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The Sharing Knife: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book three in this romance-fantasy quartet with the cross-cultural marriage. Okay, maybe . . . maybe there's a reason you don't see much midwestern-influenced fantasy out there?



Wait, no, I'm being cheap. See, here's the thing:

Dag said more slowly, "He was just an ordinary patroller, before his knife got broken. But if ordinary folks can't fix the world, it's not going to get fixed. There are no lords here. The gods are absent."

Putting aside that this is an incredibly disingenuous thing for Dag to say, considering he's spent the series developing his unexpected magic powers. She's written books about lords and books about gods, and in theory I'm all on board for a universe that changes up those power discourses. It just turns out, I don't particularly want it to be this universe, where the solution to the world's troubles appears to be a thought just a few notches above 'can't we all just get along.' And also a universe where Dag calls Fawn "child" when they're in bed, argh argh argh! Where was I? Oh, right. There's homespun wisdom, sure, but mostly these are truths so simplified, they've lost all their density for me.



I suspect someone raised in this dialect, in the region that inspired these landscapes and this river, would find more here. I . . . didn't.




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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 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.

This is the first book of a duology, a fantasy/romance with the emphasis on the romance. Our couple consists of Fawn Bluefield – farmer girl, eighteen, pregnant, running away from home – and Dag Redwing – one-handed, widower, fiftyish, from the militaristic Lakewalker culture. Dag and his patrol are tracking a malice, an immortal life-leeching menace which can only be dispatched with a sharing knife (a nice little conceit that is not worth ruining). The malice captures Fawn for nefarious purposes – you see where this is going – and in the course of rescue and saving the world, Dag and Fawn are bound together by a bit of a magical accident.

Huh. That was . . . fine. Kinda weird, though. The summary above sounds like a whole book, but it’s barely the first seventy pages. The rest is unapologetic romance, the sort of stuff that is usually relegated to the last five pages of a fantasy book where the couple mutters to each other about how the folks back home really aren’t going to like this. And I don’t object to the romance. I like Dag and Fawn – though I really hope there’s an actual, you know, reason for such an unnecessarily large age difference, because he’s older than her father and it’s distractingly icky once or twice. Part of the point is, of course, the innocence/experience trope, and the wisdom and revitalization they give to each other, but seriously, he could have lost fifteen years just fine. And while we’re on the subject of things that through me out of the narrative, let’s talk about anachronisms – your barely literate farm girl should not be thinking in percentages. She gets the concept of half and half probability, I’m sure, but she does not know what fifty percent is. I’m just saying.

Anyway. Like I said, it’s really not the romance I object to, because I was the one shaking my head and muttering about how sketchy and unsatisfying the tiny pagespace given over to developing the romances was in her Chalion books. And I’m reserving judgment on the frankly weird shape of this book, considering it is the first volume of a duology.

It’s just that the last two hundred pages of the book felt more than a little candy-coated, and there is nothing more likely to bore me in a book. It’s not the pure domesticity I’m having a problem with, nor the fact that the single dangling magical plot thread is all but ignored for two-thirds of the book, because after they save the world the heroes really do go home to the folks and hang out in the kitchen a lot. We just don’t normally get to see it. And the next volume promises to address the plot. But there was just something sort of pat about the whole thing as they tended to each other’s old, quiet damages (and I genuinely like that sort of thing, too). I like both my romance and my fantasy to have a lot more rough edges to them, and romance/domesticity are not by definition candy-coated. This book had an awful lot of smooth edges, pregnancy out of wedlock and all. This sort of polished smooth structure worked very well in Curse of Chalion because the very ordained, this person fits into this slot in the story quality was part of the plot. But when you’re playing that out back home on the farm, it’s just, well . . . fine.

It’s a good book, certainly, with clever writing and a nice little cultural divide to explore. But I believe the intent was to loft a romance up there, arching over plot, rather than dangling it from underneath as an afterthought. And, well, I just didn’t make it all the way up there – I walked around carrying this book with me all weekend, rather than the other way around. I’m glad I borrowed and not bought, and I hope the second volume accomplishes a lot more for me.

Fiction, fantasy. Third in her Five Gods universe, dealing with the son. I liked this better a year and a reread later. It is very much a Bujold book, by which I mean that the main character, while operating within the inner circles of power, has some affliction (curse and blessing) which makes him an outsider to the society he works to serve. In this case the affliction is the possession of an animal spirit. Which is why, I think, I enjoyed this book but it did not grab me by the heart and gut like Curse of Chalion did – the structure of the magic and Ingrey’s role in the story ensure that he has only a passing contact with the gods of the universe. And that’s the highlight of the series for me, the way damaged people are placed in the path of indescribably vast power, and how the power itself does not so much change them, but the having of it compels them to change themselves. It’s the best of both worlds, really – books that push my destiny button but also insist on absolute personal responsibility. That is not as true in this book, partly because the new magic here is not quite as compelling to me personally. Also, I feel like the canvas is just a bit too crowded – the five people who do have prolonged contact with the gods plus the additional two or three magical practitioners dragged into the final tableau are a bit much for a book with close third narration on a single person. It leaves them all deftly but over quickly sketched, so they are a bit more caricatures of strengths and flaws than I would like.

It is still a very good book, though. Ingrey is a Bujold protagonist, and by that I mean that he is very often unaware of the ways he is extraordinary. The villain is also thoroughly creepifying, and I particularly like the way the book ends, tied up neatly but with threads of uncertainty and loss and future trial woven in, much like life.