The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold (2007)

[lightreads]

The second half volume of the Sharing Knife series, following directly on from Beguilement. Dag and Fawn, newly married, travel to Dag’s home with the Lakewalkers. There they meet resistance to their cross-cultural marriage, family drama, a new malice threat, and some strange new developments with Dag’s Ground powers (life force magic, basically).

Since it does not seem possible to review this book without addressing it, I’ll pause here to register my continued bafflement over the splitting of the volumes. It makes perfect sense! I mean, my God, we could never have a 200,000 word fantasy novel! Utterly unheard of! And everyone knows those romance readers all have teeny attention spans, anyway!

I’m annoyed because I think I would have liked the two books as one better than I liked either separately. Also, I gather the impetus to split them was an editorial one, and given I think it was a bad call on literary grounds, that leaves moneymaking motives. And that alienates me. A lot.

Ahem. The book itself is nice enough. I complained about some of the la-di-dah patness of the first volume, and this book turns around and delivers a nasty, prickly mess of people who never did and never will reconcile, let alone accept each other. I appreciated that, as well as the thematic topnote about living forward and prescribed paths and asking questions and how to know when you’re doing right and when you’re just compounding tragedy.

Dag murmured, "It used to happen up in Luthlia sometimes in the winter, someone would fall through rotten ice. And their friends or their kin would try to pull them out, and instead be pulled in after. One after another. Instead of running for help or a rope though the smart patrollers there always wore a length of rope wrapped around their waists in the cold season. Except if someone's slipped under the ice-well, never mind. The hardest thing. . . the hardest thing in such a string of tragedy was to be the one who stopped. But you bet the older folks understood."

The book is about being the one who stops, and in that sense it’s lovely, if unsubtle. I do have to admit to snorting more than once, particularly when the profundities tipped right over into clichés.

Fawn took a long breath, considering this painful thought. "Some_ times," she said distantly, with all the dignity she could gather, "it isn't about having
the right answers. It's about asking the right questions."

My God, if only someone had ever said that to me before! To be fair, these are appropriate things to come out of Fawn’s mouth, considering who she is and where she’s from, but I still rolled my eyes pretty hard.

The bottom line, though, is that this book entertained me, but it never moved me beyond occasional mild indignation on Fawn’s behalf. Dag is interesting (though a bit too close a reiteration of several recent Bujold male leads, if you ask me), and Fawn is all right, but I wasn’t there with them, and I certainly wasn’t feeling the romance the way I wanted to. Shame, really.

Comments

[quietann.livejournal.com]

hm. The two-books decision pissed off a lot of people, including me. I was just talking to a friend last night about this; I doubt he's interested in the "romance" of TSK, but I did get his attention with the world-building.

If one puts the two books together, the series (as I envision it, since books 3 and 4 aren't out yet) is:

1. Develop a romance, show the world as troubled and in need of fixing. The book shifts from romance over to trouble as the book continues. At the end, toss the hapless pair out into the world to go save it.

2. Set up the dialog between LW and farmer, all the while showing the troubles of the world as even more dire than we already knew.

3. With allies gathered in Book 2, Dag and Fawn *really* save the world this time.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my thoughts about the series as a whole went along the same lines.

She has said part of her purpose was this sort of anti-epic, an epic fantasy that isn't about the war to end all wars, but just another few years in the endless battle. Which makes me think Dag and Fawn aren't going to save the world in the big forever way. But a small way wouldn't surprise me.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

So did the ending, rife with Dag basically running away from all his actual responsibilities, annoy you even faintly the way it annoyed me? :) (I mildly liked the book until then, at which point it left a rather bad taste in my mouth. I mean, I know, it's just a a way to get them into the Wider World, as quietann pointed out above, but.... ehhhh.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

No, not really.

No because the main argument of the book is that there comes a point of thoughtless, grinding, ineffective dutifulness that becomes tunnel visioned, and at that point keeping at the duty isn't duty, it's just stupid. And actually, by then, part of what you can't see anymore is that the duty may have changed and grown and you've been going at it all wrong. See the excerpt I quoted above. Which I agree with, more or less.

Not really because she didn't actually sell me on that in this book. I got maybe 1/3 of the way there, and I could see the channels where my thoughts ought to have been running, but they just weren't when Dag made his choice.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

the main argument of the book is that there comes a point of thoughtless, grinding, ineffective dutifulness that becomes tunnel visioned, and at that point keeping at the duty isn't duty, it's just stupid. And actually, by then, part of what you can't see anymore is that the duty may have changed and grown and you've been going at it all wrong.

I'm certainly susceptible to this argument, and I think she did it absolutely brilliantly in Komarr/ACC, where I was totally, 100% on the side of Ekaterin (both when she broke her oaths and when she was heartbroken about breaking them-- I'd argue that keeping at the duty isn't necessarily stupid, but sometimes you have no other choice but to leave it). And, of course, her literary sister, Harriet Vane, who finds that the duty imposed by love can only go so far, and not extend to breaking her own integrity. And Aral in Shards of Honor, for that matter.

But here, I just didn't buy that Dag had a compelling reason to abandon his duty, so that I felt he was betraying his integrity rather than enhancing it. (Which is kind of what you were saying, I think?) I mean, if he was going about it all wrong (which I know we'll find out in book 3 is the case) I would have liked at the very least a) more development (I felt that the whole "hey, what we're doing sucks!" came up very quickly, and was extremely suspect thanks to his newlywed-to-farmer status), and b) a plan with slightly more chance of success than "hey, let's just leave and go talk to some farmers!" (It's been a while since I read it, so apologies if that's not an appropriate summation of the end-of-book plan) which seems, to me, doomed to failure.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

(It's been a while since I read it, so apologies if that's not an appropriate summation of the end-of-book plan) which seems, to me, doomed to failure.


No that's pretty accurate, from where I'm sitting.

I think part of the problem here is that she focuses on individualism, rather than integrity. I don't have my book with me, but there's a little aside where Dag's brother says, "you're just thinking of yourself!" and Dag says, "yeah, I guess I am -- how refreshing."

And it makes perfect sense that this would be framed differently in this very American milieu -- as opposed to, say, the Vorkosigan books -- but it just didn't fly for me.