Issola / Viscount
Oct. 2nd, 2017 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishThe Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 4
I draw a mental line straight through Issola. You'd think that divide would be more reasonably put between Orca and Dragon, when the Vlad books got picked up by Tor, but no. In my head Dragon is the last of the Ace books and Dzur is the first of the Tor books, or something. I blame [SPOILER].
Also, I appreciate that Viscount is at least up-front about being composed of bound book-fragments. This does make writing about each individual volume both a) difficult and b) useless. However.
Issola
Wiseass ex-assassin's friends go missing. He heads off in search of them and gets tangled up in a minor battle in an ongoing struggle for the fate of the world. (I mean, it could have turned out to be a major battle, if they'd lost. It's hard to work out what the scale of these things is.)
There's a heck of a lot of plot in Issola. It's also got Morrolan and Aliera sniping at each other, which is always fun, and it's got a great deal of Lady Teldra, who turns out to be perhaps the most interesting and enjoyable minor character we've seen.
What else. The Jenoine worked well and came across as sufficiently alien; the stunt-writing three-things-at-once bit didn't work for me, but it was only a couple of pages so that's alright. I rather appreciated the appearance of Remover-of-aspects-of-deity. (I emphasise that there's nothing wrong with Dragon and it's quite an enjoyable diversion, but if you really don't feel like reading it you should at least flip to the bit with the Serioli, for the linguistic arguments around how to translate the names of the Great Weapons.)
This was an oh-my-god book back when I first read it and it still retains a lot of that character, which is neat.
The Paths of the Dead
Volume 1 of The Viscount of Adrilankha
(Foreword by Emma Bull; afterword by Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
It's been a couple centuries since the fall of the Empire, and one of the local warlords is making a reasonable stab at establishing his own empire, with the help of Pel. Meanwhile, off in the East, a young man named Morrolan learns witchcraft, dedicates himself to the Demon Goddess, and learns (due to the timely arrival of Lady Teldra) that he's not an Easterner at all but a Dragaeran, and in fact has hereditary lands back in what used to be the Empire. Meanwhile Khaavren is depressed at having let the last Emperor get killed on his watch, and the titular Viscount, his son, sets off on a mission to recover the Imperial Orb.
Piro, the titular Viscount, may be the least interesting part of the book. No, I lie: depressed Khaavren is the least interesting part of the book, but Piro's youthful hijinks are not terribly thrilling either. Thankfully they both start doing interesting things sooner than later. Morrolan's origin story is hilarious, as promised, and more Lady Teldra is always welcome. (I suspect that this couldn't have been written before Issola, or would have been somewhat different.)
"Tazendra Lavode." Hurrah! And Aerich being Aerich, and yet more of Pel which I will never not welcome. I dearly hope he turns up in a Vlad book sooner than later. Overall, a fine first third of a book.
The Lord of Castle Black
Volume 2 of The Viscount of Adrilankha
(Afterword by Neil Gaiman)
Morrolan takes possession of his hereditary lands, just in time for Kana the Pretender to attempt to evict him. Zerika emerges from the Paths of the Dead with the Orb just in time to face the Pretender's armies. Piro falls in love with a Dzur and gets disowned by his father.
It was at this point that some of Paarfi's verbal tics stopped being amusing and started being repetitive. "Struck by the extreme justice of this remark" was the first of those I noticed, along with variations on "what, you want me to tell you the thing I'm about to tell you?". Three Paarfis in a row are probably too many.
Thankfully the book moves along fast enough that those stumbling blocks didn't much impede my enjoyment. The defence of Dzur Mountain against overwhelming odds fascinated me; the Necromancer's arrival sheds a little light on some metaphysical bits (like death) that came up in Issola.
The Enchantress of Dzur Mountain Sethra Lavode
Volume 3 of The Viscount of Adrilankha
(Afterword by John M. Ford)
In which things end as you know they will, and the only interesting bits are a) the details and b) the process. Which are, in fact, sufficient to maintain interest despite the feeling of anticlimax.
I believe it was this book that had a conversation between Aerich and Pel that finally gave a sense of the sort of conversations that wove them all together in The Phoenix Guards. I maintain that Tazendra was given remarkably short shrift in every book after the first; her few good scenes (on average, one per book) don't really change that. Happy to see more of Sethra the Younger and the Sorceress in Green, and I wonder how reading Viscount before Yendi would affect one's opinion of the latter.
Brust has mentioned that the genesis of The Phoenix Guards was a conversation wherein he was assigning the Four Musketeers to the Dragaeran Houses. Between Khaavren's first appearance and a brief anecdote told by one of the revolutionaries that turns up in this book from a different perspective, I'd guess that that conversation occurred before or during the writing of Teckla.
If I'm giving the impression that Viscount is primarily a parade of familiar characters being awesome ... that's not inaccurate, though it might be incomplete. I don't know that it's worth reading on its own if you're not already invested in Dragaera. It is, however, indispensable if you are. (Among other things, it gives Tiassa a lot more resonance.)
(Footnote: I believe the Afterword is perhaps the last published piece of John M. Ford's writing. "My formal office is generally held to be mythographic, sometimes mythopoeic, and occasionally literary; in general, I might be described as one who dwells in the upper attics of the House of the Athyra, in the hope that the other bats will teach him to fly." Dammit, Mike.)
I draw a mental line straight through Issola. You'd think that divide would be more reasonably put between Orca and Dragon, when the Vlad books got picked up by Tor, but no. In my head Dragon is the last of the Ace books and Dzur is the first of the Tor books, or something. I blame [SPOILER].
Also, I appreciate that Viscount is at least up-front about being composed of bound book-fragments. This does make writing about each individual volume both a) difficult and b) useless. However.
Issola
Wiseass ex-assassin's friends go missing. He heads off in search of them and gets tangled up in a minor battle in an ongoing struggle for the fate of the world. (I mean, it could have turned out to be a major battle, if they'd lost. It's hard to work out what the scale of these things is.)
There's a heck of a lot of plot in Issola. It's also got Morrolan and Aliera sniping at each other, which is always fun, and it's got a great deal of Lady Teldra, who turns out to be perhaps the most interesting and enjoyable minor character we've seen.
What else. The Jenoine worked well and came across as sufficiently alien; the stunt-writing three-things-at-once bit didn't work for me, but it was only a couple of pages so that's alright. I rather appreciated the appearance of Remover-of-aspects-of-deity. (I emphasise that there's nothing wrong with Dragon and it's quite an enjoyable diversion, but if you really don't feel like reading it you should at least flip to the bit with the Serioli, for the linguistic arguments around how to translate the names of the Great Weapons.)
This was an oh-my-god book back when I first read it and it still retains a lot of that character, which is neat.
The Paths of the Dead
Volume 1 of The Viscount of Adrilankha
(Foreword by Emma Bull; afterword by Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
It's been a couple centuries since the fall of the Empire, and one of the local warlords is making a reasonable stab at establishing his own empire, with the help of Pel. Meanwhile, off in the East, a young man named Morrolan learns witchcraft, dedicates himself to the Demon Goddess, and learns (due to the timely arrival of Lady Teldra) that he's not an Easterner at all but a Dragaeran, and in fact has hereditary lands back in what used to be the Empire. Meanwhile Khaavren is depressed at having let the last Emperor get killed on his watch, and the titular Viscount, his son, sets off on a mission to recover the Imperial Orb.
Piro, the titular Viscount, may be the least interesting part of the book. No, I lie: depressed Khaavren is the least interesting part of the book, but Piro's youthful hijinks are not terribly thrilling either. Thankfully they both start doing interesting things sooner than later. Morrolan's origin story is hilarious, as promised, and more Lady Teldra is always welcome. (I suspect that this couldn't have been written before Issola, or would have been somewhat different.)
"Tazendra Lavode." Hurrah! And Aerich being Aerich, and yet more of Pel which I will never not welcome. I dearly hope he turns up in a Vlad book sooner than later. Overall, a fine first third of a book.
The Lord of Castle Black
Volume 2 of The Viscount of Adrilankha
(Afterword by Neil Gaiman)
Morrolan takes possession of his hereditary lands, just in time for Kana the Pretender to attempt to evict him. Zerika emerges from the Paths of the Dead with the Orb just in time to face the Pretender's armies. Piro falls in love with a Dzur and gets disowned by his father.
It was at this point that some of Paarfi's verbal tics stopped being amusing and started being repetitive. "Struck by the extreme justice of this remark" was the first of those I noticed, along with variations on "what, you want me to tell you the thing I'm about to tell you?". Three Paarfis in a row are probably too many.
Thankfully the book moves along fast enough that those stumbling blocks didn't much impede my enjoyment. The defence of Dzur Mountain against overwhelming odds fascinated me; the Necromancer's arrival sheds a little light on some metaphysical bits (like death) that came up in Issola.
Volume 3 of The Viscount of Adrilankha
(Afterword by John M. Ford)
In which things end as you know they will, and the only interesting bits are a) the details and b) the process. Which are, in fact, sufficient to maintain interest despite the feeling of anticlimax.
I believe it was this book that had a conversation between Aerich and Pel that finally gave a sense of the sort of conversations that wove them all together in The Phoenix Guards. I maintain that Tazendra was given remarkably short shrift in every book after the first; her few good scenes (on average, one per book) don't really change that. Happy to see more of Sethra the Younger and the Sorceress in Green, and I wonder how reading Viscount before Yendi would affect one's opinion of the latter.
Brust has mentioned that the genesis of The Phoenix Guards was a conversation wherein he was assigning the Four Musketeers to the Dragaeran Houses. Between Khaavren's first appearance and a brief anecdote told by one of the revolutionaries that turns up in this book from a different perspective, I'd guess that that conversation occurred before or during the writing of Teckla.
If I'm giving the impression that Viscount is primarily a parade of familiar characters being awesome ... that's not inaccurate, though it might be incomplete. I don't know that it's worth reading on its own if you're not already invested in Dragaera. It is, however, indispensable if you are. (Among other things, it gives Tiassa a lot more resonance.)
(Footnote: I believe the Afterword is perhaps the last published piece of John M. Ford's writing. "My formal office is generally held to be mythographic, sometimes mythopoeic, and occasionally literary; in general, I might be described as one who dwells in the upper attics of the House of the Athyra, in the hope that the other bats will teach him to fly." Dammit, Mike.)