User Profile

Maybe this book rings very true to me as somebody who is airquotes old, but this is really a book about a middle age crisis; about how to handle losing everything, picking up the pieces of yourself, and then going on to the rest of your life all the same.

Miles has largely been unstoppable in previous books, and even death only slowed him down a little bit. But this is the book where he seriously fucks up by making a mistake, doubles down by lying about it, triples down by not come clean about it, and gets kicked out of his ImpSec job. And, his job is also his only connection to the Dendarii mercenaries and his Admiral Naismith identity. He could, of course, go run off to them, but it'd be a treasonous one way trip. So instead he stays home depressed, trying to put his life as Lord Miles Vorkosigan back together (and figure out what that even is, having put it on the shelf for so long).

There's some really good foreshadowing of all of this from the previous books. Miles strips Bel of its commission for lying about not knowing about Mark. Cordelia wonders several times what would happen if Miles loses his "little admiral". But the big one for me is when Miles tells Mark, "You are what you do. Choose again, and change." This moment comes a couple of books earlier, but that theme resonates strongly here through the whole book.

I really also appreciated the explicit revisit to Mountains of Mourning and Harra Csurik. This was really the only previous time in the novel that we see Miles really being authentically happy in his role as Lord Miles Vorkosigan, and so it's a great place to revisit in a novel about Miles becoming himself again.

Some smaller bits about book that I enjoyed: * lol at thirty being middle age * Simon Illyan also having to navigate figuring out who he is when he is not his job * the metaphor about the Dendarii being children that Miles is no longer responsible for along with this whole middle age crisis theme * Miles merging both of his selves vs Mark resolving into multiple selves * the Quinn scene at the end where she wants Miles to stay and Miles wants her to go and both would lose themselves if they did

I've put off talking about this book for a bit because honestly I'm not sure where to start. The short of it was that this was one of the best things I've read this year.

It is nearly impossible to describe the plot, but this is not a plot-driven book. It's weirder and bolder and chewier than The Saint of Bright Doors. To describe it at all, this is a book about two (ish???) characters whose various lives intertwine with each other across the timeline(s???), told in a series of simultaneously deeply interconnected but also wildly different stories. There's constantly recurring thematic motifs and threads, and I feel like the reader is asked to do a lot of work to try to connect the myriad of interconnected bits and bobs and hints in its various depths. I finished it and immediately considered starting again with my extra knowledge to try to piece more connections together and better understand the whole.

Tonally, I also think Rakesfall is doing very interesting things. In comparison, The Saint of Bright Doors had some funny side jokes like "nine-tenths of the lore" in the same way that Harrow the Ninth has "none house, with left grief"; they're references if you catch them, but feel like a drive-by joke and not the destination. On the contrary, Rakesfall surgically deploys out of place phrases and tonal shifts to make impacts that deliberately jar the reader.

I apologize for pasting a number of quotes, but it astounds me a little that all of these things can be in the same book, that otherwise has a much more serious tone. I don't list these quotes as examples of what most of the prose is, but as examples of the rare places it swerves to.

The simile of the two-handed saw is not a parable. It isn't even a story. That it is self-consciously a simile suggests an unseriousness, a little haha hoho, a little lol j/k.

This is a one-off line in a brief section of the story that takes place in the same world as The Saint of Bright Doors (although you do not need to have read that book for this story).

Everybody on stage is silent and motionless for another few minutes. The AUDIENCE grows restless. Somebody in the audience takes a picture--the flash is blinding--even though there was a sign at the door that said NO PHOTOS, NO SMARTPHONES. There are muttered complaints. Imiya blinks. His pupils are huge.

Devakarti returns to the chorus and starts organizing them to move on to their next lives.

There's a chapter that is written like a script for a play, but is also a play in progress, and also includes dead people in the chorus who were killed by people in the play. This is a microcosm of what the book feels like.

All his soldiers pee themselves a little, so the king calls up his favourite wrestler, biggest face in the city, beloved far and wide as the best good guy who isn't afraid of anything, and the king says, my Beloved Bro, will you Please take this Cup of Water out unto the Dread Cemetary and give it to that Loud Fucker, and Tell him to (a) Pipe down and (b) give Thanks to the generosity of his King? And the wrestler says Sure Thing, my King. He is also frightened but he goes anyway, and he tells himself, real courage isn't found in not being afraid but in doing things that when you are, which just goes to show that after years of celebrity he is so deep in character that his internal narrative takes the voice of an Educational Programme for the small children who are his biggest fans and buy all his T-shirts.

There are other stories within stories in this book, but this one is told in this amazing style of an incredibly informal fable that was striking.

All of this makes for the kind of risky style that could be intensely irritating or obnoxious if it wasn't done so effectively. I think it works for me and I'm delighted by it; more, I think the choice to do this fits in this hurricane of a story that mixes and remixes characters and themes to such a degree.

This book is the book where Mark comes into his own; but he certainly hits the lowest of the low points before he can come back out the other side on his own merits. The setup of this plot here is that Mark cons the Dendarii pretending to be Miles into a personal heroic mission of his own to rescue some clones; he fucks up, Miles comes to save him, and Miles gets killed(?!). Mark then has to go back to Barrayar and tell his and Miles's parents about this.

It's a great move to kill off your protagonist (who takes up SO much space) to create room for Mark to figure out who he is. This is also a series that has cryochambers where you can place severely injured people and maybe revive them later with better medical facilities. Here, the cryochamber with Miles gets lost and so it's less of a question of "will Miles live" but more "where did Miles get off to" and "what lasting effects will Miles have from this death". So, it's not like [I can't mention the name of these books here because it's a major spoiler] where the point of view character from book one is literally killed in a multi-book series, but it's still a fun narrative move.

His belly shivered with a terrible longing, restrained by a terrible fear. Progenitors. Parents. He was not sure he wanted parents, at this late date. They were such enormous figures. He felt obliterated in their shadow, shattered like glass, annihilated.

The part that is the biggest delight to me is Mark having to go to Barrayar for the first time. He's royally fucked up and has to tell their parents about it; but also it's that he was trained to assassinate Miles's parents, he knows the layout of the Vorkosigan house, and he kind of doesn't want anything to do with Barrayar. It's a delightful awkwardness of everybody having such sharp edges but also earnestly trying to connect with each other.

It was another strange reciprocity, that Miles should have things he wanted to to remember, and couldn't, while Mark had things he wanted to forget. And couldn't.

Thematically, I think this book is one of the strongest in the series. We learn from Mark dancing with Kareen Koudelka that a mirror dance is one where one partner copies the other's movements, and this book is all about the parallels between Miles and Mark. Miles comes to rescue Mark; Mark comes back to rescue Miles. They both have multiple selves (although Mark realizes more here, and in the next book Miles loses them). They both are knight errants in their own right. There's also plenty of mirror imagery here as well.

Finally, I would be very curious to hear what plural systems make of this book. To my eyes, this feels like some internal family systems situation becoming multiple headmates (my word) via trauma. I feel like there's some groundwork for this earlier in the novel, and that it's not just trauma-generated, as Mark identifies some of his actions as having been unknown headmates previously. (That said, I do think that this feels some like a hamhanded attempt to write off an almost rape scene by pinning it on a headmate.) In the end, like Mark is left fronting and from other people's view is treated like a singlet; I'll be interested how a Civil Campaign reads when we get back to their perspectives again.

Here we come to the real meat of the Vorkosigan series. Brothers in Arms through A Civil Campaigan carry a large part of my fond memories of this series--Mark (a clone of Miles) appears, and both Mark and Miles go through large identity shifts in who they are and how they related to each other and the world.

The initial plot of this novel comes directly off the last novella; there's a lot of costs for the Dendarii mercenaries from their last operation, and Miles comes to Earth for repairs and in desperate need of payment. This is one of the strong points about this series that I like; each story really stands on its own with a driving plot and strong closure, but there's plenty of natural-feeling foreshadowing hooks (both personal and political) and also gradual character development across time.

Goaded, Miles snapped, "Dammit, sir, what would you have of me? The Dendarii are as much Barrayaran troops as any who wear the Emperor's uniform, even if they don't know it. They are my assigned charge. I cannot neglect their urgent needs even to play the part of Lieutenant Vorkosigan."

Galeni rocked back in his chair, his eyebrows shooting up. "Play the part of Lieutenant Vorkosigan? Who do you think you are?"

Talking of character development, if Miles had an insubordination problem earlier where he would disobey orders and lie to his superiors, it's absolutely out of control in this novel. He gets grounded in the Barrayaran embassy with no orders other than to stay put and no pay, and immediately is sneaking off and engaging Ivan in his plans. In Cetaganda, he was breaking rules but he was trying to get away with it as long as he couuld. Here, the bureaucracy is truly just an obstacle and not something he feels any reason to obey other than as a means to an end.

Back to money, I feel that Miles is only able to carry his nobility as a mercenary because he has the financial backing of Barrayar to pay for his idealistic but not financially sound decisions. It's kind of a deus ex machina, that Miles can always lean on the trust and backing of Barrayar from a distance to cut through any "can we afford to save these people" ethical knots. Even Tung jokes about this at the end, that Miles not having to make a profit is an advantage no other mercenary commander has.

"And so you want to maroon me for the rest of my life on a, sorry, backwater dirtball that's just barely climbed out of feudalism, that treats women like chattel--or cattle--that would deny me the use of every military skill I've learned in the past twelve years from shuttle docking to interrogation chemistry... I'm sorry. I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not a saint, and I'm not crazy."

"You don't have to say no right away," said Miles in a small voice.

This book is also the "Elli Quinn romance" book, which really just sets up Miles for needing somebody who loves both of his Lord Vorkosigan and Admiral Naismith selves. To its detriment, I feel like Elli and Elena are both very similar here; both are competent space mercenaries who want literally nothing to do with backwater Barrayar who would waste them. (The next book even lampshades how similar they are.) Sure, Elli is a spacer who wants nothing to do with planets and Elena is a childhood friend (that Miles is still secretly in love with) but they feel like similar letdowns and character arcs on Miles' end.

One thing I do like is that Miles has had enough character development by this time that he can more meaningfully address the question of why he doesn't just run off and become a space mercenary and divorce himself from Barrayar and his Lord Vorkosigan identity. Even if you ignore the money aspect of the backing from Barrayar, his roots and his family and his responsibility are on Barrayar. Elli only wants Admiral Naismith and dislikes Lord Vorkosigan, but Miles needs somebody who wants both.

"You are what you do. Choose again, and change."

The other big piece of this book is the introduction of Mark, Miles's secret clone who replaces Miles in an infiltration plot. I love Mark as a comedic foil for Miles; he is the younger brother forced to live in and chase the shadow of somebody who is impossibly great. Mark barely keeps up with Miles as Lord Vorkosigan, but then also finds out Miles has a second identity on the side that he now has to learn too.

I appreciate that this clone story is not a one-off pulp joke. From the start, Miles treats Mark seriously as his brother and even tells him his name should be Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, since Barrayaran names are a fixed hereditary pattern. Rather than running some scheme for his own benefit, Miles mostly thinks about Mark here, to give him a chance to be his own person and live his own life, even when absolutely everybody else sees him as disposable.