{"id":15226,"date":"2016-03-07T17:27:29","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T22:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2016\/03\/07\/15226.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:10:48","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:10:48","slug":"book-report-gentleman-jole-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2016\/03\/07\/book-report-gentleman-jole-and\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It occurs to me that I haven’t written about the new Vorkosigan<\/a> book, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen<\/a>. I had been waiting for this book for some time—I mean, I had been waiting specifically for Jole<\/i> since it was mentioned on Lois McMaster Bujold’s Goodreads blog<\/a>, but I had been waiting for a book about Cordelia and Sergeyar since… well, I first wrote about it on this Tohu Bohu more than ten years ago<\/a>. So I suppose it’s not terribly surprising that I was disappointed, with all that build-up.\n

It’s not a bad<\/i> book, by any means. A little dull, for those of us interested in plot. The things that the characters want are eminently achievable, the conflict is small-scale, mostly internal. Like the later seasons of Downton Abbey<\/cite>, the pleasure is being with the familiar characters we like, and seeing them succeed in various ways. On the other hand, like the later seasons of Downton<\/cite>, that’s pretty much all the pleasure in it for me. Oh, there’s the pleasure of well-written passages, true, and some romance-ish stuff, though not very much. But there is little of what I really like about her work, what I think she does better than other people do, which is plot.\n

My reaction was that it read like fanfic to me, and I know that sounds disparaging, and I only sort-of mean for it to. Here’s what I mean by that: I don’t read much fanfic, and when I read fanfic and enjoy it, it is largely because I get to spend a little more time with characters that I like, and the writer fills in some gaps in the world, ideally in a surprising way that is still consistent with canon. That sort of enjoyment is exactly the sort of enjoyment I got from this Jole<\/cite>. I have rarely read any fanfic that is well-plotted in the way that the Vorkosigan stuff usually is; that sort of lack is exactly the sort of lack I felt in Jole<\/cite>. And, yes, I suppose, there’s a focus on unexpected sexual pairings (or treblings) which is in a lot of fanfic, but (a) there’s a ton of fanfic that isn’t about sex, and (2) this novel isn’t erotica and isn’t even particularly prurient in its evocations of what John Irving calls sexual suspects. My Perfect Non-Reader (who may well be reading this Tohu Bohu these days, for all I know) claims that fanfic means smut—Jole<\/i> is not smut. But it is… smut-adjacent? Reclaiming a minor character from a series, making him the main character in a story of his sexual relationships with of the two main characters… well, that is the sort of thing that fanfic seems to do a lot of. And often well, although not perhaps as well as Ms. Bujold has done it here, in the manner of hitting on her own style pretty much exactly.\n

I believe one of Ms. Bujold’s lines has become a sort of catchphrase for talking about series novels or indeed plot of any kind: she has said (I’m paraphrasing) that she attempts to figure out the worst possible thing she could do to Miles, and then make that situation much worse, and then figure out how he can get out of it. There are books where that method is obvious (Memory<\/cite>, obviously, and Brothers in Arms<\/cite> and Mirror Dance<\/cite>) and others where it is somewhat less so, but in each of the Vorkosigan books there is something that goes very wrong, with disastrous consequences. In addition to the thing that has<\/i> gone wrong, there some other thing that has a high probability of going wrong in the near future, and that<\/I> would have disastrous consequences. In Jole<\/cite>, well, not so much: Gentleman Jole has a choice to make, but both choices are lovely (a new family or a huge promotion) and neither would be obviously disastrous. There is nothing stopping him from making either choice he prefers, or delaying the choice for a while, either.\n

Also, and this is connected, the sheer amazing privilege<\/i> of our characters got up my nose after a bit. I mean, yes, when we met Cordelia she was a ship’s captain and her influence has only increased from there, and the Vorkosigan clan has always been insanely rich and powerful, enough to buy or bully their way out of any ordinary situation, but then Ms. Bujold takes them out of ordinary situations and makes them prisoners of war, or escaped convicts, or else constrains them with rules of honor and loyalty that prevent the use of their amazing privilege in the direness of their specific direness. In this book, that privilege is everywhere evident. Is there a potential logistic problem? Foist it on a minion. An awkward social situation? No-one dares challenge the (effective) Queen or the (effective) Commander-in-Chief, so it’s not a problem. The closest to a potential problem would be disapproving relatives, but those relatives are conspicuously broad-minded (which is consistent with their earlier characters—I’m not saying it would be better if they weren’t, just that there was little suspense of whether they would be) and besides, Jole and Cordelia do not seem at any point worried about what their insanely rich and powerful relatives would do<\/I> if they disapproved. In the end, they just buy a couple of new houses and boats, hire some nannies and have fun! Which is nice for them, it’s true, and certainly not unpleasant for us to read about, but goodness gracious me the privilege. Might as well go ahead and watch Isobel Crawley marrying Lord Merton. Which, you know, I also enjoyed, so there’s that.\n

One of the things that Ms. Bujold has said in interviews and on her blog (hey, she evidently read my Tohu Bohu, I can read her Goodreads) (wow, that was a long time ago and on MySpace<\/cite> for the sake of everything holy) is that some readers appear to be disappointed that the book is not what they were expecting, and those readers are therefore attempting to read a book that isn’t there, rather than the one that is. I know I was looking forward to aspects of Ms. Bujold’s writings that I like very, very very<\/i> much, and which it turns are not so much in the book, and yes, I am disappointed not to find them. Not as much so as I might be if they were in the book but somehow screwed up, I point out. That would suck. No, I recognize that this is the book she wanted to write, and if it isn’t exactly the book I wanted to read, well, I suppose that’s my problem.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is wishy-washy about it, but, you know, that’s how it is sometimes, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16459,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15226\/revisions\/16459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}