(no subject)

I was recently given a copy of Victoria Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor in a successful attempt to push it higher up my to-read queue. "You will like most of this book," I was told, "but there is a lot of it." This is true on all counts; large swathes of the book are very enjoyable but it is VERY much nine hundred pages long.

The book is set in the sort of ... middle development stage of a post-fantasy-apocalyptic Utopia, I guess, is the best way to describe it? The protagonist Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary to the Last Emperor of Astandalas, and the book picks up several hundred years (?) after a catastrophe that destroyed (?) the interstellar/inter-universe (?) Empire but in doing so has provided the Emperor's staff with the opportunity to more or less rewrite the government of the bit of it that he's got left from the ground up, and by 'the Emperor's staff' I mean Cliopher, whose defining characteristic is that he's a quiet and incorruptible paragon of benevolent bureaucratic brilliance who has singlehandedly reformed literally every government institution while working with increasing towards his goals of a.) weakening the status of the nobility in order to return power to the masses and b.) implementing universal basic income.

Now, on the one hand, Cliopher is to any real career bureaucrat what -- well, I was going to say 'what King Arthur is to any real king' but that comparison actually doesn't work at all because King Arthur in every iteration has significantly more evidence of human frailty, weakness and selfishness than Cliopher Mdang. On the other hand, the history of fiction is full of paragons who are the world's best warrior or the world's greatest warrior or what have you, and I've got to admit that 'world's best bureaucrat, gods-anointed champion of writing beneficent bylaws' has all the advantage of novelty.

Anyway, the actual story follows two main threads. The first is the growth of Cliopher's friendship with the Emperor, who for traditional, ritual and magical reasons is forbidden most forms of ordinary human connection, and is very unhappy about it. The slow transition of their relationship to Personal after centuries (?) (I'm sorry I don't understand the timeline at all) of Very Strictly Professional is the main focus of the first and IMO strongest two hundred pages of the book, which take place during a beautifully described luxury vacation that had only the mild downside of making me very much want to take a beautifully described luxury vacation, and continues to be strong and emotionally compelling whenever it gets foregrounded throughout the rest of the book.

The second thread is about Cliopher's relationship with his culture and with his family -- Cliopher comes from a (Polynesian-based?) island culture and is the only islander from his generation to pass the government service exams, and suffers great personal frustrations from the fact that most of his impressive work as The World's Greatest Bureaucrat, Second-In-Command-Only-To-The-Emperor-Himself, etc., seems to be invisible and uninteresting to his large and affectionate family, who keep asking when he's going to give up his useless far-away desk job and come home where he belongs. I was also really interested in this thread in the beginning when it was just a delicate low-key tension but as it builds I think it ends up overplaying its hand -- ( spoilers but if I tell you 'the Emperor explains how important and special Cliopher is to Cliopher's meanest aunt' I think you will get the vibe )

I am told the sequel is only two hundred pages and is a fairly traditional adventure story, which, coming after this nine hundred page paean to Friendship and Audits and Being Persuasive On Committees, is extremely funny and at some point I will almost certainly read it.