Your Humble Blogger read Komarr again. It was restful.
It’s times like these that I seriously consider knocking off the whole bookblogging thing at the end of the year. I mean, seriously. I read Komarr again. I have nothing to say about it. I feel vaguely embarrassed about it. Not that it’s such a bad thing to read Komarr again. But it’s kind of like admitting that I ate half a bag of barbecue potato chips last night. I mean, I did eat half a bag of barbecue potato chips last night, but I’m vaguely embarrassed about that, too. At least I don’t have to tell all y’all that I ate half a bag of barbecue potato chips last night. You know, if it doesn’t come up.
I will say that I enjoyed the book a lot more than the chips. Frankly, the chips were nasty. I didn’t enjoy them at all. They were unhealthy and all, without nutritive value, and incredibly unadvisable since I’m still, you know, healing from oral surgery, but mostly they were just nasty. The book may have been without nutritive value, but it wasn’t nasty.
Well, there’s the odd little thing about Ms. Bujold, her Vorkosigan world and civil rights. Essentially, she fairly frequently has Good People take advantage of their positions in Barrayar’s bizarre legal/military system to do things that would totally violate any current Western sense of civil rights. Search without warrant, interrogate with truth drugs, occasionally interrogate people under duress, and engage in something awfully close to rendition. This is often accompanied by hand-wringing, or even wry comments about the lack of civil rights in Barrayaran government, but it largely works. Sometimes Bad People take advantage of their positions to do the same things with bad consequences, too.
In Komarr, Miles has just been given a sort of absolute investigator’s authority. He can grant warrants, arrest people, interrogate them, probably kill them and eat them, and he has total immunity up to the Emperor himself (to whom he has to justify his behavior after the fact). He is, at first, reluctant to do so on his instincts, preferring to wait for evidence. At last, however, he learns to trust his instincts, such instincts being why he was given the power in the first place, and it all turns out all right in the end.
Now, I don’t read Ms. Bujold’s stuff for rigorous political insight. And she gets a lot of really good stuff out of the “backward”political system of Barrayar, a system of military serfdom/junta sort of thing, particularly interacting with the other forms of planetary/multiplanetary governance. She often has her perceptive characters remark on how backward Barrayar is, and she shows the Good Characters shepherding the culture through a sort of Enlightenment to prepare it for a scheme of civil rights and suffrage. So I’m not going to make the mistake of thinking that Barrayar is presented as a positive role model, nor of thinking that Miles and the assorted Good Guys of Barrayar are role models within the context of our own circumstances. On the other hand, they are role models, of sorts, and despite her misgivings about it, there’s a sense that if such heroes as Miles were around, and if we happened to live in a culture that failed to defend individual liberties, then it would be OK to give unbounded investigative power to those people.
This is wrong.
On the other hand, it’s a terrific plot device. Given that we know that people have difficulty distinguishing between things that are terrific plot devices and things that actually work in the real world (largely, in my opinion, due to the saving human ability to make sense of the world through telling ourselves stories about it), I sometimes get grumpy when writers use terrific plot devices in, you know, their terrifically plotted books, because once we tell ourselves that’s what the world is like in some ways, it’s terribly easy to tell ourselves that’s what the world is actually like.
Not really Ms. Bujold’s fault, and there are about a million people who are a million times worse than she is in a million ways pertaining to this specific things, without having all of the things I like about her writing. But if I’m looking for something to write about the umpty-’leventh time through Komarr, I’m going to wind up carping, aren’t I?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.