The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Traitor is the kind of book that's best if you know nothing going in. So I'll simply say: its character arcs, complex political intrigue, and scorching take on colonialism's corrupting power make it one of my books of the year. Don't read any spoilers below (and especially not the short story), go read it now.





SPOILERS:

The Traitor does a lot really well. First, it's rare to see a story progress and realize that its being told from the villain's perspective. Not a “conflicted hero” (Harry's struggles with his Voldemort impulses), or an “anti-hero” (Clint Eastwood), it's an unfiltered villain and you don't realize it until the end. It's like reading a book told from the perspective of Walder Frey and the finale is his victorious Red Wedding. It's the mark of a great plot twist that it feels completely surprising and brutal in the moment, but completely inevitable on a second read (Lyxaxu's attack feels so out-of-the-blue at first, but then later you think “ahhh of course he's the one who would have figured it out”). All the best twists feel in-character, and that, when you really stop to think about it, nothing else could have reasonably happened. This feels like that.

I really appreciated having no idea of what would happen; I respect Dickinson enough to think there's no “plot armor” and that Baru really could just get assassinated and die at any point, or that she could win the rebellion and rule with her lover, or take a political marriage, or still be an Imperial agent. Right up until the end I felt like it could have gone in any direction, and that's a great accomplishment as a storyteller.

It's also great to see thoughtful, complex political turmoil. Too often fantasy-inspired fiction has really bad politics, where the characters feel like paper cutouts and there's zero intrigue or depth in the political mechanisms (like Sanderson's writing in the Stormlight Archive, which I otherwise enjoy a good amount). This instead feels like real political turmoil, where each character has deep and well-understood motives that drive all their actions (closer to Game of Thrones). When characters scheme in The Traitor, you see what they're doing and why they act that way. The web of connections and rivalries between the dukes/duchesses feels like the inheritance of decades of squabbling, just as it should. Stephen King once said something like “I don't want the reader to feel like if they took a wrong turn, they'd come out a side door and be off set. I want them to feel like every nook and cranny has some unnamed character's whole world hidden behind it.” The Traitor feels like this.

Baru's character arc is great, just a trainwreck of watching someone slowly throw away everything they hold dear. This underlines a really thoughtful critique of empire and colonialism, and eugenics (reminds me of Fifth Season in that way).

I also thoroughly enjoyed the repeated tie-in of the examples of how the empire deals with its political prisoners: let them escape so thoroughly that they think “they'd never let me get this far” and THEN re-capture them. That's exactly what the empire did with the rebellion, and the connections with individual prisoners and the cult “honeypots” drives home the message well. When you're fighting the empire, they're all Fools Rebellions.