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cyphomandraSusan Palwick, Shelter.
Oh hell, it’s been too long since I read this. I really enjoyed it, although I'm still a bit unsure about the ending. An intelligent house offers refuge to a homeless man in the middle of a storm (a storm in which the house’s owner dies, having gone out to rescue his ex-wife), and the connections between these people and a few others spin out into the story. Most of which is flashback (or, I suppose, the stuff within the frame), set in a near/possible future where compassion is a disease, treated or punished, and a deadly virus’s effects on memory have been borrowed to wipe the memories of those who fall outside the narrow bounds of society. The main characters are Meredith Walford and Roberta Danton, two of the few survivors of the Caravan virus; Meredith has privilege, power and money, and Roberta has few of any of these, and a dangerous tendency towards caring for people.
Where this book got to me was with Meredith’s character, because I ended up liking her in spite of herself; she’s damaged and petty and spoilt, but I understand her, and the scenes with her and her adopted son, Nicholas, which spiral into an appalling tangle of secrets and bad decisions (all tragically understandable) are particularly effective. Roberta, who I liked more at the beginning, moves out of the story more later on, as her actions become less important than her reactions, and I did want the ending to be more about the other characters, and less about Meredith herself; there’s less tension there than I was expecting, and partly because of that I read the last line as menacing, the first time around, and I think it’s intended as hopeful. The point seems to be that memory is necessary for forgiveness.
My copy has one of those irritatingly helpful reading guides at the back, which is the sort of thing that usually stops me saying anything else. It does, however, state that Roberta’s racial and ethnic identity is “left deliberately ambiguous”, which seems odd – she’s described as black and her parents are from Sierra Leone.
Robin Hobb, Renegade’s Magic. Third, and final book in the Soldier Son trilogy – a trilogy which does some interesting things but is also difficult, in many senses, and I do wonder what this has done to Hobb’s sales figures. I think she has enough goodwill from the Fitz books to survive one failure, but I’m not sure where she’ll go next.
These books do, however, require the reader to spend almost 2000 pages trapped in Nevare’s point of view, and he is a man who is stubbornly bland and passive to a fault, even when he’s not trapped in the back of his own mind. His main characteristic is refusal and, in this final book, where the narrative sets the reader up to want and expect reconciliation, all you get is resistance. Nevare is not a traditional hero and, while that makes him interesting in some ways, to a large degree it makes him frustrating, especially when his decisions seem to only delay (and delay, and delay – this is a series that could most definitely have been trimmed) the inevitable.
On the other hand – the trilogy does look at colonialism, and what happens when one civilisation expands into another’s territory (and not just the Gernians and the Specks, but the Specks and the plains folk), and the sheer grind of life on the frontiers where these clashes take place. There’s an emphasis on the attack (not necessarily intentional) on culture rather than just physical destruction that can cripple a society, and the way initial choices can escalate to beyond where any of the participants expected.
The Speck magic system, whereby Great Ones who wield the magic are, literally great, fattened by feeders with certain magic foods is another double-edged sword – in the second book, as Nevare grows fatter he develops an intense self-hatred, backed up by the disgust of most of the other characters, and I suddenly realised I was reading it with the same hatred and, more, expecting that Nevare would become magically thin again, so it wouldn’t count. That made me think about trading image for power, and how in fantasy the transformations we expect are always towards a particular ideal; that there are certain types of damage that are “better” than others. In this book, tho’, there are one too many scenes involving scavenging for food to rebuild Nevare’s magic, with detailed descriptions of particular berries, roots, fish, fungi etc, and the overall effect was of being in a computer game where you are desperately ransacking the landscape to build up resources for your end-of-level confrontation, which was not quite what I hoped for.
I ended up liking all the female characters (especially Epiny) much more than the male ones, which is not something I remember from my previous Robin Hobbs. I may, therefore, hope for Hobb’s next book to involve a female main character, or, really, any point of view less painfully self-centred.
Oh hell, it’s been too long since I read this. I really enjoyed it, although I'm still a bit unsure about the ending. An intelligent house offers refuge to a homeless man in the middle of a storm (a storm in which the house’s owner dies, having gone out to rescue his ex-wife), and the connections between these people and a few others spin out into the story. Most of which is flashback (or, I suppose, the stuff within the frame), set in a near/possible future where compassion is a disease, treated or punished, and a deadly virus’s effects on memory have been borrowed to wipe the memories of those who fall outside the narrow bounds of society. The main characters are Meredith Walford and Roberta Danton, two of the few survivors of the Caravan virus; Meredith has privilege, power and money, and Roberta has few of any of these, and a dangerous tendency towards caring for people.
Where this book got to me was with Meredith’s character, because I ended up liking her in spite of herself; she’s damaged and petty and spoilt, but I understand her, and the scenes with her and her adopted son, Nicholas, which spiral into an appalling tangle of secrets and bad decisions (all tragically understandable) are particularly effective. Roberta, who I liked more at the beginning, moves out of the story more later on, as her actions become less important than her reactions, and I did want the ending to be more about the other characters, and less about Meredith herself; there’s less tension there than I was expecting, and partly because of that I read the last line as menacing, the first time around, and I think it’s intended as hopeful. The point seems to be that memory is necessary for forgiveness.
My copy has one of those irritatingly helpful reading guides at the back, which is the sort of thing that usually stops me saying anything else. It does, however, state that Roberta’s racial and ethnic identity is “left deliberately ambiguous”, which seems odd – she’s described as black and her parents are from Sierra Leone.
Robin Hobb, Renegade’s Magic. Third, and final book in the Soldier Son trilogy – a trilogy which does some interesting things but is also difficult, in many senses, and I do wonder what this has done to Hobb’s sales figures. I think she has enough goodwill from the Fitz books to survive one failure, but I’m not sure where she’ll go next.
These books do, however, require the reader to spend almost 2000 pages trapped in Nevare’s point of view, and he is a man who is stubbornly bland and passive to a fault, even when he’s not trapped in the back of his own mind. His main characteristic is refusal and, in this final book, where the narrative sets the reader up to want and expect reconciliation, all you get is resistance. Nevare is not a traditional hero and, while that makes him interesting in some ways, to a large degree it makes him frustrating, especially when his decisions seem to only delay (and delay, and delay – this is a series that could most definitely have been trimmed) the inevitable.
On the other hand – the trilogy does look at colonialism, and what happens when one civilisation expands into another’s territory (and not just the Gernians and the Specks, but the Specks and the plains folk), and the sheer grind of life on the frontiers where these clashes take place. There’s an emphasis on the attack (not necessarily intentional) on culture rather than just physical destruction that can cripple a society, and the way initial choices can escalate to beyond where any of the participants expected.
The Speck magic system, whereby Great Ones who wield the magic are, literally great, fattened by feeders with certain magic foods is another double-edged sword – in the second book, as Nevare grows fatter he develops an intense self-hatred, backed up by the disgust of most of the other characters, and I suddenly realised I was reading it with the same hatred and, more, expecting that Nevare would become magically thin again, so it wouldn’t count. That made me think about trading image for power, and how in fantasy the transformations we expect are always towards a particular ideal; that there are certain types of damage that are “better” than others. In this book, tho’, there are one too many scenes involving scavenging for food to rebuild Nevare’s magic, with detailed descriptions of particular berries, roots, fish, fungi etc, and the overall effect was of being in a computer game where you are desperately ransacking the landscape to build up resources for your end-of-level confrontation, which was not quite what I hoped for.
I ended up liking all the female characters (especially Epiny) much more than the male ones, which is not something I remember from my previous Robin Hobbs. I may, therefore, hope for Hobb’s next book to involve a female main character, or, really, any point of view less painfully self-centred.
