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Oct. 11th, 2021 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI 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 -- the Cliopher hagiography ramped up steadily throughout the book but the point when it fully lost me was when a.) it turned out that the tension was just the result of a series of Big Misunderstandings -- there's no real cultural disconnect or interesting questions about different values for what makes a life well lived, Cliopher's family simply have not been getting the announcements of all the Big and Important Government Things he's been doing because their local aristocrat hasn't been passing them on! -- and b.) this reveal was then followed by a full two hundred pages featuring every single one of Cliopher's relations and childhood friends learning, one by one, to their great surprise, that Cliopher is actually really successful and important. That is essentially a whole book in and of itself of pure wish-fulfillment, just one solid book of "your family never knew you were any good at things but actually you're the best in the world at everything and they're all so very proud and also so very sorry they never realized it before!" and while I do understand the appeal, for me this all became just a little much.
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.
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 -- the Cliopher hagiography ramped up steadily throughout the book but the point when it fully lost me was when a.) it turned out that the tension was just the result of a series of Big Misunderstandings -- there's no real cultural disconnect or interesting questions about different values for what makes a life well lived, Cliopher's family simply have not been getting the announcements of all the Big and Important Government Things he's been doing because their local aristocrat hasn't been passing them on! -- and b.) this reveal was then followed by a full two hundred pages featuring every single one of Cliopher's relations and childhood friends learning, one by one, to their great surprise, that Cliopher is actually really successful and important. That is essentially a whole book in and of itself of pure wish-fulfillment, just one solid book of "your family never knew you were any good at things but actually you're the best in the world at everything and they're all so very proud and also so very sorry they never realized it before!" and while I do understand the appeal, for me this all became just a little much.
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.
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Date: 2021-10-12 05:41 am (UTC)This is a real question, not a derisory one: is this book filed off from another canon?
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Date: 2021-10-12 09:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2021-10-13 12:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2021-10-12 08:43 am (UTC)The first two hundred pages are excellent - if they stood alone as say, book 1 of a trilogy, I'd be crying it up to the heavens and praising the strength and delicacy with which the family tensions are drawn. And the iddy Poor Misunderstood Darlin, We Had No Idea bits I can respect as being extremely serviceable for someone else's id, but I was infuriated at the revelation that this was all a big misunderstanding. It really cheapened the whole book for me, it just felt like such a cop-out.
I really did enjoy, from a structural point of view, the last third of the book which is just Cliopher going on a gentle day out and sitting in coffee shops fixing things, though would have preferred with 70% less hagiography. What if one of the hagiographies they read out about the Viceroy had actually been negative, and they came away with a more balanced view of the effects of his policies? (I know, not possible, because all of his policies were the best possible versions and could not possibly have caused any meaningful negative effects. Setting aside his massive negligence in the Vangavaye-ve...)
Equally, I loved the promise of the Islander culture thread, and the way Cliopher wrestles with his identities. I don't think I've seen Fantasy Polynesia ever foregrounded in high fantasy before? And the ceremonial scene at the end gave me chills. But the more I think about it in hindsight, the more it feels like the author trying to have her cake and eat it? With respect to assimilation/multiculturalism, benevolent empire and any sense of meaningful difference or true clash of values. Like, I loved Moana! But this feels very safe in the same sort of way, and you've got nine hundred pages in which to make it be less safe and more substantive.
The sequel is slight but fun - and yes, completely different in tone and structure from this one. There's also a prequel novella, The Tower At The Edge Of The World. The two can be read in either order - I think I would recommend Tower first, because it gives you more context, but going in to Return context-free and then filling in the gaps is also a very valid reading experience.
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Date: 2021-10-13 12:59 am (UTC)I ALSO WAS INFURIATED BY THE BIG MISUNDERSTANDING. It's like -- OK, actually, you know, I think the thing that gets me angriest about it is that the only person who calls out his negligence in the Vangavaye-ve is not any of his relatives, or the people actually impacted by it, but the Emperor, and the Emperor is doing it not to call him out but to reassure him that he really is incorruptible! It's one hundred percent trying to have her cake and eat it too, as you say. Like, I truly just do not believe that you can be a person with as much power as Cliopher has by the end and not be fundamentally changed in ways that mean the people who knew you as a child simply will not recognize some things about you, and that's without adding in the profound cultural tensions that the book ... fairly consistently downplays, or rather, depicts Cliopher as suffering under but nobody else as much fussed about.
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Date: 2021-10-12 10:28 am (UTC)Oh and I actually do have something to do with audit, indirectly, so yes. I don't think my family would respond so positively for 200 pages ^^
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Date: 2021-10-13 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-12 12:14 pm (UTC)As a bureaucrat, I wonder if the author is also a bureaucrat.
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Date: 2021-10-12 11:07 pm (UTC)The lack of attention to the realities of bureaucracy, uh, shows.
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Date: 2021-10-12 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-12 03:49 pm (UTC)Prose style is also very serviceable and easy-reading.
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Date: 2021-10-12 12:35 pm (UTC)I think that one affect of the apoocalypse was that time stopped working the same for everyone? So in the capital city it's been hundreds of years, in Kip's home it's been about 30 years, in the Greenwing and Dart books, which are set in one of the related words, it has been about 10 years in one place, and less than that in another. Now that things are more stable, they are coming into sync again so that one year is the same everywhere.
(On Earth it has been approximately since the Bronze Age)
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Date: 2021-10-13 01:12 am (UTC)(Also tbh I feel like living subjective centuries longer than everyone you know and love would have maybe greater impacts on a set of relationships than simply 'I'm bummed they don't appreciate that I'm a big deal now' but perhaps this also is something I am not understanding about the timeline.)
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Date: 2021-10-12 03:45 pm (UTC)I feel like: on the one hand, an editor would have made this book half it's length, and on the other hand, an editor would have made this book half it's length?
Like, clearly this book wants to ROLL IN IT. And making it half as long would have been half as much rolling in it, you know? But do we really need "the emperor of reality, explains, once again, to Cliopher's dim but supportive family, that he actually is a big deal and also has accomplished a lot," to happen six times?
So. Yeah, I go back and forth. As it is, it is "if this is the sort of thing you like, this will be the sort of thing you like," and it could have had a wider appeal if taken severely in hand, but at the cost of not being quite so much the thing its admirers admire.
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Date: 2021-10-12 08:25 pm (UTC)Is Cliopher a great bureaucrat only or is he also an outstanding poet/musician/mechanic/whatever? Or able to solve all the things all on his own? Does he bring in experts for various issues? Thanks!
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Date: 2021-10-12 10:21 pm (UTC)Oh, easy questions to answer! Yes, yes (except for a giant glaring irresponsible oversight in his own home province that we are supposed to find sympathetic and not further evidence of the flaws of autocracy), and no. In fact, do experts even exist in this world?
I believe in my own review I described him as "Good Bismarck (Who Can Also Dance and Make Boats Perfectly)."
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Date: 2021-10-12 10:13 pm (UTC)I literally just today finished the sequel, in the hopes that the good things I found in The Hands of the Emperor would come out tops -- for indeed, as you remark here, there were some! and they were compelling -- but alas, I think I must give up. This sequel had many of the flaws of the first (in fact, the incident of saviorism, though singular, was so intensely awful!) and added a few all its own. At least it was indeed shorter? (Though honestly I think that in itself was a flaw; the book ended in medias res, practically.)
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Date: 2021-10-13 01:47 am (UTC)(Honestly, it feels like the inhabitants of the Vangavaye-ve have as much insular-hobbits-of-Hobbiton in their literary DNA as anything else half the time, which does not make for a great meld with the themes of minority representation and cultural imperialism and colonialism that the book sort of half-engages with in order to try and make us admire Cliopher more.)
That is truly too bad about the sequel; as frustrating 190 of the last 200 pages of the book are I did kind of love the Emperor's dream and Cliopher pulling him out of it with the Mundane Frustrations of Duty, and if that had been a pointer to the tone of the next book I would have been delighted.
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Date: 2021-10-12 11:20 pm (UTC)Yes, I also found it somewhat odd that Cliopher didn't seem to mind all the capital punishment floating around. Or the giant militaristic-if-declining autocratic empire of imperialism which doles it out. They do tend to go hand-in-hand.
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Date: 2021-10-13 03:55 am (UTC)So like... a mirrorverse version of The Traitor Baru Cormorant?
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Date: 2021-10-17 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-14 02:52 pm (UTC)This is fascinating and useful, by which I mean this is not a book for me.
(Also I keep mixing it up in my head with The Councilor which is apparently also about fantasy bureaucracy? I think?)
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Date: 2021-10-17 03:10 am (UTC)MAJOR SPOILERS - skip if you haven't finished Hands of the Emperor
Date: 2021-10-28 11:28 am (UTC)Re: MAJOR SPOILERS - skip if you haven't finished Hands of the Emperor
Date: 2021-10-28 11:31 am (UTC)Re: MAJOR SPOILERS - skip if you haven't finished Hands of the Emperor
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