The Traitor Baru Cormorant

Hmmm. So: it's a high fantasy political intrigue thing, featuring a hard-assed lady, Baru Cormorant, trying to rise the ranks and take down the Evil Empire (here, “the Masquerade”) from within because (1) they took over her island home (VENGEANCE!), and (2) disappeared one of her dads, cuz he was bi and the Masquerade is like, wow, big time homophobic.

They're also eugenicists and basically an 18th century colonial super-power (with smallpox blankets, without slavery), and thus very easy for a Modern Person to despise. Too easy! And that's kinda the problem with this book: it's a book about nuance, subtlety and intrigue, all presented in LOUD, BLUNT, ALL CAPS EXCLAMATIONS OF TELLING (not showing!). Much like Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, we have a Modern Person juxtaposed against a caricatured historical setting, and all our Modern Ideas - about sex, about gender, about politics - are put into conflict that feels facile. (Like, yo, marriage being about love and sexual fulfillment is a very recent (Victorian?) idea, so why all this terrible fuss about who Baru's gonna marry?! Lady, it's Medieval Hyper-politics Land, you marry the duke with the most land and then you do whoever you want! Who cares! argrhghgh)

And speaking of “facile” (instead of “easy”): It also dresses up this really blunt, declaratory storytelling with a thing I can't stand: an over-reliance on $1 words, in the style of Gene Wolf. This is a cormorant, people. “Abeam” means you're looking out the side of the ship. And other tedious roadblocks to my reading experience. :/ And don't get me started on how everyone had the same voice... and how there's the grizzled spy Duke, the grizzled philospher Duke, and the grizzled Duke we meet this one time on the road. Good Lord!

Beyond the ALL CAPSness of this book is the coded story between the lines (in SMALL CAPS, shall we say). Dickinson passes Bechdel with flying colors (yey), and there's some wonderful subverting of gender norms: like, imagine lots of strapping naval officers in dashing naval uniforms, imagine corpulent rulers with limited morals and outsized personalities, imagine Rohirrim-type/Genghis Khan-type warriors of the steppes. You're probably thinking of dude, dude, dude. But they're all ladies! That was nice, I +1 that with my heart.

But then the niceness evaporated when Dickinson beat me over the head with his THIS EVIL EMPIRE OMG stick.

But let me recap the plot (briefly): Baru Cormorant is a super-genius “savant” type girl who grows up in Haiti Oppressed Tropical Home, has her family unit destroyed and shamed by the homophobe imperialists, and is raised in an imperialist school (one-room!? white-washed walls?!) where she aces the civil service exams and is sent to be the Federal Reserve person ODI Fellow Imperial Accountant at this other land of mountains, steppes, and mighty, rowdy, throwback Medieval types. Much is made of basic economics: like, Baru's SAVANT-LIKE GENIUS to realize that money is the source of all power - and money > tribe in conflicts. Even when people think it's about tribe. No, srsly, it's money. MONEH. See Paul Collier for much more on ideas of this nature.

Baru has various political designs, figuring out these Medieval people who also have political designs, and eventually she becomes the figurehead/leader of this big ass rebellion. There is much high fantasy fighting stuff: horses! rape and pillage! banners flapping in the wind! If you're into that, there's also a veeeery long climax fight in the end which is basically like the last scene in Henry V where they fight in the mud for like half the film (yo, and I'm into that scene).

I couldn't help but compare this book, somewhat not favorably, to a slew of other high fantasy political intrigues featuring interesting sex/gender politics: Floating Worlds is probably the closest (also featuring a hard-ass lady subverting a Medieval steppe warrior people in a quest to overthrow a larger-scale evil empire), but I also felt shades of Ancillary [something] in its sneaky gender surprises, sneaky non-white hegemony and parallels with colonial history, and even The Goblin Emperor, also fairly blunt political high fantasy. And, of course, the Great Masters of this genre: Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson.

So I love me a good political high fantasy/spec book that subverts gender/sex norms, hence - perhaps - my acute disappointment. What Le Guin and Robinson always did so well was show, not tell; and not cast judgment so obviously. There was a LOT of gray on that crazy Red Mars, or that crazy planet called Winter; even if, at core, they were making socially/politically liberal/left-wing points, there was no use of straw man stuff. The Evil Empire-analogue in Le Guin's The Dispossessed is also kind of a stupid, sexist place (and an obvious commentary on 1960s America); but we're not beaten over the head with it, and the alternative (that crazy anarchic moon from whence the protagonist comes) is presented in rich, three-dimensional variety (including the shortcomings). I just didn't feel that same grayness in Oppressed Tropical Home, or in the book as a whole.