(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.

[skygiants]

I mean, maybe I missed something in Amberlough, but I have now read it twice and I'm still just as confused about why he didn't just try to leave with Ari as soon as he got back from his disaster mission, BEFORE the fascists took over and made it so difficult to get papers. Like, I get that travel's difficult to arrange, but there would probably have been months to sort it out if you didn't actively help them bring about the coup, Cyril!

[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?

[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."

[musesfool]

I guess because then there wouldn't be a book? But yeah, I didn't get that either.

[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.

[skygiants]

Right! The scenario you outlined is a hundred percent plausible and a very convincing saunter downwards, but the WHOLE ACTUAL SECRET POLICE, that's so many secret police!

(Now admittedly I've read enough Ben Macintyre at this point to know how easy it is for ideologically conflicted traitors-in-potentia to accidentally wander into highly-placed positions in intelligence organizations, ripe for recruitment by enemy agents, but even Gordievsky was not the HEAD of the ENTIRE KGB.)

[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.

[sovay]

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.

Okay, fine, I'm just going to leave this fourteen-year-old post about the consumptive Nazi doctor here. I don't apologize for the content, but I feel bad about the prose. I'm trying to blame grad school for the footnotes.

[osprey_archer]

Gordievsky was a Big Cog but at the end of the day, he was still just a cog, not the mainspring of the whole damn clock. I'm not sure I would say he accidentally wandered into his highly placed position, though; my impression is that at first he wanted a successful career so he could visit cool places, and once visiting some cool places had changed his internal ideological conflict into external dissidence he wanted to continue rising so he could get access to the really good secrets.

In another comment you mention the character arc from "ignorance to knowledge," and I think that's also important. If you have a character like Carmichael who is already at "knowledge," who knows that fascism is wrong but nonetheless gets strong-armed not merely into compliance but active and extremely damaging complicity (he leads the whole actual secret police!)... where can he go from there? He already knows its bad. What's he going to do, realize that this bad thing that he already knows he's doing is, like, not just bad but REALLY bad? The BAD kind of bad?

[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.

[ghost_lingering]

Ahhhhhh, Chrome, why do you keep eating my words.

I was just going to say: one reason that I think that the Cardassians in DS9 work is that Bajor and Bajorans are never forgotten. If Kira wasn't there in the main cast to loudly advocate for Bajor in the wake of the Cardassian occupation, then making Cardassians likable would fall flat for me.

ALSO: I remembered another piece of media where I have complicated feelings about fascist characters. Fullmetal Alchemist. Where most characters are members of a military in a country that is basically a fantasy version of the Third Reich. D: Verrrrrrrry complicated feelings all over the place.

[skygiants]

Gordievsky definitely did some active maneuvering to get where he got, as did Kim Philby -- jokes aside, neither of them was handed a position they were at all reluctant to take. There's another MacIntyre book where he makes the argument that basically the entire German Abwehr counterintelligence service ended up working to undermine the Nazis, but also, a.) nonetheless they all were pretty happy to go along with most of the early ideology until it looked like the war was being lost and b.) counterintelligence is not the secret police.

Yeah, I think if you're not going from ignorance to knowledge but instead starting from a point of knowledge, then the possible character arcs you've got are like ... okay, there's 'character is pushed ALLLL THE WAY UP against their hardest moral line and finally finds the one they won't cross!', which has the danger of trivializing all the various moral lines crossed previous to the one they finally found; or there's 'character in a high-pressure situation does ALL THE BAD but once the specific situation is over attempts to become a different and better person than the person who did ALL THE BAD', which I do think can be super interesting when well done but you need so much time and space to do it right!

[skygiants]

Grad school has that effect on so many of us!

I've only read The Sparrow and its sequel of Russell's work, but from that and your post one sees a certain theme in her work of, uh ... high-key self-loathing? and, I mean, a sense of deep shame is for sure one of the things that can make a character who has committed atrocities likeable/compelling/relatable; the trick is to balance that against the urge to hand out absolution/redemption as, like, a reward for sad feelings, which it sounds like Russell does.

[skygiants]

Yeah, absolutely agreed, on both counts (she said, using a Scar-and-Marcoh icon for the third time in this thread). Scar plays kind of the role in FMA that Kira does in DS9, honestly, except that Kira starts out as one of the main cast members, so you're already firmly primed to support her over all of our side Cardassians, whereas with Scar you start out like 'oh Scar is a villain' and then are drawn in with the protagonists into realizing 'oh no ... oh shit, we've been the villains.' And I think both are really interesting tacks to take, and effective in their own way, but without a very specific emphasis and narrative support for those key characters the stories just do not work.

But for sure, for sure one of the reasons that I find Mustang and Hawkeye and Marcoh compelling and sympathetic is that, at the point we see them in the story, none of them even try to make excuses for their actions; they're doing the work but they're not asking for forgiveness or redemption, because that isn't the point, and if retribution is asked of them then they'll give it, but in the meantime they'll do the work for as long as they can. It's a hard arc to pull off but incredibly rewarding when it's done well, and I do think that Arakawa manages it.

[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.

[sovay]

He DOES have enormous amounts of style, though!

He does! It's just not a substitute for ethics! And yet it's such good style that it's easy to miss this fact for at least the first half-dozen viewings!

(I mean, I was also about twelve the first time I saw it and my concept of life under fascism was a lot more historical-theoretical and I probably just gravitated toward the atmosphere of bisexual trash fire.)

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

*fistbump*

[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.

[sovay]

I've only read The Sparrow and its sequel of Russell's work, but from that and your post one sees a certain theme in her work of, uh ... high-key self-loathing?

I lost track of her after Dreamers of the Day (2008), which was neither as metaphysical nor as weird as it needed to be for its conceit. Her next two novels were a pair of Western mysteries starring Doc Holliday and in the abstract I should have eaten them up on toast, but I just never tried.

a sense of deep shame is for sure one of the things that can make a character who has committed atrocities likeable/compelling/relatable; the trick is to balance that against the urge to hand out absolution/redemption as, like, a reward for sad feelings, which it sounds like Russell does.

Well, one of the things that still makes Schramm's arc work for me is that we never are sure if he gets his redemption or if he just does some useful as well as destructive things with his life; he is not one of the characters whom the narrative tracks into post-war life where their balance can be assessed (the image I'm actually thinking here is the weighing of the heart, which Russell does not use in the novel), so we are never told how to feel about him at the end. Renzo does get the angst exemption coupon and I wonder now if it's one of the reasons I didn't love him as much as the author clearly thought I should.

[genarti]

Yes, absolutely, about sacrificing the personal for something bigger rather than the other way around -- I agree with your entire paragraph there. It's complex, and everyone has their own view of where to draw the line of when "complexity of motivation, moral grey areas, and human flaws" becomes "cruel and amoral self-centeredness."

Similarly and relatedly, my sympathy for a character in a self-destructive spiral depends heavily on the extent to which that spiral has a blast radius. (That is, one the character either embraces or doesn't attempt to avoid, which involves people who have not opted in -- I don't mean "is it stressful for their friends.") Like, I loved Privilege of the Sword, but I bounced hard off Swordspoint for that reason -- the first time Richard killed a total stranger because Alec was bored, I put the book down forcefully and walked away. It's entirely possible, even likely, that that's the start of an upward arc, but I personally couldn't forgive them that. And there are plenty of other canons I've either done that with, or haven't picked up because I suspect I'd have the same kind of reaction.

It's not the same thing as sacrificing principle for personal, exactly, but it feels related all the same -- if I'm going to follow a protagonist through their story, I need a certain base level of attempted decency towards people in general. However bad the character is at it, however awkward or rude they are, whatever their underlying motivation for that decency is, however many mistakes they make, however much circumstances conspire to make decency hard to hold to or follow through on, I want the attempt to be there. I don't want all fiction to be about paragons -- there's a lot of importance as well as interest in exploring human failings both petty and massive! -- but I need some kind of principle and for that principle to involve some kind of recognition that other people's lives matter.

(Ah, fair enough, about Cyril! I'm not sure I'd be willing to forgive him anyway, but at least there's that.)