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Jul. 9th, 2025 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen kate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!
Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?
We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.
By a few chapters in, I was describing it togenarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time.
Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. I should have known tbh as soon as it turned out how much James was lying to Richard in the early letters but it became really EXTREMELY clear when James and Richard have a temporary homosocial breakup over James' Dark Secrets at the very same time as we learn that Richard is! secretly!! James' half-brother!!!
Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.
Now even as I write this, I know thatgenarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak.
And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.
On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.
kate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?
We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.
By a few chapters in, I was describing it to
genarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time. Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. I should have known tbh as soon as it turned out how much James was lying to Richard in the early letters but it became really EXTREMELY clear when James and Richard have a temporary homosocial breakup over James' Dark Secrets at the very same time as we learn that Richard is! secretly!! James' half-brother!!!
Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.
Now even as I write this, I know that
genarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak. And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.
On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.
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Date: 2025-07-10 03:28 am (UTC)It's funny to learn or realize that something is Lymond-inspired. I think my most "oh shit/goddamn it, no wonder" moments for this were Outlander and Kushiel's Dart.
On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. Same hat on that one too. Our tabletop campaign is coincidentally dealing with some similar material albeit in a very different fantastical context, which was planned... well before it seemed like it was going to be this topical, ha ha, except in the sense that I have a pessimistic disposition, but it's been interesting.
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Date: 2025-07-10 12:43 pm (UTC)ajsd;flkdj I haven't read Kushiel's Dart since before reading Lymond but of course. of course. The funniest for me I think has been watching Eugenides visibly transmogrify into Lymond before my eyes in the Queen's Thief books, like an Animorph cover.
OH MAN I BET. I bet.
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Date: 2025-07-11 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-11 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-10 03:30 am (UTC)okay wait I have never read any Dunnett but F&N is one of me fave re-reads, my copy has been read to loose-pages-falling-out-level, should I read Lymond books?
I love how that scene with Engles basically lampshades the book's sense of humor about its own shortcomings, TBQH.
(to be clear one of the things I love about the books is the politics. Also the slow burn romance and the ways characters reveal different parts of themselves depending on the letter recipient, but heavily the leftism is relevant to my interests.)
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Date: 2025-07-10 12:47 pm (UTC)(yes, it's one of the most fun letter game variants I've yet hit for this -- the letters do genuinely feel like they're coming from and going to different people, with different things told and held back in each, it's not all just a construction for the prose. As someone with epistolary-novel aspirations I feel like I learned quite a bit from it! also, of course, the politics)
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Date: 2025-07-10 02:06 pm (UTC)Brust and Bull know how to commit to a narrative device. I'm not sure I recommend Agyar here in the 2025th year of the common era (I would have to reread as there are at least two things that I can think of that may not have aged well) but it's truly an exemplary example of a novel as diary that's genuinely written for the diary-writer and therefore doesn't say lots of things that the diary-writer just knows.
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Date: 2025-07-10 09:57 pm (UTC)Okay, with all those reservations noted, ILL ordered. (I trust your booklogging enough that I have a libby tag for "skygiants rec" so I can remember why I put a book on hold. I do not believe it has led me in a wrong direction yet.)
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Date: 2025-07-11 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-11 09:45 pm (UTC)the Niccolo novels are somewhat less fannish catnip, for a variety of reasons.
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Date: 2025-07-21 03:41 am (UTC)As someone who strongly prefers Nicholas--I read Lymond either during the publication of later Niccolo books or afterwards; I can't remember--are there any books channeling Nicholas rather than Lymond?
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Date: 2025-07-21 06:45 pm (UTC)That is an excellent question, and I don't know the answer to it! Possibly because Nicolas is more complicated and less overtly romantic than Francis, I suspect the answer is no.
But it's a good question for Bill Marshall (you can find him on Bluesky), as he's trying to compile a list of authors who have publicly acknowledged (and shown) their Dunnett influence.
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Date: 2025-07-11 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-10 05:32 am (UTC)I just re-read the latter two-thirds of Westmark.
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Date: 2025-07-11 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-11 04:00 am (UTC)"'The world is absurd,' Keller told Sparrow. 'Thank heaven for that. Otherwise, I—we, that is—would have no occupation.'"
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Date: 2025-07-10 06:46 am (UTC)Also, the bit that broke my suspension of disbelief about the whole thing being epistolary was when a woman wrote a letter describing in detail the first time she has sex with a guy TO THAT GUY'S SISTER (forgot the names, sorry). Um. I would not want that level of detail on a sibling's sex life! I guess they just really wanted to write that sex scene, but it could have been a journal entry or something.
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Date: 2025-07-11 03:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-10 11:51 am (UTC)Yeah, Steve Brust has said in public in my hearing several times that his own upbringing was proletarian because his father, a college professor, chose to be part of the proletariat so therefore it all totally counts. So this is not abstract for at least one of the authors.
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Date: 2025-07-11 01:40 am (UTC)... I'm sorry to pick on a real person who is the real parent of another real person who people know and care about, but I am just asking myself: what does being a member of the proletariat *mean* to Steve Brust's dad? ... But I won't keep belaboring the point...
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Date: 2025-07-11 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-11 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-11 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-10 01:14 pm (UTC)I knew you would enjoy the revelation about them being secret brothers!! (I suspect, since it was written as a true letter game, that Richard was not named that way on purpose, however.)
yes, it's very true about the off-screen deaths of the actual working class--one of the things I decided in the reread is that a late one of those is particularly unnecessary.
I'm so glad you had fun!
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Date: 2025-07-11 03:22 am (UTC)I went back and read some of your posts and I agree!! There was no need to tragically kill that man! (though I did actually think the other spoiler ending death was pretty effective)
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Date: 2025-07-11 11:39 am (UTC)yes, I do think the other one works, at the time I was just very sensitive because of the other!
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Date: 2025-07-10 01:22 pm (UTC)And like
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Date: 2025-07-11 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-07-11 09:48 pm (UTC)And yes, just push through -- don't bother trying to follow it all, just keep going. Eventually the narrative momentum will overpower the confusion.
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Date: 2025-07-22 09:47 pm (UTC)Back when I was trying to read Lymond after adoring Nicholas/Niccolo, a popular usenet rec was to start with book 3. If that worked, you could decide to read books 1 and 2 later. I did that although I still have trouble with the "Lymond!" "Lymond is back!" stuff in book 1.
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Date: 2025-07-23 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-07-12 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-11 02:47 pm (UTC)Hee! My last reread, a couple years ago, was sparked by rereading S&C and thinking "this is fun and all but i'd rather be rereading F&N."
(Then I reread it and quoted extensively from the 'james and susan hook up' sections to my partner, who eventually got so fed up that she just read it herself and is having a lovely time.)
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Date: 2025-07-12 11:51 am (UTC)