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]

This book reminded me of Heinlein's The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail.

Not sayin' Ivan came off as lazy, just... like you said, next to luminaries like Miles and Gregor, he does seem a bit pale.

[ecaterin]

:D :D :D In some comment somewhere, Lois explicitly calls this book 'a bon bon for the fans,' which made me ROFL....because if she wrote it as a bon bon, you know she did it entirely for her own delicious self indulgence in the Vorkosiverse :D ITA with your write-up, it was delightful and I was perfectly giddy to fling myself onto the puppy pile of adorable Vorkosiverse-isms and roll around giggling.

Can't say as I have a problem with this book written in this way at this time :)

I, too, hope she decides to scare up some more Problems with a capital P though - it's not like she doesn't have enough prequal material or new generations growing into adulthood, yk? There's ALWAYS problems. I just get the sense that she's written what she has to write in this 'verse, at least until she herself is in a new period of her own life and that suggests new points of view to her writing.

[ecaterin]

It's such a carefully cultivated laziness - the invisibility of being utterly average....and yet you know that by virtue of his gene-pool if nothing else, he's clearly not average. The kind of effort he puts into THE PERFECT AVERAGE CAMOUFLAGE indicates a seriously scheming intelligence!

[lightreads]

I just get the sense that she's written what she has to write in this 'verse, at least until she herself is in a new period of her own life and that suggests new points of view to her writing.

Yes. She's seemed to be preoccupied lately with time passing and aging and children growing up, which makes sense, of course. Has left me really hoping we'll get more aging Miles dealing with the increasing vicicitudes of his body, etc.

[ecaterin]

Yes, exactly. As her stage of life changes, surely she'll be imagining her best characters in that same place. I adore your Forward Momentum story to itty, bitty teeny tiny pieces for that reason and would love to see her take on all the aging issues. Aral is, after all, going to die and Cordelia will live through it in her inimitable way.....as will Miles, Simon, Gregor, Kou, Drou....I mean, how everyone copes with losing Aral is a whole damn book unto itself. Miles' body will not age gracefully and Ekaterin will be there in the midst of that. The up-comming count/tesses and prince/esses are going to go through their own growing pains while their elders are dealing with all of that - give us those books, LMB! I'd read the shit outta those :)

[livingbyfiction]

On it.

[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.

[kate_nepveu]

I haven't read this yet. But I don't agree with you that this universe is running out of problems, I think that LMB doesn't want to solve the problems that are there; put another way, this is the main reason why I didn't like _Cryoburn_ (which I recall you did).

[lightreads]

Yeah, I can agree with that. I did like cryoburn, though there is definitely something . . . less than brave about it. (And this book takes place before Cryoburn, incidentally, which I think is not just ducking on her part, but maybe a teeny bit is). And I definitely agree with you there are many stories left to tell -- we sat around for five minutes at a con in June just tossing them out there. All the stories of Miles aging, and Ekaterin and Laisa growing into their roles and solving crime and the entire bloody book about Simon and Cordelia Dowager Vicereine of Sergyar and and and. But do have a feeling we won't be getting most of those. Well. At least not from her, anyway.

You may like this one better, btw. It does take place mostly on Barrayar so we get a lot more people we actually care about. And there is a sense of movement, not just for Ivan but also for Simon (Simon Simon Simon!). There's a fair bit more oomph to the caper here. Nothing huge or deep, but it didn't have to be.

[kate_nepveu]

I probably will, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to separate my expectations for it from my disappointment at the prior three books, which is an awful thing to do to a book.

Oh, hmm, this is interesting, I have also just discovered a reluctance to have possibilities contract down into canon, which is a bit odd because I haven't even read *that* much Ivan fic. Anyway. My problems, not this particular book's.

[lightreads]

Oh, hmm, this is interesting, I have also just discovered a reluctance to have possibilities contract down into canon, which is a bit odd because I haven't even read *that* much Ivan fic. Anyway. My problems, not this particular book's.

Oh do I understand that. Not in this particular case, but yup.