Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

[lightreads]

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Or as I have been calling it for over a year, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ivan Vorpatril?.

Which was a little bit snide of me. Apologies to anyone who was there in June when I co-modded a panel and have already heard me going on about Bujold’s tendency to solve people’s lives like equations. Who is your perfect mate, what is your perfect challenge? What is the thing that balances you? How can we write the equals sign, reduce you to a simpler function, and be done with it? Which is both true and unfair to say – most fiction is in this business to some extent or other, and I’ve actually loved the way she does it. I was just a little worried she’d solve Ivan the way she eventually solves pretty much everybody: by pairing him off, marching him onto the arc two-by-two, and tossing some babies at him.

And yep, she pretty much did that. And I’ll shut up (for now), because I loved it.

I didn’t love it centrally as a romance, though I did enjoy that aspect, and the lady in question is great. Marriage of, um, convenience is not quite the right word -- marriage of expediency is not really my kink, but this was charming. (Also, I can’t help noticing Tej is a smirking, tongue-in-cheek, “oh yeah?” response to all those people who wanted to see Ivan paired up with a Haut lady. Heh.) But I really loved the shape of it, how it’s all about being the one person who doesn’t quite fit into an extraordinary family, not because you don’t measure up but just because you’ll have to shout down some of the biggest personalities in a three light-year radius to be noticed, and who wants to do that? It’s about just wanting to live your life, and how that can appear small and unworthy when you’re surrounded by families like Ivan’s and Tej’s, but how really it’s not at all, it’s great, it’s perfect.

And mostly I loved the indulgence of this book. It basically took a big pile of what I love about this universe (Miles and Alys and Gregor and Simon (Simon Simon Simon!) and heaped it up, and flung itself on top. And then delivered a moment of such wry, perfect Bujoldian hilarity that made me snigger so unexpectedly I almost fell over on the train. You'll know it when you see it, trust me.

This is how you solve a problem like Ivan Vorpatril. And it is really, really sad to me that this universe is running out of problems, because no matter what I say, I love watching her solve them.




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Comments

[readerjane]

ROFL! Indeed. And one can certainly understand why Ivan would be so assiduous in avoiding the lead weight of responsibility that might have descended upon him, if he had shown signs of coming anywhere near his potential and if anything had happened to Gregor.

So much shared genetics and environment, and yet Ivan came out so very different from both Gregor and Miles. I see a lot of my son in Ivan. Not the social ease, alas, but the happy willingness to do exactly as much as is required and not an erg more. And the vast capacity for enjoyment. People like that are restful to be around.