "I will go there, I." Which, very distracting -- partly because, random pronouns all over the place, but mostly because I kept trying to figure out *why* he would talk like that. And eventually I came up with the explanation that in Caerdicci (presumably, if it really is Italian) that initial pronoun would be implied in the verb (andro`), and so the initial pronoun would actually be dropped -- and this is true of all tenses (whereas in the Slavic languages that I know, this is only true for some tenses). So, speaking Caerdicci, he knows he doesn't need to use the initial pronoun, and he doesn't (just the appropriate verb form), but then he gets to the end of the sentence/clause, and he still hasn't put a pronoun in, and that just feels *wrong*, so he stick it in at the end -- which sort of makes sense, as Slavic languages (again, ones that I know) have more flexible word order than most. So, after I came to this conclusion, the "I will go, I" encounters were still distracting, but now in a positive way. I have no clue whether this is indeed what was intended, or if I just managed to come up with an explanation for this verbal weirdness that sort of fit the facts and worked for me... but there you have it.
There is one fairly random thing that bothered me (probably more than it should have) in Kushiel's Chosen. There are several "historical fantasy" peoples represented in Carey's world -- you've got the ~Germanic/Nordic Skaldi, the ~Italian/post-Roman Caerdicci, the ~Celtic Picti of Alba and Eire, the ~Gypsy Tsingani, and the aforementioned ~Yugoslav Illyrians -- and you've also got the Yeshuites, who are, unsurprisingly, the Jew-equivalents. Except, for some reason, they are Messianic Jews and believe that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah. I am, frankly, boggled by this.
See, the D'Angelines worship Elua, who is, convolutedly, the child (or, more precisely, product) of Yeshua, the Magdeline, and Mother Earth -- and is thus the grandchild of the One God. The various other ethnic groups believe in fairly appropriate "pagan" gods -- it looks like Jupiter is worshipped in Caerdicci (Italy), the Skaldi worship an Odin-figure, and there's reference to a Macha-figure in the mythology of Eire. So... um, why ascribe beliefs in no way indicative of the (main) historical group to these fantasy Jews?
I can sort of see the worldbuilding reason, if I squint. Since the other countries are pagan, and the sophisticated D'Angelines have skipped over Christ to worship the post!Christ!Elua -- and yet Christ *is* recognized as a figure of divine origin -- well *somebody* has to worship him... and I guess that task falls to the Yeshuites. And it's also helpful in terms of plot, because these Yeshuites are out actively converting at least one person, which actual proponents of Judaism never do -- but it still pisses me off, a bit. I mean, going to the trouble of giving these people actual Jewish naming conventions and sidelocks and script and quoting actual Hebrew -- but changing a fairly central tenet of the very thing that defines this group -- their religion -- is, kinda... I dunno.
I'm almost certainly overly touchy on the subject of fantasy Jews -- because, for instance, the Tuukos in Sarah Zettel's Isavalta novels, who are also a kind of fantasy-Jew-type also bothered me more than they should have. On the other hand, I think the Kindath in Kay's Lions of Al-Rassan (and, briefly, elsewhere in the same world setting) -- were very decently done.
So, there is another book of this trilogy, Kushel's Avatar, which I will try to read if it returns to the library, and then another trilogy (a sequel to this one) set in the same world that I might check out if I come across it -- although I've heard that the Kushiel series goes downhill after the first two books. There is also something by Carey that I've seen described as "LotR from the point of view of the villains" (and That : Lotr :: Paradise Lost : Bible), which sounds intriguing, but, frankly, I kind of doubt she could pull that off well, even setting comparisons to Milton aside.