(no subject)

[skygiants]

I had deeply mixed feelings about Lara Elena Donnelly's Amberlough, the first book in the Amberlough Dossier trilogy, when I read it two years ago; now the trilogy is finished and I have read the whole thing, most of it twice, and I still can't quite sort out how I feel about it. But on the other hand, I did read both Amberlough and middle book Armistice twice ...

It's relatively easy to find stories about revolutions (and you all know that I love stories about revolutions), but the Amberlough Dossier leaves the actual central revolution almost entirely offscreen to focus on the messy and complicated parts at the edges. Amberlough is about the rise of a fascist government; Armistice focuses on the machinations of expatriates and exiles while the fascist government is in power; Amnesty, the final book, picks up after the revolution has succeeded and the fascist government has fallen, leaving a deeply scarred country attempting to rebuild. Central characters include Cyril DePaul, a compromised gay spy; Aristide Makricosta, a stripper/emcee/smuggler and the star-crossed love of Cyril's life; Lillian DePaul, Cyril's stressed-out foreign diplomat sister; and Cordelia Lehane, Aristide's stage partner, stripper, petty criminal, eventual revolutionary heroine.

I like the complexity of the trilogy; I appreciate its ambition, and how determined it is to avoid easy stories and easy answers. I admire the emotional tension -- how the real world comes to bear on the sacrifices that people make for love, how the different relationships break down and come back together again, fragile but generally worth fighting for. I think I like the worldbuilding, which pulls from real-world elements while doing a careful dance to avoid mapping anything too directly (though I would love to see somebody else talk about Porashtu, the technically-neutral nation where the second book takes place, which is heavily South Asian influenced but reverses several gender norms; also I have some geographical questions about a world in which cultures as variant as the ones displayed in Gedda and Porashtu and Liso all seem to have developed just a few hundred miles away from each other.) I LOVE the revolutionary organization made up of former stagefolk, called the Catwalk because they walk in the shadows and light things up bright, and the entire plotline in Armistice about using Bollywood films as cover for revolutionary arms dealing, and the big awkward theatrical dinner party full of dramatic backstory revelations. (Armistice is my favorite of the books for a reason.) I like the questions, overall, that the series is asking...

But I don't know how I feel about the answers. I spent a lot of time while reading the trilogy thinking about what actions in a protagonist are unforgivable to me as a reader. "Knowingly selling out your country to fascists" is ... sort of a big one! Cyril has reasons for what he's doing, and he's willing to give his life for Aristide, even if not for anything else -- but it's also very clear from early on in the book that he knows exactly what the costs of the things he's doing will be, and he does them anyway. He doesn't even try to get out of it.

And it's not like there aren't consequences for the things he does; that's what Amnesty is about. But the thing is, Amnesty's trying to grapple with the same questions as the DS9 episode "Duet," in which Kira is confronted with a man who's attempting to turn himself in for war crimes that he didn't personally commit, but also did not stop, so that the people of Bajor can achieve closure through punishing a figurehead villain. And I LOVED "Duet," and the questions of who bears responsibility for terrible acts and whether it's more important to publicly take on punishment that maybe you don't deserve or to figure out a way to live what you did and make a life for yourself that does better are difficult questions that are worth raising and grappling with, but ... the thing is ..... a.) Cyril might not be solely responsible for the Fall of Amberlough but he very much did actually do the crimes he's being accused of and they are BAD CRIMES and b.) Cyril and Aristides' decision to Live With And For Each Other comes at the cost of several more lives, like, guys, that's not -- that's not actually much of an improvement on -- cool motive still continues to be murder!

And it's not that the narrative de-emphasizes the things that Cyril did. I can't even say for sure that it wants you to think Cyril and Ari are making a correct choice when they decide to break Cyril out and bolt. But there's a moment where Ari is thinking about the people who want Cyril punished in Cordelia's name, and how Cordelia herself wouldn't want that and it's so complicated and people are trying to make it simple ... but it is, in a way, that simple; Cordelia kept her principles and Cyril didn't. The fact that Cordelia herself has forgiven Cyril so easily by the second book is, I think, is maybe a little bit of a cheat. The fact that we never hear from anyone who cared about Finn Lourdes, the perfectly nice character that Cyril murdered to cover his and Ari's escape attempt in Amberlough, or see any fallout from his death, is definitely a little bit of a cheat, in a book that wants to be about complications and consequences. Throughout the trilogy, we really only ever spend time with people who either have a reason to love Cyril and want him to survive, or people whose stake is political, not personal; the people who want him punished are only ever people who see him as a figurehead, never anyone who was directly injured by him. I'd like to hear from one of those people. I absolutely think there's a case to be made for second chances and survival over punitive justice, maybe even for crimes like "sold an entire country out to a fascist government," but I want to feel more like Lara Elena Donnelly is making the case fairly rather than relying about our feelings about how sad Ari and Cyril are and how much they love each other to carry it through.

Anyway, tl;dr, the short version is that I definitely want to fight with the books but they're for sure really interesting and I'm going to be thinking about them for a long time, which almost certainly makes them worth reading. Again: I did it twice!

Also, if you want to talk to me in comments about what protagonist crimes you find unforgivable, or, alternately, things you would generally find unforgivable but that particularly skilled authors have nonetheless sold you on, I would be interested to hear it!

Comments

[musesfool]

I was a little frustrated with the third book because as you say, Cyril knowingly did terrible things, and I was much more interested in Cordelia's story and this was not that. I also didn't emotionally invest enough in Cyril to forgive him easily, though I was surprised at how glad I was that he and Ari at least had a reunion.

I mean, I obviously can be a fan of a character who commits unforgivable crimes! *points to icon* Cyril just didn't win me over enough I guess. I don't know.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I get why Cordelia did not make it to Book 3 and I think Cordelia's arc overall remains a solid and compelling one, but that leaves you in the third book without any viewpoint characters who are really willing to make a moral stand about anything and I think that's a weakness of the narrative structure overall -- it leaves you on very shifting sand. Like, as I was reading in the moment, I found the scenes with Ari and Cyril figuring out how to be something to each other again after all they'd been through really compelling, but as soon as I was out of them I was like "...WAIT a minute."

I was actually thinking about Anakin Skywalker in this context, and I think one of the differences is that I can care about Anakin but I do not think Star Wars ever really expects me to forgive him for the things he's done and I sort of feel like the Amberlough books do want me to forgive Cyril. (And also pretty much the first thing we see Cyril do is betray the faint principles he's got, so it's not like there's much chance to get invested in him before.)

[musesfool]

Like, as I was reading in the moment, I found the scenes with Ari and Cyril figuring out how to be something to each other again after all they'd been through really compelling, but as soon as I was out of them I was like "...WAIT a minute."

*nod nod*

And I agree - we immediately see Cyril compromising himself so it's hard to feel like maybe he was a good person driven to extreme measures; instead it's like, he's a spy and he's compromised and even though he should be smarter than this, he's going to do some terrible things. *hands*

[osprey_archer]

In the vein of protagonist crimes and "characters who collaborate with the fascists," I always had trouble with Jo Walton's Farthing books because midway through one of the characters basically gets blackmailed into becoming the head of fascist!AU!Britain's Gestapo... and this seems to be presented as a hard-luck moment more than anything else, not a moral failing, certainly not something that's going to complicate his protagonist-hood.

I get that he's being blackmailed and it's not like he wants to lead Britain's Gestapo, but sometimes being blackmailed is just not a good enough excuse.

[skygiants]

oh man I REMEMBER THAT. And, like, it's definitely a fine line, because on the one hand, I appreciate that authors writing about oppressive regimes want to show how easy it is for likeable people to become collaborators when pushed up against a wall, and complicate the notion that 'well, only Easily Recognizable Bad People(TM) would do such things, none of us would ever -', and I too want to see that in fiction -- and I don't at all think that rules out a character being likeable or sympathetic or even protagonist-y! we're all human! -- but it's alarmingly easy for that tip over into an "alas, a sauntering vaguely downwards! but look how bad they feel about it! not a bit reprehensible, it's so defensible!" kind of apologism and. urgh.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, definitely. I think if Walton had made Carmichael a collaborator on a smaller scale, it might have worked. Like maybe he gets blackmailed into handing over a few names, but he convinces himself that it's ultimately for the greater good for him to stay in his position because he's so good at catching murderers, and anyway when he always gives the secret police the names of *bad people* - by which he means people who he thinks are guilty of crimes but he couldn't convict them the normal way, which probably means that some of them are innocent, not that that ever got in the way of self-justification.

But making him the head of the whole damn Secret Police is just too much. Leaving aside everything else, that's not usually a position that likable people just vaguely saunter into, you know? Usually the road to Evil Head of the Secret Police is paved by lengthy scheming and undermining of rivals and sprucing up arrest and conviction records by tossing out pesky concerns about "guilt."

[ghost_lingering]

I had a reply but Chrome ate it. D:

I was mostly going to say that this made me think about all of the 90's sci-fi tv shows and their space fascism and colonialism and how those shows are the closest I think I've ever come to finding fascists or reformed fascists interesting or sometimes even likeable in media: the Cardassians (Garak!) of course, but also Londo Mollari on Babylon 5 (though more he's more colonialist than fascist) and the Peacekeepers on Farscape. Farscape is, in particular, interesting to me because Aeryn Sun is a reformed fascist. Her reformation happens more on personal grounds than political ones and the show doesn't really grapple with the harm that Aeryn personally caused while a Peacekeeper (the sole exception is Moya's first pilot, but that storyline centers the personal not the political consequences). Crais' change of heart is theoretically more political, but I also a) hate Crais and b) hate Crais so his turn from fascism is deeply uninteresting to me. Also, of course, Firefly, where I find myself torn between the Browncoats, Joss Whedon's space Confederate soldiers, and the Alliance, the shadowy fascist-seeming winning side that condones experimenting on humans to make assassins?

[skygiants]

Oh man, watching Deep Space Nine was a constant experience of loving Cardassians and then deeply interrogating myself about it, which I think is right and appropriate. I love so much of the stuff they did -- Garak FOR SURE, but also Kira and Kira's Cardassian dad, the Kira-Damar-Garak resistance arc, everything with Odo as a collaborator ... and I think part of why that works for me is that DS9 is constantly showing you the consequences, even while it makes you fall in love with these people. It's throwing the contradictions at you all the time and you have to sort of fully accept them.

I haven't seen Farscape or most of Babylon 5 (though I do genuinely intend to watch Babylon 5 someday) but I've osmosed bits of some of those arcs! In general I think I have an easier time with characters who genuinely believe their terrible ideology and then have that ideology shaken -- like the Operative in the Firefly movie (...that was the movie, right? it's been so long!) -- than characters who don't believe it but go along with it anyway, out of fear and expediency; "ignorance to knowledge" is a simpler and easier-to-swallow arc, which doesn't necessarily make it a better or more interesting one.

[sovay]

Also, if you want to talk to me in comments about what protagonist crimes you find unforgivable, or, alternately, things you would generally find unforgivable but that particularly skilled authors have nonetheless sold you on, I would be interested to hear it!

Captain Renault has always been my favorite character in Casablanca (1942) and every now and then I try to examine this fact because even though he is played by Claude Rains, let's be honest, prior to his endlessly quotable heel face turn the dude has nothing going for him but style.

[edit] Less fascistically, Gilbert Norrell has no style to speak of and manages to cram a lifetime of terrible decision-making into the ten years of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), but I am in fact fond of him for all the reasons detailed here, even though I don't ever expect some of the other characters to forgive him.

[skygiants]

He DOES have enormous amounts of style, though! (Renault, for me, falls into the category of 'characters I would happily watch do their thing for hours and hours on end, but would not at all narratively mind if they ended up dead at the end either.')

NORRELL. I am also fond of Norrell and his sad dusty heart with its very faint sad feelings, and I remain mildly sheepish about this.

[genarti]

I think a big protagonist crime I find, if maybe not always unforgivable, at least very very difficult to forgive, is... well, what it sounds like Cyril and Aristide are doing here. (I haven't read any of the books.) That is to say, being willing to sacrifice anyone and everything for Their Chosen Person/People, or being willing to watch lives be lost/ruined/endangered/etc and only caring if it's someone on the shortlist of people they personally care about. Whether that's "to save my boyfriend, I will be a fascist collaborator, let's do this thing" or "you tried to kill someone under my protection so I will kill all of you even if I have to derail a train full of people to do it" or whatever, it's a hard NOPE from me.

(It's possible that the right author doing it juuust right could make me interested enough to stay with it, and even that someone has, but I can't think of an example right this moment. I'm more willing to accept secondary characters doing it if the protagonists aren't, but I don't want to spend a book/movie/whatever following someone who'd do that around.)

It's a fine line sometimes, because I am usually willing to stay sympathetic to a character who believes they're doing harsh things for the greater good (even if they later change their opinion on that, or if the narrative disagrees), or to a character who believes that they can't save everyone and will spend their limited resources on the people they care about first, or a person in a corrupt system who didn't initially realize what they signed on for and can't figure out what to do about it now that it's too late. Harsh choices and moral compromises and slippery slopes all happen! But not caring about the harsh choice or the other people sacrificed, not thinking twice about it, that immediately burns up all my sympathy and liking. Especially if it happens onscreen -- if it's something that was true in backstory and now they're trying to grapple with no longer being that person, I'm a lot more willing to ride with that story.

This is occasionally a difficulty because there are a lot of Cool Amoral Characters whose stories I bounce hard off from page one. If I'm reliably informed that they have a moral awakening later, I may push through to page whatever-that-is, but otherwise, nahhh.

[skygiants]

Yeah, as you know, I too am generally much more likely to sympathize with someone who reluctantly sacrifices the personal for something bigger than vice versa (though obviously there's a lot of gray area in there and ideally there's a balance of caring about the political and about the personal because going either way to one end of the spectrum or the other is definitely a good way to land in villain territory ...) Like, humans are often selfish, I'm for sure interested in compromise and complexity and explorations of human selfishness, but I want to hang onto something that's a principle, generally speaking, even if the principle is a deeply misguided one.

(in defense of Cyril, I will say that Cyril does think about the people he's sacrificing -- he thinks about it quite a lot! he feels very bad all the time! -- it just absolutely is not enough of a consideration to stop him from doing the things he somewhat inexplicably, and also as it turns out very patently incorrectly, feels like he has to do to save himself and Aristide.)

[sovay]

or being willing to watch lives be lost/ruined/endangered/etc and only caring if it's someone on the shortlist of people they personally care about.

The narrator of Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) believes himself to be this sort of person and is totally wrong, which in the kind of plot he lives in is simultaneously heartwarming and tragic. [edit] Discussed in detail in context of the 1958 film, which I anti-recommend with extreme but not unwarranted prejudice.

[sgac]

One of my problems with Cyril was that the third book heaped him with so much torture and PTSD that it felt like it was saying 'see, he's HAD his punishment, it was karma, you have to forgive someone who's suffered so much'. And that's a cop out. I would rather have a compos mentis Cyril who's capable of making amends, or consciously sacrificing himself to justice.

The only reason it works at all for me is that I just want to cuddle Aristide and give him all the good things, so if Cyril's a thing he wants I guess he can have him and I'll cry over their happy ending for his sake.

[skygiants]

Yeah, it was like, we'd occasionally get these hints -- "oh, he did good and self-sacrificing things and saved people in Liso and suffered for it!" But we never actually saw him making those decisions, or indeed becoming the person who would make those decisions, and without actually seeing those interstitials for me there's not much reason to think that his arc since Amberlough has trended in any direction except 'sadder'; they're just doing the same thing all over again, except it worked this time.

All that said, am I emotionally weak to the desperately awkward mutually tormented Aristide/Cyril reunion scenes in Amnesty? SURE.

[jothra]

I definitely agree with many of your more complicated discussions of morality upthread. I can forgive (or at least stay interested in) a protagonist who does a lot of terrible stuff.

HOWEVER, infidelity is almost always a hard no for me. Complicated political maneuverings involving murder? SURE, tell me all about that. Cheat on someone you love or are otherwise committed to? NOPE. You might not be a villain, but you are now an asshole, and I'm no longer rooting for you.

I cannot really explain why this is such a clear moral event horizon for me...

[skygiants]

lol, it's not my Hard Moral Event Horizon, but I think I get it -- it's like, a significant betrayal of trust that's almost always for an inherently selfish reason? I mean I GUESS sometimes in fiction one bangs, as one murders, for the mission/the greater good/whatever, but I'm not sure it even counts as 'cheating' per se unless it's something you actively want to do.

[cyphomandra]

I do actually like the Thomas Covenant chronicles (mainly the second chronicles, which are great at showing how the time difference inherent in portal fantasies can work), while realising that having your lead character rape a young woman in the first book is a hard no for many many people. I never felt that Donaldson thought it was a good idea, whereas books where I feel the author justifying/excusing their character (piers Anthony is the first example that comes to mind, but actually Lois McMaster Bujold managed to tick me off with one of Mark’s deals in Lord Vorpatril’s Alliance, and I used to really like Mark) will put me off, but it’s a fine line and I accept many other people won’t draw it in the same place.

I tried to read Amberlough and couldn’t get into it; I’m not sure this review has moved it up my wait list!

[skygiants]

I tried the Thomas Covenant chronicles as a teenager and did indeed hit the hard no, but it's true, insofar as I remember, that excuses are not made. I've also have problems with Mark ... stemming from his near-rape incident in Mirror Dance, now that I think of it, so I guess that's a fairly consistent line for me really.

Of the three books, for the record, I think Amberlough is the one that works the least well for me, mostly because it relies the most on Cyril making poor decisions in the name of a relationship that is NOT VERY MUCH onscreen. The subsequent books still involve a lot of dubious decisions but the emotional dynamics feel more substantive.

[aberration]

I can't really think of any hard-and-fast rule I have in terms of what's "unforgiveable" in a protagonist - for me it tends to be a lot more about narrative. If I don't feel like the narrative is trying to rationalize the characters' actions, and is maybe making some efforts to be responsible in how it sells me on the drama of those actions, then that's probably more important to me than the characters' actions? Or I might just decide I don't want to spend time with such a protagonist even if the narrative isn't trying to justify it, but.

(Weirdly I've been feeling lately the sort of opposite - like I keep encountering media where I think the writers just don't want to commit to a character doing something morally questionable/bad, and so arrange circumstances in such a way that it was the only option/they didn't really do it/etc. I end up just wanting the writers to have some damn nerve and have their characters do bad things.)

But I feel like maybe my most relevant recent experience is The Americans, which I know even among avid viewers, there were divides about how to respond to the protagonists' crimes. Because over the course of the show they do murder innocent people, or completely upend others' lives, and these were people who generally just happened to be adjacent to the wrong thing at the wrong time. I never felt like the narrative of the show tried to justify or rationalize their actions, but at the same time, it seemed very reluctant to make moral judgments about individuals in general. There were never any straight up villainous characters, I can't think of a single character on the show with whom you weren't forced to have at least one moment of empathy, even very minor or even single-episode characters. I felt like the takeaway from the show was more about the systems that these people were in, and how they were used and exploited by them, and how navigating them almost inevitably meant hurting others unless one removed oneself entirely from them, which also had consequences.

But the show succeeded in forcing me to face that the protagonists' victims were real human people whose pain can't be justified or rationalized, while also making me deeply love those protagonists, so yeah.

[skygiants]

Yeah, there's definitely two possible nope reactions -- one is "I don't like this character and don't want to spend time with them," and the other is "I'm annoyed by the narrative's attitude towards this character," and either of those might fire together or separately, but once the second thing happens the first is much more likely to go off as well.

(Although yes THAT ALSO bugs me sometimes. The Disney villain death; they just fell off the cliff! It was nobody's fault!)

And the thing is, when a narrative does pull off that balance -- making you empathize with a character while also feeling deeply uncomfortable about their actions and the cost of them -- it can be extremely compelling, and raise some of fiction's most interesting questions. But that balance is so difficult to hit!

[melita66]

Thank you for another thoughtful review. I've been eyeing Amberlough because it was getting good press but your review has moved it into the nope pile.

[skygiants]

I'm glad it was helpful! Overall I was glad I read the trilogy -- I thought it was interesting and thought-provoking, even if some of the thoughts it provoked in me were "I have major doubts about this" -- but it's very definitely a YMMV.

[melannen]

Hi I am super late to the party, but I wanted to thank you, because reading this discussion made me realize where one of my big lines falls in terms of who deserves a redemption arc: I have realized that I am totally okay with a plotline where are character has done really incredibly terrible things and then turns back to the side of good if they're a fundamentally good person who has just been through so much crap and tragedy and hypocrisy and gaslighting that they've lost all faith in "good" - if they're doing evil mostly out of a nihilistic sense of "it doesn't goddamn make a difference anyway, so why bother trying". And then, of course, someone sparks that last little bit of faith in them and they realize that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do (etc.)

Pretty much all the characters I'm thinking of when I've been puzzling over "this is usually a hard no for me, but somehow I'm skipping over it with this person" fall into that category. (I'm thinking of Renault and his sexual extortion and Vader and his ... Vader-ing here, in particular. But I'm also thinking of characters like Huck Finn, who is admittedly pretty ineffective at being evil, but is maybe my ur-example of that character point, who decides that being "good" isn't any better than being bad, and, "well, then, I'll go to Hell," even though he's not much interested in being bad, either.)

[skygiants]

Thank you in return for this comment! because, yeah, now that you've put it into words, that's super a thing for me as well -- on the one hand I think 'but they're a good person deep down!' can easily turn into a flimsy excuse, but on the other hand I have a lot of innate sympathy for broken ex-idealists, people who really did believe in something and have lost that belief, or who want to believe in something and can't find their way to it (the Grantaire school of tormented nihilism, which sort of comes at this from the opposite angle and also for sure gets me where I live.)