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queenluaGlancing over reviews of this book, I’d gotten the sense this was The Book TM for sharp postcolonial commentary in a fantasy setting, a means of examining the agonies and excesses and contradictions of empire, to look seriously at how difficult it is to change a system from within, and so on.
Baru Cormorant is not not that book. And yet.
The setup is this: Baru Cormorant is an island girl, born when the Empire is just beginning to open up trade routes with the island. Friendly. Helpful. Except, the more the Empire trades with the island, the more people use the Empire’s own paper currency, and the more the Empire “helpfully” sets up schools to educate the children (while also teaching them to view their island’s native customs as sinful/bad/wrong), and the more the Empire sends in “guards” for the merchants that get in “skirmishes” with the local populace... Over the course of a masterful opening, Baru witnesses the slow and horrifying erosion of the people and the culture she loves, the death of one of her fathers, and even while she’s immersed in that colonial school, she knows the Empire is to blame.
So she vows vengeance. She’s savant-level smart at math and school stuff, and by God, she is going to leverage that power to smash the civil service exams, and then rise up the ranks, and become so powerful that she can change and/or destroy the Empire from the inside.
So far, so good. This is definitely how empires work, and Baru’s choice is absolutely my jam. (I, too, was a sucker for Roy Mustang’s arc in Fullmetal Alchemist—)
But over the course of the book—to avoid spoiling too much—the image we get of the Empire is... all shadowy menace, but it doesn’t feel real? Like, the Empire is competent, it is clever, it is fierce and fully-fanged and breathing down everyone's necks. The Empire has eyes and ears everywhere. The Empire is not governed by some petty feckless parliament, it is governed by a shadow-council where the real power lies, full of terrifyingly competent nigh-infallible people—
And, look, maybe I’m just saying this because I live in an empire whose best (ha, for some depressing realpolitik value of “best”) days are probably behind it, whose displays of incompetence are impressively over-the-top and garish, and whose bureaucracies and institutions are so bafflingly complex and multi-headed that no one even pretends they’ve got it all under control. But I’m pretty sure, even in empires at the absolute height of their prowess, imperial power isn’t composed of absolute technological superiority and superhuman intelligence and total control. Power, from what I’ve seen in large institutions, is a bit of a mess—conflicting personalities, vague directives from above, power-hungry jackals jostling around inside, huge ships turning very very slowly onto new courses, and so on.
(Which doesn’t make power less frightening or awful or difficult to confront! This isn’t me saying Dickinson should make the Empire less competent because empires aren’t actually that menacing, or something; they absolutely are. It’s more like—you know how there’s that pop psych theory about why people are drawn to deep state conspiracy theories? and it’s because of this: beliving that some extremely hypercompetent evildoers are at the heart of everything is comforting in a way? because at least that’s better than accepting how much evil occurs due to callousness and incompetence and hubris and boring human selfishness? Yeah, that.)
But the Empire in this book is hyper-competent, because the book wants to tell a story about how Baru will succeed, superhero-style, against absolutely overwhelming odds. Which means, to me, it misses more interesting, subtler lessons: for instance, that power can lose, self-sabotage, overreach, underdeliver, and so on (and those are likely better areas to stab if you can engineer the chance).
And here’s where I have to take a step back, because I imagine this writeup sounds a bit like, “I’m mad that Dickinson wrote this book, instead of some totally different kind of book, wah wah wah.” And yeah, I blame my mismatched expectations on the reviews I skimmed—I don’t think it’s Dickinson’s fault that this wasn’t the book I expected. He’s talked in interviews about how he loves the trolley problem, Sophie’s choice, and similar moral thought experiments, and how he models his fiction after that—and, yeah, this book does feel like a thought experiment, rendered on an epic scale, stylish and sleek.
But ultimately it is a contrivance; the ending, especially, makes it all feel like a contrivance, one that I’m forced to swallow for the sake of the plot, when there’s like, a thousand way more obvious things that coulda-woulda-shoulda happened.
And it’s not that I don’t find thought-experiment-things interesting. I thought pretty seriously about being a philosophy major; I’ve absolutely passionately argued about totally contrived problems before. But I also dropped that whole idea after my very first philosophy seminar, because I realized, after a certain point, I want to move on, I want to pick an answer to a problem so we can start talking about pragmatics, common cases, what is it like in practice, whereas my classmates... did not, hah.
At which point I had to bow out of that class, and I guess this is me bowing out of the series—I see where it’s going and I’m just not quite sold on it.
Caveat: if you do think this sounds compelling, by all means, read the book, because it’s extremely good at what it is doing. The writing style is delightfully readable without sacrificing real beauty, the plot moves swiftly, there’s a hot badass lady, there’s a lovable secretary, there’s a very slick macroeconomics subplot, the politicking between various duchies is pretty well-done, and hell, the individual character work is solid, I liked Baru and Tain Hu plenty. It’s the structures around them that feel off to me. But there’s still a lot to like here; it just left me, personally, feeling cold, for reasons that are probably somewhat idiosyncratic.
Baru Cormorant is not not that book. And yet.
The setup is this: Baru Cormorant is an island girl, born when the Empire is just beginning to open up trade routes with the island. Friendly. Helpful. Except, the more the Empire trades with the island, the more people use the Empire’s own paper currency, and the more the Empire “helpfully” sets up schools to educate the children (while also teaching them to view their island’s native customs as sinful/bad/wrong), and the more the Empire sends in “guards” for the merchants that get in “skirmishes” with the local populace... Over the course of a masterful opening, Baru witnesses the slow and horrifying erosion of the people and the culture she loves, the death of one of her fathers, and even while she’s immersed in that colonial school, she knows the Empire is to blame.
So she vows vengeance. She’s savant-level smart at math and school stuff, and by God, she is going to leverage that power to smash the civil service exams, and then rise up the ranks, and become so powerful that she can change and/or destroy the Empire from the inside.
So far, so good. This is definitely how empires work, and Baru’s choice is absolutely my jam. (I, too, was a sucker for Roy Mustang’s arc in Fullmetal Alchemist—)
But over the course of the book—to avoid spoiling too much—the image we get of the Empire is... all shadowy menace, but it doesn’t feel real? Like, the Empire is competent, it is clever, it is fierce and fully-fanged and breathing down everyone's necks. The Empire has eyes and ears everywhere. The Empire is not governed by some petty feckless parliament, it is governed by a shadow-council where the real power lies, full of terrifyingly competent nigh-infallible people—
And, look, maybe I’m just saying this because I live in an empire whose best (ha, for some depressing realpolitik value of “best”) days are probably behind it, whose displays of incompetence are impressively over-the-top and garish, and whose bureaucracies and institutions are so bafflingly complex and multi-headed that no one even pretends they’ve got it all under control. But I’m pretty sure, even in empires at the absolute height of their prowess, imperial power isn’t composed of absolute technological superiority and superhuman intelligence and total control. Power, from what I’ve seen in large institutions, is a bit of a mess—conflicting personalities, vague directives from above, power-hungry jackals jostling around inside, huge ships turning very very slowly onto new courses, and so on.
(Which doesn’t make power less frightening or awful or difficult to confront! This isn’t me saying Dickinson should make the Empire less competent because empires aren’t actually that menacing, or something; they absolutely are. It’s more like—you know how there’s that pop psych theory about why people are drawn to deep state conspiracy theories? and it’s because of this: beliving that some extremely hypercompetent evildoers are at the heart of everything is comforting in a way? because at least that’s better than accepting how much evil occurs due to callousness and incompetence and hubris and boring human selfishness? Yeah, that.)
But the Empire in this book is hyper-competent, because the book wants to tell a story about how Baru will succeed, superhero-style, against absolutely overwhelming odds. Which means, to me, it misses more interesting, subtler lessons: for instance, that power can lose, self-sabotage, overreach, underdeliver, and so on (and those are likely better areas to stab if you can engineer the chance).
And here’s where I have to take a step back, because I imagine this writeup sounds a bit like, “I’m mad that Dickinson wrote this book, instead of some totally different kind of book, wah wah wah.” And yeah, I blame my mismatched expectations on the reviews I skimmed—I don’t think it’s Dickinson’s fault that this wasn’t the book I expected. He’s talked in interviews about how he loves the trolley problem, Sophie’s choice, and similar moral thought experiments, and how he models his fiction after that—and, yeah, this book does feel like a thought experiment, rendered on an epic scale, stylish and sleek.
But ultimately it is a contrivance; the ending, especially, makes it all feel like a contrivance, one that I’m forced to swallow for the sake of the plot, when there’s like, a thousand way more obvious things that coulda-woulda-shoulda happened.
And it’s not that I don’t find thought-experiment-things interesting. I thought pretty seriously about being a philosophy major; I’ve absolutely passionately argued about totally contrived problems before. But I also dropped that whole idea after my very first philosophy seminar, because I realized, after a certain point, I want to move on, I want to pick an answer to a problem so we can start talking about pragmatics, common cases, what is it like in practice, whereas my classmates... did not, hah.
At which point I had to bow out of that class, and I guess this is me bowing out of the series—I see where it’s going and I’m just not quite sold on it.
Caveat: if you do think this sounds compelling, by all means, read the book, because it’s extremely good at what it is doing. The writing style is delightfully readable without sacrificing real beauty, the plot moves swiftly, there’s a hot badass lady, there’s a lovable secretary, there’s a very slick macroeconomics subplot, the politicking between various duchies is pretty well-done, and hell, the individual character work is solid, I liked Baru and Tain Hu plenty. It’s the structures around them that feel off to me. But there’s still a lot to like here; it just left me, personally, feeling cold, for reasons that are probably somewhat idiosyncratic.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-20 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 12:54 am (UTC)When I foray into nonfiction to figure out how big powerful nations work, or what was going with leadership during an atrocity – like Dikotter's account of the Great Leap Forward, or The Making of the Atomic Bomb – I get a view of 'the sociology of institutions', where the role of the individual or the small circle is... not unimportant, but more 'the natural unit of storytelling so that the author can explain the incentives and material conditions, etc with it as the fulcrum'. This feels true even when the author paying a lot of attention to those key players qua people with agency!
And I've come to think that any work of fiction is taking on the project of 'talking about empires' that ascribes imperial actions to different types of entities than the ones you get a sense of when you pick up nonfiction about how empires actually work, then it's not doing its job.
I think someone can make a fictional empire run on a shadow conspiracy and still tell a good story about what it's like to be colonized (and I thought that was one of the strongest parts of the book), but they can't tell a good story about what it's like to try to subvert that power if the in-world politics runs on YA lit mechanics. I don't think that's meaningfully engaging with the real world concept of imperialism.
(On the other hand, I don't think that many people would be satisfied by a work of fiction that read like longform journalism that went into detail about some institutional fuckup, so I get why authors don't want to go more in that direction.)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 01:02 am (UTC)- Ones led by a mix of incompetent and competent people that blow up and become a scandal within a month of forming
- A starter conspiracy led by two competent people who know each other well but are constantly frustrated because they don't want to go the route of #1 and are trying to find competent people who share their fringe ideas about how to steer society, but they can't find anyone like that, so they're just in underfunded startup hell mode forever
- An accidental conspiracy of high-ups in disparate organizations who band together every once in a while for some common cause (this started out pretty much accidentally), but they're not personally bonded as a group, and have sufficiently different purposes, that they're wary every time they call a meeting that THIS is the time someone will leave and the whole thing will blow up in their faces
- The AU CIA funds a conspiracy in another country, but the group goes off the rails and starts doing entirely orthogonal shit that sometimes works for the AU!CIA's purposes but only accidentally
- Conspiracy that gets nothing useful done because they immediately break up into subgroups that plot against each other
Please, god, anything but the 'shadow cabal that works harmoniously and has master plans that work approximately as designed'. No more of that.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 04:49 am (UTC)(and honestly it's a relief to hear someone felt similarly about the book; i was sorta wondering if i was the only one. thanks for commenting~)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 04:44 am (UTC)