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May. 21st, 2022 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
I loved Traitor and I liked Monster quite a lot, but this was my favorite in the series. There's a shocking amount of humor- black humor, admittedly, but humor nonetheless. It's an incredibly fully realized, serious world, but there is a lot of zaniness, a lot of quippiness, a lot of really solid character humor, and those things helped to ground the complexity of the story in a richer and more real emotional context, and also make it more enjoyable and cathartic to read. It's somehow helpful that at this point we all know that Baru has been through the wringer to an absurd degree, and can sort of laugh about it.
Traitor is a largely linear narrative, tracing Baru's journey from childhood to the height of her political power. Tyrant is nonlinear, with multiple point of views (including some gripping passages in first person from Xate Yawa, a wonderful mirror and foil of Baru) and time jumps to at least three different eras in the history of Falcrest and Oriati Mbo. I read the book slowly, savoring it and digesting it the way I read a CJ Cherryh novel. By taking this expansive perspective, it fleshes out many of the hints of culture from the earlier books, and it also gives us a greater sense of what it means for Baru to be a savant who can keep track of it all and spot the hidden advantages. (Of course, the point is that Baru cannot actually keep track of it all. The point of this book is that Baru thought in Traitor that she had a straightforward, albeit difficult, plan that she could execute, but by Tyrant she knows that her plan is going up against the plans of people she doesn't even know exist. It's impossible for her to execute her entire plan. But Baru is a survivor, too. Oh has she survived a lot. )
We learn through flashbacks that a key trigger point for the story of Baru is the Armada War that took place a generation earlier between Falcrest and the Oriati Mbo. This had nothing to do with Baru's home on Taranoke, directly, but its template sets some important modes of interaction for Baru. And the Falcresti men who shaped Baru, notably Cairdine Farrier and Cosgrad Torrinde, were themselves shaped by the war in significant ways. The Armada War flashbacks are fascinating writing, they almost feel LeGuinian in their construction of a civilization that European chauvinists might call primitive, and then peeling back that first instinct toward dismissal and showing the massive cultural and societal machinery built on entirely different foundations. The concept of trim, a sort of social magic that may or may not exist but which certainly operates even if it doesn't exist, is central to what the book is doing as a narrative about civilization.
At some level, it is baffling and therefore miraculous that Dickinson has managed to make me still care about Baru's destiny at this point. It's amazing. She's so terrible, and she's done such reprehensible things, why do I like her? One reason is because she's funny, now. It's easier to forgive a funny monster. Another reason is because she suffered so much in Traitor and Monster and she is still suffering now. But, like, Baru causes terrible things to happen to so many other people, and those people I also care about, but not as much as I'm rooting for Baru to win. The real trick is that Dickinson has done such a good job of making The System the villain. Everyone is fighting against The System, everyone is failing and being corrupted by it, so it's not so much that I see Baru as a good guy, but that I see no good guys and I'm therefore fully onboard for demolishing The System.
I complain so often on this journal about narratives that collapse the complexity of the system being the enemy by creating a single villain that you can punch to take down the system. The Masquerade cycle is as far in the other direction as is possible; Is it any wonder that I love every minute of it? It proves that it is possible to tell a story like this and still have it be compelling, or in fact for it to be even more compelling and suspenseful because evil is distributed and ambiguous and no single punch will take down a system. The cover tagline is "Baru could end the world, or fight to save it," but this only true at a laughably shallow surface level: Baru is debating throughout most of the book whether to unleash the Kettling on Falcrest or instead go with an absurdly convoluted plan to take over Falcrest via trade manipulation, but within this single debate there are so many options and choices of how to go about it that the whole single question sustains the book's momentum. The fluidity of the plans and Baru's ability to change with the flow is what makes this book continuously exciting. And that means that while I think some might reasonably complain that the ending is kind of easy, as I've sat on it I don't feel that way. So much had to happen to set up the ending, and I found it really satisfying as a result.
I'm not entirely clear where the series goes from here? I don't think this is the final book, I think the rumors were this was going to be at least four books. The epilogue sets up some further story possibilities, and even without the epilogue it would be interesting to jump ten years and see where Baru is, if she's still alive. But also this would be an entirely satisfying ending to Baru's story on its own, in a way that the endings of books one and two definitely were not. There's a scene about ten pages from the end where Dickinson pulls off a masterfully surprising change in tone that delivers really all that I needed from an ending for the series. Notwithstanding that, I'm perfectly willing to follow wherever Dickinson goes from here.
I loved Traitor and I liked Monster quite a lot, but this was my favorite in the series. There's a shocking amount of humor- black humor, admittedly, but humor nonetheless. It's an incredibly fully realized, serious world, but there is a lot of zaniness, a lot of quippiness, a lot of really solid character humor, and those things helped to ground the complexity of the story in a richer and more real emotional context, and also make it more enjoyable and cathartic to read. It's somehow helpful that at this point we all know that Baru has been through the wringer to an absurd degree, and can sort of laugh about it.
Traitor is a largely linear narrative, tracing Baru's journey from childhood to the height of her political power. Tyrant is nonlinear, with multiple point of views (including some gripping passages in first person from Xate Yawa, a wonderful mirror and foil of Baru) and time jumps to at least three different eras in the history of Falcrest and Oriati Mbo. I read the book slowly, savoring it and digesting it the way I read a CJ Cherryh novel. By taking this expansive perspective, it fleshes out many of the hints of culture from the earlier books, and it also gives us a greater sense of what it means for Baru to be a savant who can keep track of it all and spot the hidden advantages. (Of course, the point is that Baru cannot actually keep track of it all. The point of this book is that Baru thought in Traitor that she had a straightforward, albeit difficult, plan that she could execute, but by Tyrant she knows that her plan is going up against the plans of people she doesn't even know exist. It's impossible for her to execute her entire plan. But Baru is a survivor, too. Oh has she survived a lot. )
We learn through flashbacks that a key trigger point for the story of Baru is the Armada War that took place a generation earlier between Falcrest and the Oriati Mbo. This had nothing to do with Baru's home on Taranoke, directly, but its template sets some important modes of interaction for Baru. And the Falcresti men who shaped Baru, notably Cairdine Farrier and Cosgrad Torrinde, were themselves shaped by the war in significant ways. The Armada War flashbacks are fascinating writing, they almost feel LeGuinian in their construction of a civilization that European chauvinists might call primitive, and then peeling back that first instinct toward dismissal and showing the massive cultural and societal machinery built on entirely different foundations. The concept of trim, a sort of social magic that may or may not exist but which certainly operates even if it doesn't exist, is central to what the book is doing as a narrative about civilization.
At some level, it is baffling and therefore miraculous that Dickinson has managed to make me still care about Baru's destiny at this point. It's amazing. She's so terrible, and she's done such reprehensible things, why do I like her? One reason is because she's funny, now. It's easier to forgive a funny monster. Another reason is because she suffered so much in Traitor and Monster and she is still suffering now. But, like, Baru causes terrible things to happen to so many other people, and those people I also care about, but not as much as I'm rooting for Baru to win. The real trick is that Dickinson has done such a good job of making The System the villain. Everyone is fighting against The System, everyone is failing and being corrupted by it, so it's not so much that I see Baru as a good guy, but that I see no good guys and I'm therefore fully onboard for demolishing The System.
I complain so often on this journal about narratives that collapse the complexity of the system being the enemy by creating a single villain that you can punch to take down the system. The Masquerade cycle is as far in the other direction as is possible; Is it any wonder that I love every minute of it? It proves that it is possible to tell a story like this and still have it be compelling, or in fact for it to be even more compelling and suspenseful because evil is distributed and ambiguous and no single punch will take down a system. The cover tagline is "Baru could end the world, or fight to save it," but this only true at a laughably shallow surface level: Baru is debating throughout most of the book whether to unleash the Kettling on Falcrest or instead go with an absurdly convoluted plan to take over Falcrest via trade manipulation, but within this single debate there are so many options and choices of how to go about it that the whole single question sustains the book's momentum. The fluidity of the plans and Baru's ability to change with the flow is what makes this book continuously exciting. And that means that while I think some might reasonably complain that the ending is kind of easy, as I've sat on it I don't feel that way. So much had to happen to set up the ending, and I found it really satisfying as a result.
I'm not entirely clear where the series goes from here? I don't think this is the final book, I think the rumors were this was going to be at least four books. The epilogue sets up some further story possibilities, and even without the epilogue it would be interesting to jump ten years and see where Baru is, if she's still alive. But also this would be an entirely satisfying ending to Baru's story on its own, in a way that the endings of books one and two definitely were not. There's a scene about ten pages from the end where Dickinson pulls off a masterfully surprising change in tone that delivers really all that I needed from an ending for the series. Notwithstanding that, I'm perfectly willing to follow wherever Dickinson goes from here.
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