The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

The Hands of the Emperor *


3/5. The Secretary to the last Emperor of a fallen magical empire asks His Radiancy on vacation, breaking all custom and taboo. Because that makes them actual friends, eventually, and then things start happening.

This book is extremely long, which gives it time to be both exactly what I wanted and deeply cringe. Here are some thoughts as scattered as the book

• There are two major plot strands here – Cliopher’s growing relationship with His Radiancy, and Cliopher’s complicated family situation where his family doesn’t understand how important and special he is. This second plot gets dragged out over hundreds of pages of nonsense, culminating in a wildly overplayed emotional orgy of apologies and everybody learning how wrong they were and how special and admirable Cliopher really is. It’s a lot. The first plot, well. My suspicion is that she amped up the family plot because she knew the relationship plot was not going to be satisfying. It’s not, let’s be clear (and I’m not just saying that because the homoerotic subtext will, I suspect, remain subtext). They have a beautiful friendship, but a barrier remains between them, no matter how hard they both try, for reasons that do at least make sense. But what I don’t forgive is how she wrote more than three hundred thousand words of this stuff and then faded to black on a scene near the end where they practice touching each other how to greet people in a non-imperial way. It’s emotionally significant, it breaks a specific taboo in the book (no one touches the Emperor ever ever ever), and it bookends an earlier, beautifully sad scene where Cliopher has to wrap him in cloth to hold him while he breaks down. And yet. Fade to black. It’s a baffling choice for someone who clearly never met a scene she couldn’t write lushly and at great length.


• On the one hand, this book is so long that pacing isn’t really a thing anymore. On the other hand, it has this trick of humming along smoothly in its grooves for a dozen chapters, then throwing a curveball of either emotion or magic with fast intensity. The first of these is the thing with the moon – you’ll know it when you get there – which made me sit bolt upright in bed and whisper what the fuck! to myself. Later examples are generally more emotional, but no less effective.


• This book also does a really good job of that thing where it never actually sits down and explains to you the complicated and unusual magical backstory. You’ve just gotta pick it up, and boy howdy are you going to have a lot of questions for, like, a hundred thousand words.


• One thread connecting the two plots is Cliopher’s relationship to his island culture, and what parts of that he brings with him to the empire which thinks him “primitive,” and how his culture measures accomplishment and success, and his place in his oral tradition, and how that intersects with his bureaucratic work building a new post-imperial government. It’s a lot – everything in this book is a lot – and parts of it are super interesting and parts of it really landed wrong with me. There’s one scene in particular that – well, I see what she was intending to do, but it struck me as an exercise in getting the colonizer stamp of approval. Like, oh, we see that you are not in fact primitive because you perform art that we deem sufficiently interesting.


• We’re not even talking about the thing where Cliopher introduces universal basic income, or, you know, that little matter of His Radiancy’s real [redacted], which are both, like, a whole experience. IDK guys, this book contains multitudes.

Did I enjoy it? Oh yeah, when I wasn’t not enjoying it. And I have since delved into her catalog of connected novels, so brace yourselves is what I’m saying.

*IDK why it’s so ridiculously expensive; just buy the e-copy from her website directly.