"Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."
- Shooting An Elephant, George Orwell
I get a lot of reading done when I'm visiting family. It's not that I don't want to spend time with them exactly, sometimes I get a little tired though. So I pick a book to take with me and read during the downtime, and that was "The Traitor Baru Cormorant". Unfortunately, it was a bad choice because it was entertaining enough that I read the entire thing in two days, and had to find something new after. I'm looking forward to getting the two sequels.
The weakest part of the book was definitely the beginning. It should have been really interesting, as it's an account of the protagonist growing up as her homeland gets colonized by the fantasy-British Empire (the Masquerade). Also, it's supposed to serve the function of setting up the motive for the epic revenge story, but I didn't really feel it.
Luckily, things pick up as soon as Baru leaves her home. There rest of the plot has two different parts. The first part involves Baru getting used to her role as Masquerade accountant and introducing her new home, a sort of fantasy-medieval Eastern Europe place. The second part is an epic Game of Thrones-ish account of war and politics.
These were both pretty good. The accountant stuff was unique, without getting too technical. As long as you can understand the concept of inflation, you can follow it. The politics stuff was really good as well. There's a ton of different characters at this point in the story, all of whom have unpronounceable fantasy names, but they were written well enough that I could keep track of them all. Some were very memorable.
There's two interesting aspects of the story to write about. The first is the Masquerade. Lots of fantasy stories have evil empires or malicious tyrants, but they usually don't focus 19th century colonialism. The Masquerade is literally just the British empire with some colorful fantasy details. A particular aspect of their evil is that they forcibly introduce their social morality onto colonized peoples. This morality has a lot in common with real British race "science", but also an overwhelming obsession with preventing homosexuality and polyamory. It's a little over the top, but works well to add drama in a story with a lesbian protagonist. In spite of the homopgobia, the empire have an interesting take on gender: they're essentialists in that they believe in biologically defined gender roles, but those roles include a lot more stuff for the women to do. For instance, they think women are naturally better sailors, so the navy is mostly female.
My biggest problem with The Masquerade is that they just aren't mean and stupid enough. Every real world empire has times where the clever plans are too much work, and they fall back on ugly violence for no good reason (the point of my Orwell quote above). On the other hand, The Masquerade is incredibly efficient and strategic at all times. Where are the corrupt officials who torture the local populace just because they don't know any better? When does the Masquerade fight a pointless war just because those in charge can't admit they were wrong?
The other thing about this book is that it's very gay. That's good, too much modern speculative fiction includes queer characters just because the author thinks it's a good vibe. (how would you know it's a cyberpunk dystopia if there weren't a few trans people hanging around?). I though the way in which Baru is slowly more and more honest with herself about her sexuality as she gets older was pretty realistic. Also her relationship with Tain Hu was very cute... for the most part.
