Book Review: The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
I saw this at Half Price the other day, and it looked interesting. A renaissance-esque swashbuckling fantasy about an initially typical girl learning to swordfight? Sounds perfect!
There will be spoilers.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. What there was of the book was good―mostly―but it felt like the first third of a good book, with a deus ex machina climax tacked onto the end. First, for a book ostensibly about a swordswoman, there's precious little swordfighting. Katherine fights a total of three duels in the entire book, and the first two are completely one-sided thrashings against opponents who don't take her seriously because of her gender. She's just beginning to come into her own as a character, and then the novel abruptly ends.
Which brings me to the ending, in which Kushner seemed to forget who her protagonist was. The main plotline of the novel isn't resolved by Katherine, but by a male relative, while she's locked up in his house, forbidden to go out. Who the hell ends a story that way? (And given the way it was resolved, it would still be a lame ending even if he had been the main character.)
As with the swordfighting, so also with romance: Kushner teases but fails to deliver. All through the book there's hints of a budding lesbian relationship between Katherine and a much more conventional young noblewoman, which is cleverly mirrored by characters in a popular play. They even correspond with each other using the characters' names. Just to ram the symbolism home, the "male" character in the play is portrayed by a female actor. There's a nice ambiguity to it all because for the longest time the book gives us no hint of either girl's actual orientation. Are they just playacting, or is it serious? Even they don't know! It could have been a great romantic story.
There's finally a hint when Katherine sees two women kissing (the two actresses who portray her and her friend's respective fictional counterparts, no less), and finds the sight arousing. But then, as with the main plot, the author abruptly abandons the story she has been telling and tacks on a different, completely out of the blue and unsatisfactory ending. After 4/5ths of a book's worth of building toward Katherine ending up with her lady friend, and showing no hints of heterosexuality whatsoever, she suddenly falls for a male buddy instead, right at the end.
I wonder if there wasn't some sort of editorial meddling going on? The last few chapters are such a sharp departure from the rest of the book. Maybe Kushner's editor nixed an original, better ending. "No no no, you can't make her queer, change it so she ends up with the boy. And she can't be the one to kill the villain, that wouldn't be ladylike." Well, whatever really happened behind the scenes, The Privilege of the Sword is a big fat bait and switch, and that sucks.