lightreads | Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sequel to Shards of Honor. Aral becomes regent, Cordelia becomes pregnant, and a civil war and personal violence threaten both.

Hmm. Yeah, okay, this one stands up much better than the prequel. Which, duh, she wrote it much later. This is one of those books where I think my ambivalence is personal rather than literary. This is a book about the price of parenthood – it's bursting with interlocked parental/child constellations, each revolving to different drums – and while I appreciate it as a narrative, it's not a subject I personally care much about. Right now, possibly ever. And I'm a bit alienated by the way this book – and some of the series later – talks about children. There's a gentle flavor of moral imperative about it, and I'm thinking and thinking and failing to come up with anyone in this entire series who doesn't construct large portions of their psychology or identity around reproduction. Mark, maybe, though I'd actually argue he's still a teenager in the way he's focused on his own, er, genesis. Ivan, I suppose, is the closest you get to an alternative perspective, which . . . huh.

Aaanyway. She writes beautifully about that, but I'm still alienated in flickers here and there. The thing I'm not alienated by is the abbreviated abortion debate we get here, with the conservative Barrayarans calling to abort a child that the liberal Cordelia insists on preserving. It's not actually as nuanced as I'd like, and one of these days I'll articulate some of the slivers of problematic theory that pricked at me this time through from a disability studies perspective, but it's there.

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The thing that struck me the most about that debate in Barrayar was my disappointment in Aral. I was glad he chose to support Cordelia, saying to Piotr "You are my past. She is my future." I was disappointed, however, that Aral wasn't showing any determination to defend his son. If it were Cordelia who didn't want to go through with the pregnancy, Aral never would have come up with the idea of using the uterine replicator to let Miles have a chance at life even though his mother didn't want to gestate him. Miles wasn't real to Aral yet -- and while I guess I can understand how an unborn might not feel as real to his father as he felt to his mother, I still wanted to see Aral defend him.

I thought the same thing, actually. At least on my first time through. He felt strangely invisible to me through the entire center of this book. We don't even get a lot of reflections of what he's thinking from how Cordelia perceives it. Kinda strange.

Yeah - though I like the parenthood arcs (as I'm in a differnt slice of life than you), I do suspect Bujold rather of stacking the deck on Barryar's (the planet, that is) history and sociology so that it's basically inconceivable for anyone on that planet not to have a moral imperative towards reproduction.

Now, Beta Colony, I could see how it might produce people like Cordelia (who chafe against the reproduction limits) but yes, it would be nice to see the flip side of that-- you'd think it would also give rise to a lot of people who find satisfaction in other pursuits, which never even gets mentioned except for the off-screen evil promotion-hungry Cordelia-ex-lover who lied about children!

On the other hand... Elli Quinn doesn't seem to be at all interested in parenthood, right? She's pretty awesome. And it makes sense for her to have a very different outlook on this than your average maniacal Vor, the same way that a US educated woman will have a very different outlook on this than, oh, my equally-educated Korean relatives.

I thought of Elli, but now I have to find those bits at the end of Ethan of Athos. Because she does have children, we assume, she just isn't parenting them. Which is about as alternative approach as we get, I think.

But yes. People finding life satisfactions in other pursuits, that's what I was failing to say in the review. Thanks.

I need to go back and read it too, but I seem to remember that (although Ethan sweet-talks her into the kids) she is rather bemused by the whole idea of having children, not ever having had that be a particular motivation in her life. Which-- it's probably cheating a bit for Bujold to give her twenty zillion children anyway, but at least (as far as I remember) there's no oh, hurray, I was really a repressed wanna-be-mommy this whole time, which gives a nice galactic contrast to planet-bound Barrayans (and, I guess, Athosians).

I never thought of this before, but now it makes me wonder about what kind of family planning discussions Elli and Miles had when they were trying to convince each other to be long-term partners. Because to me the divide between Elli and Miles' attitudes about kids is pretty much just as great as the divide between mercenary Admiral/Vor, yet it doesn't seem to have ever been a point of contention. Maybe they just assumed the other felt the same way about it... eek.

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

My review

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