Then we will be a different sort of friends

[sovay]

So first I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor and somehow it was two in the morning. Then there were two kittens asleep on my chest and somehow it was after three. It's after four now. I managed to displace the kittens. I am going to shower.

Some of the reasons I like Maia Drazhar are the reasons I imprinted on Robert Graves' Claudius in tenth grade and liked the historical George VI before he looked to most people like Colin Firth. Some are his own. The worldbuilding of the Ethuveraz is very nice, ditto what we see of Barizhan, and I'd like to see those friends of Vedero's in about a generation. This is the first of Monette's novels I have really enjoyed; I love Kyle Murchison Booth, but he exists only in short stories and I bounced off The Doctrine of Labyrinths with a resounding spang. I started reading this one around midnight and see previous paragraph. It will not surprise anyone who has spent much time around me that I liked Thara Celehar as soon as he appeared; he had a different ending than I expected and I was glad of it. I hope someone other than me wants the stories about Shaleän the sea captain and her wife in Solunee-over-the-water, because seriously.

Anything else should probably go on hold until I've slept, which means it has an even chance of not being written up at all, the way time and pain are going lately. I found it very rare to read a novel which was as much about intrigue and politics as trust and learning; it is not grimdark and it is not a book in which everything is solved by hugging people, either, although sometimes a letter or an informal pronoun is just as good. It has airships and steam-powered bridges and is not our nineteenth century, or anyone else's. Occasional echoes of Gormenghast, although that might just be the density of daily ritual and architecture. If I read more about royal courts of our history, I might draw other comparisons. The style is incisive, graceful, and often dryly, extremely funny. Occasionally horrifying. It is amazing what a kind novel this is, while pulling few of its punches.

I understand there will be no sequels; it says so in the FAQ. Nonetheless, more like this, please?

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I can't stand Grunts; I tried it in college before I'd read any of her other work and bounced with extreme prejudice.

I read it in college as well. I found parts of it funny, perhaps because I was reading it with sufficient memory of being a cynical twelve-year-old,* but the pointless/allegedly humorous brutality of it was troubling and I suspect I'd find it much more troubling if I read it again. It's clear there was an aspect of making fun of both Middle Earth, and more so the third generation carbon copies of Middle Earth that were showing up in the late 80s and early 90s, but there was also an aspect of making fun of the orcs-are-people-too story that in retrospect I find puzzling because I don't remember seeing too many orcs-are-people-too stories in that era outside of Shadowrun novelisations.**

I recommend Ash: A Secret History (2000) and Rats and Gargoyles (1990) without reservations

Thanks. I'll hold the first in mind. As for the second, I've this feeling that I've actually got a copy somewhere, but picked it up during a time when I was alternately depressed and distracted, put it down for something else, and never got back to it. I remember a Scholar-Soldier, an academy for thieves where some/many of the students were aristocrats and future political leaders and a city with a ruling (or at least powerful) class of elegant Rats, at least one of whom, as a character in the background of a scene, apparently had a human slave with heavy hints of concubine/pet. Would that be it?

*That peculiar stage in life when miniature empires of cannibalistic Smurfs or tiny teddy bears fighting endless wars in a fashion that the Imperium of Warhammer 40,000 would consider excessively brutal become the height of comedy.
**I feel as if I've read more of them since; for instance, Urusla Vernon's sadly incompleted "Elf and Orc" and Dominic Deegan's vegetarian orcs.

[sovay]

I remember a Scholar-Soldier, an academy for thieves where some/many of the students were aristocrats and future political leaders and a city with a ruling (or at least powerful) class of elegant Rats, at least one of whom, as a character in the background of a scene, apparently had a human slave with heavy hints of concubine/pet. Would that be it?

That's it. The Scholar-Soldier is Gentle's early recurring character Valentine White Crow, the academy for thieves is the University of Crime, the city is the nameless city (with five cardinal directions) at the heart of the world, and the Rats are, well, Rats. Servants of the Thirty-Six Decans, masters of the other races of the city. The Rat King is an eight-bodied rat king, elegantly knotted at the tails. (I did not know about the supposed phenomenon of rat kings when I read the novel, so I thought it was a brilliant invention of Gentle's. The rest of the novel is plenty inventive, though.) The plot is so labyrinthine it achieves the complexity of The Big Sleep and is almost irrelevant by the time the wheels stop spinning, but none of the characters care and I don't either.

I do not recommend the immediate sequel The Architecture of Desire (1991)—I finally read an essay by L. Timmel Duchamp that argues that the novel knows exactly what it's doing, but I still don't like most of its choices—but the title novella of Left to His Own Devices is great. Otherwise there are two early short stories, "Beggars in Satin" and "The Knot Garden," and I don't believe she wrote about Valentine and the unreliable, unshakeable love of her life the Lord-Architect Casaubon after 1994. I'm a little sorry; they are strong and curious protagonists. I assume she said all she wanted to with them. These things happen.