Bujold & Sayers

[truepenny]

melymbrosia is talking about books again, and her comment on A Civil Campaign has inspired me to post on why I find the ending of that book both incredibly satisfying and incredibly wrong. (I'll be talking about Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity (Lois McMaster Bujold) and Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon (Dorothy L. Sayers). Dunno how spoilerish I'm going to get, but I don't promise not to give things away.)

And since this is going to get insanely long, if you aren't interested, don't click here.

Before I start--and I always do this, standard disclaimer type stuff, before I get out my sharp little knives--I want to say that I am a great big slavering shameless Bujold fan. Got all her books, read 'em all at least twice, etc. etc. Looking forward tremendously to the new Chalion book.

But for me, the Vorkosigan books hit their ne plus ultra with Memory. I think Memory is a brilliant book, the way that the plot and the thematics and the character development all integrate and make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, Miles comes out at the end smelling like roses, but he also hits his absolute nadir as a human being in his progress through the book, and for me it feels like he earns his auditorship. The book works.

I start having problems with Komarr, and they focus on Ekaterin. She's too freaking perfect. I would like Miles so very much better if he could for once fall in love with a woman who isn't breathtakingly beautiful. And Ekaterin herself is so clearly tailor-made to be Miles's Perfect Spouse that she's boring. Boring, boring, boring like a very boring thing (as jess79 would put it). Her primary motivation is her child, and since I don't like children, I can get behind that on an abstract level, but I can't empathize with it particularly. And Bujold, who writes such fascinating male characters, never puts her back into it when she's writing women (the honorable exception being Cordelia before Miles's birth). Poor Ekaterin is stuck being the love interest, all her subversive feminist thoughts about Barrayar's patriarchal system notwithstanding. (Hang on to those thoughts, 'cause we're coming back to them.)

I love the experience of reading A Civil Campaign. I giggle insanely and cheer and love everybody at the ending. But then, because I am cursed with a brain the size of a planet, I start thinking. ACC suffers from the same problem I was talking about in an earlier post about Harry Potter: the world divides cleanly into Those Who Like Miles (Whether They Admit It Or Not) and Those Who Don't. Even in Komarr, there are characters who don't like Miles who are still perfectly decent human beings (e.g., the Komarran who proposes to Ekaterin). But in ACC that subtlety is gone, and what's worse, she's mapped it onto her political divide. It's a bad bad bad sign when the Emperor is officially impartial, but everybody knows he's secretly in favor of your protagonist's party. (Just replace "protagonist" with "antagonist" and suddenly you have a horribly corrupt and evil government. Bad.) So everything comes together too cleanly; defeating the people who are annoying Miles also means defeating the people who want bad things for Barrayar and are otherwise icky. Too simplistic.

But back to Ekaterin. The blunt brutal fact of the matter is that she caves too quickly. It's no secret that ACC is in part an homage to Dorothy L. Sayers (along with Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Georgette Heyer), and thus the parallels with the Vane Quartet (SP, HCC, GN, BH) are not only obvious, but intentional, and thus fair game.

At the end of SP, Harriet and Peter are in a roughly similar position to Ekaterin and Miles at the end of Komarr. Peter has saved Harriet from being hanged for a murder she didn't commit, is passionately in love with her, and has told her so. Harriet's still in emotional overload, and so can't process.

Now here's the key difference. It takes Sayers two insanely long books (for a total of 917 pages in my hardback editions) to get Harriet around to the point where she can accept Peter's love. She has much of the same baggage as Ekaterin (the guy she didn't kill being her emotionally abusive lover) plus the horrible obligation of being grateful to Peter. And because Harriet isn't Perfect, she behaves like a spiteful bitch all over the place and generally tortures both herself and Peter trying to come to terms with the fact that she loves him. ACC (405 pp. in the hardback) cheats by essentially switching models in midstream, jumping from Sayers to Heyer, who lets you do these rapid-fire every-plot-thread-resolved-happily endings. And the obsessive pairing off of the Koudelka girls seems borrowed from another Bronte: Anne and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

So the end of ACC is emotionally satisfying, but it's a cheat. It cheats by yanking out Ekaterin's spine and trampling her character flat. All those feminist thoughts (which Sayers deals with honorably and extensively in GN) get swept away by the passion of True Love. And no matter how much I want to be, I'm not okay with that.

The problem even carries over into Diplomatic Immunity. DI and BH are equally pieces of fluff, but BH includes some extremely serious and emotional scenes as Peter and Harriet try to negotiate their relationship around Peter's work and what it does to him. I was hoping when I bought DI that at least some of those feminist issues would come up, but no. Ekaterin is reduced to Adoring Bride and Helpmeet. Once again, she's Perfect and therefore boring. I want Ekaterin to find her Inner Bitch and tell Miles where he gets off. And I want it soon.

And now I feel like a bitch myself. But I can't turn my critical faculties off, even when I want to. Mea maxima culpa

Comments

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It would have been a very strange book if that had happened, and everyone would have hated it. People tend to get very crabby with books that renounce their generic allegiance. But it would have been interesting.

Well, not everyone. Any more than everyone hates Have His Carcase. I would have loved it, and would probably have been so desperate to read the sequel that I'd have bought the hardback. (I had a similiar feeding-frenzy reaction to HHC when I first read it, more than twenty years ago.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Okay, true. I mean, obviously I would have liked it, and you would have and Papersky would have and most likely a great many other people. Mine was a ruthless overgeneralization, and I should know better.

But it would definitely have been a more difficult book, and while Bujold's books are intelligent and interesting, they aren't difficult. I don't know if that distinction makes sense to anyone but me. I reread her books when I'm sick, because they're comforting, the same way I reread Georgette Heyer. So what I was talking about wasn't popularity at all, but something quite different. Sometimes that happens. Thanks for making me clarify my thoughts.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Re-read, sure, because you know what's going to happen.
I'll re-read Sayers as comfort reading, and I have comfort read Cyteen.

Mirror Dance is a difficult book, on first read, at least it was for me, and so was Barrayar. They don't duck.

I thought, before Memory (and what about Memory? The only book that's ever got me to cry three times at three different places in the same scene? The book that got me to cry at "Ivan, you idiot, what are you doing here?") that she was doing something long and complex that would end up with Miles as a villain, being Miles, doing what Miles does, sure he's right, but actually wrong and entirely ruining a complex diplomatic something and maybe starting another Cetagandan war. You know where he locks up the three commanding officers in The Vor Game? Like that, only without the author being on his side, and then afterwards he would realise at last what he had done and that he had become the cackling evil mutant of Barrayaran legend.

I'd have loved that book with all my heart, even while Zorinth was hating it.