Reading roundup: more Warchild

Jan 21, 2016 21:43

2. Karin Lowachee, Burndive (Warchild #2)
3. Karin Lowachee, Cagebird (Warchild #3) -- OK, ikel89 posted hers, so I guess I better do this write-up now, too, to have my thoughts down somewhere in one place more or less coherently before (as I expect) comments start wandering from here to there.

So, I have to be honest. I respect and appreciate the larger things that this series is doing -- the successive POVs revealing multiple sides of a complex conflict, the inside look at the damage of childhood trauma (IN SPACE) and how it's coped with and transcended and lived with, the 'deconstruction of masculinity' -- all those things. But what I actually enjoy and CARE about in these books is much narrower, and can be summed up with the words "Cairo Azarcon and the people important to him" -- his family, crew, foils, allies.

As such, Burndive -- which I'd expected, from the title, to find boring, because I thought it was going to be about literal burndiving, and those parts of the first book were my least favorite -- ended up being my favorite of the extant three, by a long shot. Spoilers from here! Massive spoilers!

Ryan's POV was amusing and frustrating at first, but as soon as he was on Macedon, things really picked up for me, and I would've happily read three whole books just of that -- Azarcon Extended Family Theater, as I put it to ikel89: initial father-son awkwardness and gradual understanding and fierce protectiveness and mutual grief, the exponentially greater awkwardness of Captain Azarcon and Sid (who Cairo knows is sleeping with his wife) on the same ship, Admiral Grandpa Ashrafi, who seems to have impressive reserves of humour and zen (doubtless in large part thanks to training from teenage Cairo...), the way Jos fits into the whole thing, at once Azarcon's shipboard son, as Ryan jealously perceives him, and foil and younger brother, in a sense, as Yuri thinks in the third book -- the three of them all "mentored" and scarred by Falcone in different ways; Erret Dorr self-appointing himself Baby Az's older brother (and Sid's boyfriend) -- and I was pleased to see confirmation, on Lowachee's blog, that Dorr was the blond jet making funny faces at Ryan, during Ryan's first meeting with his father -- and whatever his presumed history with Cairo is -- I'm really curious about that! Sanzhez says "You know, Dorr, I'd like to see how behind the peace treaty you'd be if you weren't warming the captain's bed while he's rolling in another with the strits." Ryan thinks "Surely not literally", and I'm quite sure Azarcon is telling the truth about not having lovers on ship. I think it would feel too much of Falcone's ways to be sleeping with his crew. But I bet Erret did flirt with him when they first met, and I wonder how Cairo made him stop...

Evan sort of fits into this by similar logic, too, because actually -- despite the fact that he wasn't with Falcone directly (and that, presumably, Cairo, like Jos, had been off limits to the rest of the crew and Evan was not) -- he actually has the closest trajectory to Cairo himself (even the ages roughly work out, I think? ages are so hard in this series, due to time distortion and deep space effects, it's brain-breaky) -- kidnapped and his family murdered at twelve, spending years living as a pirate before being rescued by jets. Anyway, obviously, they are very different people and process their damage in vastly different ways, and that's pretty fascinating. And Evan is Jos's family (per one of the author vignettes, by Jos's direct admission), which adds to the tangle.

So, basically, I loved everything in the book about Azarcons and families, with highlights being dinnertime with Cairo, Grandpa Ashrafi, Ryan, Sid, and Jos; Ryan and his father bonding over listening to loud music when they're angry; Cairo making quiche for breakfast; everyone ruffling Ryan's hair and Erret cheerfully giving him and Sid a hard time; Jos thawing enough to actually make a joke, sort of; Sid very restrainedly giving the Captain advice about Ryan; Azarcon's pained and earnest desire for people he loves to stop saying stupid shit so he doesn't have to keep telling them they don't know what they're talking about; Cairo (in Ryan's memories) talking to him about the war and girls (because asking Sid about sex would be too weird); Ryan calling Cairo "Dad" for the first time in the wake of Song's murder; Ryan sitting between Cairo and Sid at his mother's funeral and comforting Sid.

I don't think that, after Burndive, I am really shipping Cairo/Niko in earnest, mainly because everything with Song showed just how... not good Cairo is at serious romantic relationships. But I am looking forward very much to Azarcon on Aian-na, which is supposed to happen in book 4, and maybe that will change my mind. I do very much like Azarcon's obvious respect for Niko as a fellow captain and competent person. Sending Ryan for tea-times on Turundrlar was especially interesting (and reading this author vigentte about teenage Cairo soon after he comes to live with the Ashrafis makes me wonder if that's where he learned how powerful that kind of gesture of trust can be).

I want all the Cairo backstory (author vignette or fic, I'm good either way). More of Cairo with his adopted parents, what the Ashrafi daughters thought of a half-feral pirate teenager living in their house all of a sudden, and what their relationship was like as they all got older (I don't think it's specified what the relative ages are, but it sounds like the girls were both living at home when Cairo was 18, so they wouldn't be THAT far apart, right?). I'm very intrigued by the missing Azarcon brother who is apparently alive (Paris). Also, what is the deal with the naming scheme their parents chose? Bern, Cairo, and Paris -- why those particular cities? Do they have roots there, way back on earth? (Azarcon is a Spanish/Hispanic -- or apparently Filipino, per Lowachee's Tumblr -- name, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Also, "azarcon" is apparently Pb3O4, a Mexican folk remedy for digestive illness. Huh.)

There are people other than Cairo in these books, but they are really not that important to me personally. I do love Ryan's relationship with Sid, the way Sid is sort of both his only real friend and his older brother and sorta-stepfather and also surrogate Earth/Austro daddy, and just these layers of complexity that don't sit easily with each other. (I don't see Ryan as having a crush on him or anything -- even aside from the fact that Sid reads to me as, like, the one 100% straight person in these books -- but Ryan sure does joke a lot about it, which is, of course, largely Ryan being an ass, and partially Ryan being really uncomfortable about being sort of complicit in the whole thing where his bodyguard is sleeping with his mom, but it's rather... consistent. So I guess for me it comes down to, I could it potentially being a thing in a universe where Sid has not lived in his house and followed him around everywhere since Ryan was 12 years old, but not in this universe.

But wait, there's more! There are even people other than AZARCONS in this book (though you wouldn't know it from me). Erret Dorr is my favorite non-Azarcon (and overall second favorite, after Cairo), and he is delightfully, cheerfully psycho. I really wonder how he came to join Macedon's crew, and how it came about that he actually listens to Cairo (and no-one else), and how he came to know about Cairo's past with Falcone when this is something Cairo literally never talks about even to his wife and son. After the first book, it's interesting to see Jos through other people's eyes, and to see him sort of... normalzing once he comes clean with Macedon.

Evan is a really fascinating character, and it is both interesting and heartbreaking to watch his interactions with Jos first and foremost, and with other people too, like his friendship with Ryan -- but like with Yuri, I have a hard time, mmm, letting him in, I guess, is the right phrase, because I don't really WANT to have to care about someone who's been so affected by trauma. Why it works like that for me with Evan and Yuri and doesn't with Cairo is a good question, and I don't really know. Maybe it's 'cos Cairo is older and has gotten to a point where he is no longer so haunted by his time with Falcone -- though, obviously, it's not like he's NOT affected by it, either, by his own admission and by his behavior, as well. Or maybe it's as simple as not having a Cairo POV (unlike Yuri's) and having him be someone who is much less ready to admit anything about his emotions (unlike Evan), and so it's not as evident, first-hand, how fucked up he is.

I guess I'm talking about Yuri now? Sure, let's talk about Yuri. I actually don't have a whole lot to say about Yuri. I think he's very well done as a character, I think the contrast between his narration and Jos's is very interesting -- the unflinching, almost poetic way he talks about everything he's gone through, from the death and maiming he witnesses as a child to the geisha training* to prison and retaking his ship.

* Also, I don't know where to put this, but the revelation (from Yuri's POV in the third book) that Cairo was also trained as a gesha by Falcone came as a bit of a shock to me. Partly because I'd somehow gotten from Falcone's pep talk to Yuri on his thirteenth birthday that Yuri was the first to be both protege and geisha (maybe he even does say that, and was just lying...), and partly because it breaks my brain a bit to see Cairo in a, well, service oriented role. Like, Yuri, who may be a killer and everything, does seem to have a fundamental desire to PLEASE people, as a way of connecting and caring, and is also someone who keeps actively *finding* people to care about to give antagonists leverage over him. Cairo seems to have a fundamental desire to tell people to fuck off, mostly. And as for caring and leverage... I kind of think he's the opposite there, too. I mean, obviously he cares about Ryan -- but per Word of God, Ryan wasn't in the plans, he was a play by Song. Of course Azarcon would do anything for him, but I don't think he would've CHOSEN to give a hostage to fortune. (Which is not to say that Azarcon doesn't care about others -- he doesn't abandon his jets, is known for that -- but of course there are also people he would be pepared to sacrifice if he had to. That's what jets are.) So, anyway, I'm not sure how this geisha could've worked without someone, a client or Falcone, shooting him in the six years. Not that I particularly want to know.

Which, actually, is a broader question. Yuri survived by finding something to care about -- at first Marcus as substitute father figure, before things turned bad. Then Estienne, and Dexter (he has a tendency to acquire pets even in environments where pets are generally not kept, and Falcone's present of a pet is pretty telling, I think, of his understanding of Yuri's vulnerabilities). Jos survived by repressing and dissociating and running away as quickly as he could. The other protege, who must've been between Cairo and Jos, killed himself. I really wonder how Cairo coped. Ultimately by making it his mission to take down Falcone, and by becoming an emotionally unavailable control freak, but when he was back on the Khan -- what sustained him? Was he planning to take over Falcone's fleet and dismantle it from within? Turn Robin Hood? Use it to defeat the strits? He obviously bought into some (a lot) of Falcone's methods, but it seems highly unlikely that he would buy into Falcone's philosophy...

(So, yeah, when I said I was talking about Yuri? Apparently I'm actually talking about Azarcon after all... :P)

But anyway, Yuri is interesting and really, really well done, the sweet little boy gradually molded by Falcone into the emotional sleep-walking, self-harming wreck, but I'm emotionally disengaged from him because, frankly, he's waaay too messed up for me. (The darkness is really well done. The early sections are incredibly creepy, because the reader, of course, understands what's going on a lot better than kid!Yuri does, and then he has the encounter with his first client, and it goes downhill so fast from there, with Falcone methodically stripping away everything. I was *glad* for the distance I had to the character, but the distance was definitely still there. Possibly I'll become more emotionally engaged in him now that he's on Macedon, and allowed to make actual human connections without danger of them being perverted by Falcone, and maybe going to look for his family again. It seems highly likely, since my investment in everybody else goes up a notch as soon as they come into contact with Cairo.

(Oh yeah, and speaking of Cairo -- were we ever speaking about anything else? of course not... -- I really liked seeing the couple of scenes at the end, in both flashback and real-time, between Yuri and Azarcon: Cairo coming into his cell, with the guard dismissed, and punching him for kidnapping Ryan, assigning Yuri and Piotr to triage of Archangel and waiting outside the door for Yuri and Finch to volunteer again -- pretty much every scene they were in together. I want to see Ryan's overtures of friendship-or-whatever towards Yuri, too. I also liked the way the scenes at the end of the book bring out the Cairo-Yuri-Jos foils, Yuri asking Cairo "How did you", meaning "survive", and Jos asking Yuri, "I ran away. Why didn't you?" -- I like the way this is handled with a total absence of answers, because what answers could there possibly be in this situation?

The Russian is quite good, as far as such things go, though not 100% spot on. The patronymics and diminutives are correct, though Lowachee uses them sometimes where an actual native speaker wouldn't -- such as a parent calling Yuri "Yurochka" when they're upset with him. Some of the names are not Russian but something else Slavic (and I'm not sure about Mishka... that one bugged me, because I automatically think of it as the diminutive of a boy's name -- it's the Russian equivalent of "Mike"), but given the general mix of ethnicities everywhere else, it makes sense. I think the "mat" and "otets" stuff back in the first flashback is silly and unnecessary and adds nothing, but fine, whatever. I'm more partial to Yuri's use of "dermo" in book 2, when his Ryan-napping operation goes south. And his penchant for ordering White Russians everywhere is pretty cute.

Calgitiera is pretty interesting -- I've got to respect him for not buying into Falcone's crap with the proteges, at least -- and Lukacs also. I assume they'll become the antagonists now that Falcone is well and truly dispensed with. Oh, and I liked Piotr, too -- he was fun. Looking forward to more of him.

Oh yeah, one more thing about Burndive -- the POV switch. Like the 2nd to 1st switch in Warchild, I understand why it's there, but it feels too... deliberate, not organic enough -- stunt writing. I don't think it was necessary, even less than the 2nd person POV prologue was.

Quotes:

Burndive:

"She said, in that tactless way people had when they thought they knew you just because your face was on the Send: 'You look terrible, Ryan.'"

"[Ryan] sank more into that pink couch like he was making love to a world of cotton candy."

"my endangered ninteen-year-old son? Endangered like all those fuzzy animals on Earth with exotic eyes and woebegone faces."

"Sid grabbed him suddenly at the side of his neck and pulled him close. He thought it was a hug and reached up to touch Sid's back, but Sid's hands dipped into his pockets, then up and down his ribs and legs.
'Stop it!' he tried to shove away.
Sid came up empty, looked at him in half apology. 'I'm sorry, but I had to check. They were going to.'
Ryan got up, blind, tipping the chair over. He went for the door. Sid grabbed his arm and then he found himself engulfed. A brief, hard embrace that seemed to shore up his outer defenses at the same time it chipped him away from the inside."

Ryan: I'm doing okay, too, thanks for asking.
Cairo: I could see for myself. And your mother briefed me. But since you mention it, are you okay?"
"I'm fine."

Cairo, wearing a "greay, threadbare hooded sweater and faded balck pants." "Then he stood and it all poured from his shoulders, an unthinking authority that bent every eye in the room to his stature."

Cairo: Song, he's going. I think he needs to go.
Ryan: How do you know what I need?
Cairo: Obviously you don't know what you need, so I think you ought to be told.

"The captain scrutinized Ryan's five cases next to Sid's single duffel and said, 'Are you mad? Pick one.'"

Cairo: Stay on the bed and strap yourself in.
Ryan: You say that to all your dates?
"His father frowned at him."

Jos: I'm the symp who killed Falcone.
Ryan blinked once, and stared. "What?"
"Jos," the captain said now. [...]
Musely still looked at Ryan, unapologetic. "If you want somebody to blame. You seem to be looking for somebody to blame."

Azarcon Extended Family Theater, my favorite bit:
Ryan: Don't patronize me.
Cairo: Say somethig smart and I won't have to.
"Cairo," from the Admiral.
"Sorry, sir," the captain said, perfectly respectful in the way you got when you felt the exact opposite. Ryan knew it well.
"Eat," Sid murmured to Ryan. "Before I slap you."

Ryan: I'm not one of your recruits!
Cairo: That's obvious, since I would brig any recruit who bitched as much as you.

[Ryan[ swa it then, in one glance that the captain cast Sid before looking back at him.
"You're jealous," Ryan blurted. [...] it got more of a reaction out of the captain than anything else up to this moment.
"I'm what?" the captain said.
"You heard me."
"Everybody heard you," the admiral said. "And both of you are stepping on my last nerve."

Cairo: "Ryan, don't create conflict where there's none. I know it's a talent of yours, but try."

Ryan: Why are you smiling?
Cairo: Because you're concerned about me but you have to be sulky about it.

Cairo's philosophy of obedience: "I don't completely ignore orders, especially if they come from your grandfather [...] although I do ignore all the dumb ones, regardless of source."

Cairo: "Hot number one bachelor, huh?"
Ryan: "Don't even."
His father kept laughing.
"Please. Shut up." It didn't help. "I'm serious."

Ryan: "Sid's my only real friend, but even then he was ordered to be."
Cairo: "No, he was ordered to be your bodyguard. I think he's your friend by choice."

Cairo: You are one bold son of a bitch, Sidney.
Sid: Yes, sir."

Ryan: My father wants us to be boyfriends.
Musey stared at him. The look was worth any grief Ryan might get later. [...]
Ryan: "I'm joking. You heard of jokes, right? The longer Musey stood there, the louder Ryan laughed.

Song: Stop about the pirates, Cairo. Your mad hunt for them resulted in our son being shot at."
Cairo: I see. So we ought to let them kill other people because it's safer that way for us.

Ashrafi: "Cairo. I hope you're writing your statement."
The screen opened. The captain stepped out in his dress uniform. A black, ironed affair with small stripes of elemental color on his chest [...] A pin of golden wings on the opposite side, lest anyone forget he was a fighter pilot first. [...]
He tugged at his collar and started for the hatch, barely glancing at the two of them. "If I have to wear this damn starch then the entire galaxy had better pay attention."

Cairo's statement: "My duty is foremost to my crew, the miliatry, and the citizens of the Hub. That is the order in which I prioritize my professional life and I don't apologize for it."

Song: [t]here is no other way to deal with it but in the public. Or else they think you're hiding something.
Cairo: I am hiding something. I'm protecting my personal life from a rabid galaxy that has no right to know--"
Song: "They have a right, Cairo! They pay for your ship!"
Cairo: "They don't pay for my ship."
Song: "Pretend for one second that you actually work for EarthHub."

Sid: How is Ryan?
Cairo: I think he's finished his shower and might be eavesdropping on us.

"I wasn't sure what exactly about her I missed, since she'd never been much for affection or confidence; maybe it was just because she was my mother." [I should've guessed at this point Song was going to die... :/

Cagebird:

"I think the pain is making me crazy or at least too determined about the wrong things."

Yuri, on recruitment: "Community, I told them. That was what we had. And I wasn't even lying."

"Azarcon had left the pirates, left Falcone, and not just left -- surpassed him. Azarcon wouldn't be traumatized [by Ryan's murder]. He'd be briutal in his revenge."

Azarcon to Yuri: "Don't even try to manipulate me. Nor do I have the patience to listen to taunts. I know you're aware that we have a common past -- for whatever it's worth. So you know you won't get anywhere with me."

Yuri on Ryan: "Kitten eyes in a self-aware face."

There are several (seven, currently) vignettes on Lowachee's Tumblr, of which my favorite (and the longest) is this Halloween story

a: karin lowachee, reading

Previous post Next post
Up