The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I prefer to do the most interesting thing” Early in Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings (2015), the emperor from a formerly minor and scorned state that has conquered six others, dies, and his 12-year-old son becomes the spoiled puppet of the regent and the chatelain, the former acting like an unappreciated scholar suddenly come into power, the latter working towards a long-desired revenge on the deceased emperor. Inevitably, the six vassal states (who used to exist in rivalrous independence) rebel, shaking the empire. The novel then depicts how a variety of people try to exploit this fluid situation to carve out reputations and new roles, some more self-serving, some more people serving. Two such men stand out: the “dandelion” Kuni Garu, a former ne’er-do-well small-time good-natured gangster about town who wants to live an interesting life and gets serious (i.e., starts working at a real job) in order to marry Jia Matiza, a beautiful young lady into herbs and poetry; and the “chrysanthemum” Mata Zyndu, an 8’ tall, double-pupiled, formidable descendant of the last great war hero of a conquered people. Affable, down-to-earth, kind, clever, married, strategist Kuni and taciturn, reserved, aristocratic, solitary, and larger than life humungous sword and cudgel wielding warrior Mata make a fine odd couple. Kuni is a people person who likes partying and organizing, Mata a cold-hearted and hot-blooded revenge killer hero. It is absorbing to see how far the pair will go together and suspenseful to wonder how long it will take them to fall out with each other. In some ways Liu’s novel closely follows the tradition of the historical Chinese martial arts epic (e.g., The Three Kingdoms, Legends of the Condor Heroes, or Tribes and Empires), in that it depicts a crumbling empire and the resulting chaos of feuding states, into which ambitious real people--bureaucrats, soldiers, scholars, and monarchs with their own agendas, but no epic fantasy Dark Lords--make their marks. It’s full of people doing what people have done throughout history: scheme, fight, build, destroy, etc. There are obvious Chinese touches here like people writing calligraphically, sitting at desks on pillows on the floor, pulling things out of the folds in their sleeves, eating with chop sticks, drinking from three-legged drinking vessels, and living in rigid hierarchies with strong family traditions. And the characters regularly refer to and quote a Confucius analogue conservative patriarchal scholar poet sage from the past, Kon Fiji. The different points are, of course, that this novel takes place in a fantasy world in which the eight gods and goddesses are very much involved with the doings of mortals, so that although they do not directly fight with mortals, they are not above influencing them indirectly through prophecies and inspirations and nudges, as they play their own game with people as more or less free willed pawns. (Compared to the many gods running around in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, the number of gods here is blessedly small.) There is little, if any, magic, Liu instead imagining basically medieval technology, with dirigibles and submersibles making the book what has been called “silk punk.” The writing is clean, fast-moving, and dry, but also capable of flights of simile (e.g., “Zindari letters emerged in the black space on the page, fading into view like ships coming out of the fog” and “his bushy white beard floated up like the whiskers of a carp as he labored to catch his breath”) that give pleasure. There are plenty of gripping and vivid action scenes, from small brawls and assassination attempts to sneak attacks and epic battles on land and sea or in the air. There are neat lines on human nature (including speculation about the difficulty in drawing the line between performance and self) and cool wisdom (“When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon”). While at first I thought that Liu was falling down regarding women, especially with an unconvincingly self-sacrificing princess, he finally writes some compelling female characters into the novel, especially Gin Mazati, and Kuni values the women providing vital support to his military effort, which gives him an advantage over his rivals. There are some weak points to the novel. At one point a smaller force tricks a larger one by fashioning 5000 straw puppet cavalry soldiers, mounting them on horses, and sending the cavalry in tight formation into the heart of the enemy army before any of the soldiers notice something’s funny! And there are some corny lines, like “everything she said felt like daggers twisting in his heart.” But it was a fine read, and people who like Game of Thrones (with a smaller cast and a Chinese atmosphere) should enjoy it. The audiobook is capably read by Michael Kramer. Perhaps he has a certain rhythm that repeats throughout many sentences, but it’s appealing, and he enhances the reading experience. There is a pdf file that comes with the audiobook, but it consists only of a list of characters, a glossary, and a note on the Tang Dynasty source of Mata’s chrysanthemum poem, and doesn’t have a map of the seven states of Dara, so I found it helpful to look at the map in the preview of the kindle book. 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