Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars It’s been three years since Aral Vorkosigan suddenly died. Since his death his wife Cordelia, who with Aral dragged the Barryaran Empire into the Galactic community, has been attempting to deal with her loss by fulfilling her many duties as Vicereine of Sergyar, one of three planets in the Empire. Her partner in keeping the colony of 2,000,000+ inhabitants on Sergyar functioning and thriving on the backwater still new world has been Admiral Oliver Jole, the man in charge of the space fleet. One of the early interesting developments of Lois McMaster Bujold's Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2015), the latest entry in her long-running, intelligent, character-driven space opera Vorkosigan saga, is that Oliver was left at least as bereft as Cordelia at Aral's death, because he had been Aral’s secret lover for over twenty years. It turns out, in fact, that Aral, Cordelia, and Jole had been living in an off-the-record three-partner marriage in all but name, Cordelia and Jole sharing the great man, and that since his death they’ve been like a pair of planets deprived of their common sun. As this novel opens, they love each other as old friends (in all their years together with Aral, Cordelia and Oliver made love to Aral separately and never to each other), but then Cordelia drops a bombshell on Oliver, impelling their relationship into a new phase. Cordelia informs him that she has ten genetic lottery tickets: six frozen zygotes (Aral’s sperm in her eggs) that she’s hoping to turn into six daughters and four frozen gametes that she’s offering to Oliver so that he might add his own Y chromosomes to Aral's X chromosomes inside Cordelia's enucleated eggs ('egg shells') so as to have, in effect, sons with Aral. Oliver, who has never married or fathered any children, is at first stunned and then attracted by the possibilities. The novel depicts the pair's romance against the backdrop of Cordelia's attempts to move the capital of Sergyar from a terrible location next to a restlessly dormant volcano to a more sensible one despite the opposition of vested interests, and of Oliver's attempts to deal with his impending fiftieth-birthday party and a great job offer that would take him back to Barrayar. Those plot strands are complicated by the surprise visit of Cordelia and Aral’s son Miles Vorkosigan and his wife and six kids, because Miles is curious and keen (and an Imperial Auditor for whom a hint is like a stick in the hands of a boy by a wasp nest). How will Cordelia and Oliver let him know about their plans to become parents and about their new relationship and Oliver and Aral’s old one? The story is not complicated by any of the hitherto de rigueur Vorkosigan series nefarious plots or empire threatening dangerous developments. It is a novel about love ('What is love but delight in another human being?'), transience ('While you can, take delight'), parenting ('Parents don’t make children; children make parents'), and happiness (what do Cordelia and Oliver want to do after retirement?). This is all fine, because Bujold's characters and world are so appealing and her writing so witty and the reading experience so comforting and familiar. It is a mostly funny and often moving book. There are some great scenes, especially involving one-on-one conversations, like when Cordelia and Oliver have lunch early on, or when Cordelia shows her grandson some of Aral’s sketches, or when Oliver and Miles talk after the birthday party. It is good to learn more about Aral through Cordelia and Oliver's memories of him. And there are some neat descriptions of the Autumnal romance, as, for instance, when Jole is 'Squinting into the light till the crow's feet seemed to wink at her.' And Miles gets some good lines too, like 'I know I had issues with being an only child, but really mother, NINE siblings?' That said, it all seems a little too easy compared to other Vorkosigan books. Thanks to the technology of Cordelia's homeworld, Beta Colony, it is easy in Bujold’s sf future to do things like live healthily past 100, to fully enjoy a 50-year-old lover at age 76, to become a mother (multiple times) after age 76, to make babies (artificial conception and uterine replicators mean that women no longer need to conceive, carry, and bear babies), and so on. Another mild kvetch might be that Bujold's seemingly bold move in writing at least half her novel from the point of view of a bisexual character is actually rather tame because Oliver's relationship with Aral is a thing of the past and because he's currently so in love with Cordelia that he seems heterosexual. A more challenging story for Bujold and her readers would depict some or all of the twenty-year period when Oliver and Aral were lovers. . . And Bujold badly uses or under uses the relatively new flora and fauna of Sergyar too much for an sf novel. Grover Gardner reads the audiobook and continues to be the only person I can imagine reading the Vorkosigan series. He reads with perfect clarity, emphasis, and understanding. He never does accents, whether Barryaran or Cetagandan, etc., which is both a blessing and a pity. A reader like John Lee would be trying hard to give the different cultures different accents based on earth's (Russian, American, etc.), which would probably distract from the story. On the other hand, it's a little disconcerting when Cordelia's broad Betan accent is rendered in the same American English as every other character's. I noticed that Gardner, like all of us, is aging, and that his golden voice reading this book has a new huskiness. Was it his aging voice or the (relatively) quiet plot that made me wonder if the sun powering Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga is finally running out of energy? Veterans of the Vorkosigan series would like this book, while new readers should begin with earlier novels like Shards of Honor or Warrior’s Apprentice. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University