46 – A Desolation Called Peace
A Desolation called Peace is the second in the Teixcalaan duology. The first entry was A Memory Called Empire and that was a five-star banger. A Desolation called Peace is no different in that respect – it’s genuinely excellent. Like the best sci-fi (The Three Body Problem, The Expanse series, Dune and so on) it transcends a normal rating system simply because of the scale of the story. On one hand, a Desolation called Peace is about an empire on the brink of war. On the other, it’s a story about what it means to be. The first book flirted with those themes, particularly in relation to a vast empire which considered everything outside of its domain to be ‘other’ – much of the story there is about reconciling the hunger for belonging with the awareness you never can.
That gets carried through here – Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is still forever torn between her nominal loyalty to her home station and her dream of being accepted as authentically Teixcalaan. The setup is simple. Her old friend Three Seagrass comes to the station to draft her into the struggle to prevent war with an intractable and unknowable alien force. The disparate threads of her reality come together. The colliding of her worlds, contexts, and confused feelings knits into a complexity that poses questions she’s not able to answer. While she and Seagrass struggle to find a way forward, the Empire is losing ships at astonishing speed and with alarming viciousness. A battle for political supremacy in the background pits her loyalties against each other, and factions of the Empire are striving for vastly different outcomes. It’s a Gordian knot that nobody can work out how to slice through until Seagrass and Dzmare can reconcile all those competing forces and see what the evidence before them is really saying.
Arkady Martine’s books are remarkable in that they are simultaneously plot driven and yet deeply rooted in character. Most authors struggle to excel in both capacities. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, for example, usually don’t have much of a plot to write home about. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is so bereft of a meaningful plot that I have described it as being ‘almost entirely about a feeling’. Game of Thrones – both the books and the television shows – struggle to present interesting characters that aren’t merely stand-in surrogates. Those that are genuinely compelling are notable precisely for how rare they are. For every drunken lecherous dwarf there are twenty bearded, stoic men who would make for the world’s most difficult police line-up.
That’s not the case in these books – the plots are gripping, the characters are rich and complex, and amongst all of that Martine manages to ask – and even answer – questions on genuinely huge topics without ever resorting to a lecture. Her critiques on empire are deep cuts. Even the title shows the subtlety of her approach. I instantly recognised it as a famous Caledonian quote regarding the Roman empire, as it was quoted by Tacticus. Speaking of the Romans, a pre-Scottish chieftain described their approach as ‘They create a desolation and call it peace’ That’s a vicious commentary on the scorched earth strategy of Roman ‘pacification’. You don’t get anything as abrupt as a title drop in the text of the book. Instead, it’s dropped into your subconscious and left to percolate. Martine has a lot to say about the themes in the book, but they work like a stabbing in the dark. They penetrate and then gradually fester. You only realise what she’s done when the scars become impossible to ignore. It’s masterful, really.
These two books are awesome. You are doing yourself an injustice if you don’t read them.
47 – Convenience Store Woman
Convenience Store Woman is essentially about an autistic lady who doesn’t understand why people think it’s a problem that she’s working the same supermarket job that she has for years. I mean, they don’t come right out and say she’s autistic but it’s pretty obvious from even a surface reading. Her job gives her structure, routine, and mastery over her environment. She knows what to do, and when to do it. She understand the social pecking order, and how things are supposed to be. She’s happy there – for a given value of happy – simply because she’s never been conditioned to understand why she shouldn’t be. Happy is perhaps the wrong word. She is ‘at peace’ with her life. Nonetheless, people keep acting like her life is a problem and in an attempt to simply ‘get along’ she reacts to everything with the assumption everyone else must know better.
Most of the pressure she gets is at least well intentioned, until she comes into contact with a new co-worker – basically a refugee from /r/theredpill. Despite having nothing himself to offer, he believes himself entitled to the ministrations of a companion. One who will support him, and who will keep his existence secret so he can indulge in his own appetites without societal pressure landing on him. Keiko, our protagonist, doesn’t understand enough of human dynamics to see him as the toxic monster he is and is gradually compelled to acquiesce to his expectations and demands. Especially as his mere presence as ‘her partner’ seems to alleviate some of the expectations laid upon her by others.
It’s an odd duck of a book. On one hand, the passive acceptance that Keiko shows to the rhetoric of an especially toxic incel makes it feel a bit like propaganda. I don’t want to read some unwashed virgin’s view of the essential subservient nature of women. There’s a reason I don’t frequent those parts of the Internet and it’s not because they’re hard to find. Having it shoved down my throat in a novel about a vulnerable woman was unwelcome and uncomfortable. With no-one to push back against the commentary, it comes across as accepting of things none of us should be willing to accept.
But more than that, Keiko doesn’t just avoid pushing back – she internalizes it. She doesn’t know better, so she accepts the rhetoric. A lot of the book left me wanting to scream at her, and at the author, for letting the intellectual rot sink in. It’s more than ‘she deserves better than this’. It’s ‘I the reader deserve better than this’. Unfortunately the anger I felt reading this wasn’t directed at the situation, such as in Kim Jiyoung Born 1983. It was directed at the author for incorporating it into the text. If the Men Going Their Own Way crowd could have written a pairing of author-insert and willing strawman, they couldn’t have asked for better.
It would be easy to dismiss the book, I think. However, when it’s good it is actually genuinely insightful. Why is it a problem for someone to find their equilibrium and stick to it? Why should we be demanding everyone ‘progress’ in their lives and their careers? My own life goal is to find my local optimum where I solve an area equation. On one axis is ‘The stuff I want to do but don’t have to’ and the other is ‘The stuff I have to do but don’t want to’. As soon as it feels like I’ve found the point that maximises the first while minimising the second, I will coast from that point onwards. Keiko clearly has a different pair of axes she’s working with, but she’s found the ‘point of serenity’. We should all be so lucky. If people didn’t pester her to do more with her life, there’d be no need for her to even think about it. Convenience Story Woman is a meditation on where contentment comes from – in its own way.
Still, the awful MRA stuff appears suddenly and poisons everything else in a way that seems only somewhat in service of the narrative. It spoils what could have been an excellent book and infects it with manosphere bullshit that leaves me, as a reader, feeling grubby and contaminated at the end.
48 – The Glass Hotel
The Glass Hotel is kind of a companion piece to the Sea of Tranquillity, a book I read early on in this project and really enjoyed. Emily St. John Mandel has a gift for language, or at least a certain kind of language that evokes dreamy, fragile stories that can be situated uneasily in the liminal space between science-fiction and actual literature. Sea of Tranquillity makes mention of a particular character, and a particular incident, and then never dwells on it. That’s because its contours were already explored in the Glass Hotel.
The problem really is that this feels like a very slight book – the premise, in comparison to Mandel’s other works, is almost impossibly small. Chronologically it precedes Sea of tranquillity, and that seems weird because it feels like its successor, such as it is, represents the origin point. It feels like you need to have read Sea of Tranquillity first, otherwise the grab-bag of elements don’t really seem to have anywhere to be emotionally grounded. It meanders rather than coruscates, and that’s a shame because it makes the book feel thoroughly ancillary. It reads like the novelization of a set of wiki pages about something much more famous.
It is not though, it’s important to say, a bad book. The author’s skill is such that she elevates the relative mundanity of the tale through her sharp writing, keen characterisation and general ephemeral eeriness. It’s powerfully evocative of some of the early haunting visual imagery of the early Corona pandemic. It’s just not a book I think you need to read, and if you skipped over it in your exploration of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquillity I think you would find it had zero impact on your understanding of the St John Mandel Cinematic Universe.
49 – The Raven’s Tower
If The Bear and the Nightingale was Katherine Arden channelling the Tiffany Aching Discworld books, the Raven’s Tower is Ann Leckie drawing strength from Small Gods. The whole of the Raven’s Tower is inspired and enervated by the philosophy at the core of Pratchett’s tale of belief and ritual. Essentially it is this – gods become powerful through belief, and that belief sustains the edifice of their faith even when all that is left is a hollow husk of institutional worship. That’s how the gods in this book work, and it’s as compelling a thesis here as it is in Pratchett’s novel.
The Raven’s Tower though isn’t just a Small Gods knock-off. It has its own curious cosmology that gives religion an unusual shape. Divine magic here is not a series of spells that change the world, but rather based on the fact that anything a God says must be inherently true. Upon making an utterance, the universe will shift to ensure that there is no lie, and that draws from the power reserves of the God. In the event of extreme distance between word and reality, there is a tension. Either the universe cracks, or the God does. It’s an elegant idea, lending a genuine weight of importance to the words of divinity. If a God says ‘And then Michael dropped down dead’, it’s a trivial task for the universe to make it happen. I could have a heart attack, I could slip down a set of stairs, I could be hit by a sniper’s bullet. However, if a God says ‘And Michael had been dead for years’, it requires the undoing of a lot of doings. I’ve been writing these posts for years, for example. To unravel such complex knots, most Gods will drain themselves and die in the process.
Imagine what it would be like if everything you said was like that – not that it had to be true, but that whatever you said became true. You’d probably be a lot more circumspect in your conversation. A lot less immediate in your answers to questions. You’d likely rely on riddles and statements open to interpretation. You’d probably spend a lot of time thinking and listening with not so much of the yakketty-yak. While the Raven’s Tower doesn’t make any comment about modern religion, it does actually give an answer to a question that it doesn’t pose itself – if God is out there, why isn’t He talking to us?
Maybe he’s scared of the consequences of everything He might say.
The braver, more proactive Gods wield this ability like a weapon though, but they’re crafty about it – it’s all about finding the inflection point where events could take several courses and then snapping reality into the trajectory you desire. A god doesn’t say ‘My armies will claim these foreign shores’ unless they have an army sufficiently large to make it a fair bet. It’s all about placing a divine finger on a cosmic scale, and it creates Gods that are weirdly relatable in that they’re kind of like everyday people. We can all accomplish magical things if we ensure that they were compatible with an outcome we all but pre-arranged. If you want to create miracles, first arrange the conditions under which miraculous things can occur.
I liked this book an awful lot. It’s stand-alone, but I hope Leckie does more with this fascinating concept.
50 – Assassin’s Apprentice
When I began this project, one of the names that was recommended to me again and again was Robin Hobb. Her bibliography is extensive, and the most accessible starting point that a lot of people gave me was the Assassin’s Apprentice book. That’s where I dug in. I have to say, I was initially disappointed.
I’m not much of a fan of stories about child prodigies taken in by mysterious benefactors in order to hone their phenomenal skills. Children are dumb and boring. There, I said it. Come at me, bro. Superheroes are dull, even if they come in the garb of prenatural skill as opposed to borderline magical abilities.
I don’t want to read about children becoming adults – even remarkable adults – because that particular trajectory falls far below my threshold of boredom. Admittedly I did adore The Lies of Locke Lamora but largely only once that part of the story was over. I want to read about unremarkable adults achieving remarkable things. So yeah, I did have to suppress a number of bored sighs in the early parts of the Assassin’s Apprentice, especially because the story lacks the steampunk trappings of Locke Lamora. It’s pretty standard fantasy, which in itself is another snooze factor for me.
But my word, did this grow on me as I went through it. And I think it’s because of how it subverted my expectation – this isn’t about a talented child growing to become a world-leading assassin. It’s about a relatively average child (at least, within the borders defined by fantasy) becoming a relatively workaday, and only occasionally effective, professional. He’s not training to become a supernatural killer. He’s not a ninja, floating on the winds to strike dead his foes by the thousands. He’s not a stupendous warrior or a legendary thief. He’s the equivalent of a chartered accountant, except his spreadsheets are poisons and his ledger books are, well, also poisons.
That strikes me as so much more interesting than how it could have been. Fitz (the name of the character) is talented, sure, and has some mystical ability I’m sure will become prominent in later books in the series. But he is essentially a largely normal person with flaws and a lot to learn. His mentors likewise work within tight constraints to accomplish their goals, and nobody can simply juggernaut their way through obstacles by virtue of supernatural competence. There are no Skywalkers in here, and it’s unquestionably for the better.
By the end of Assassin’s Apprentice I was hooked, and the two other books in the trilogy now nestle on my bookshelf ready to be read. I can’t speak, at the time of writing, to whether the rest of the books are worth your time. All I can say is that this specific book definitely is.