A Pose of Indifference

[mtvessel]

Feb 2017
Shadow and Betrayal - Daniel Abraham - Orbit, 2007
* * *
This is a compendium of the first two books of the Long Price Quartet, a fantasy with a dense construction and a pleasingly different oriental feel. However, I remember relatively little about it. To be fair this may be more middle-age memory loss than anything else, but I do think its grimdarkness is partly to blame.

The magic system is interesting. Specially trained poets capture ideas - andats - using words, and bind them into a human form. It's effectively like having a djinn who can only grant one wish. In the first book, A Shadow in Summer, the andat is called Removing-The-Part-That-Continues, or Seedless, and he is used to extract the seeds from cotton, giving the city of Saraykeht a somewhat unlikely advantage over its economic competitors. Of course, there are other uses for such a power and they form the backbone of the plot. The worldbuilding is unremarkable but solid - there is a trope of using gestures to indicate meaning or social status, which is clever and fits with the Asian stylings, but is clumsy, longwinded and hard to visualise when described in prose ("Maati took a pose of polite enquiry"). The culture also unfortunately takes after its oriental mediaeval inspiration in being sexist, with male lines of succession, and this is reflected in the lack of agency of the two women among the six main characters. The younger of the two, Liat, is particularly annoying as she essentially has nothing to do but be the love interest of two of the men, Maati, a trainee poet, and Itani, a labourer who is not what he seems. Still, the plot unspools nicely as the conflicted characters strive against each other and a long price is eventually paid.

A Betrayal in Winter is less interesting, being focused around a struggle for succession to the throne of the city of Machi in which competing sons are expected to kill each other until only one is left standing, and in which both Maati and Itani get caught up. This unoriginal concept was of course parodied rather effectively by Neil Gaiman in his delightful Stardust, and I found it hard to take seriously here. The sole female character of any note is a scheming Cersei-type called Idaan, and in fact the whole thing reads like a massively shortened and simplified version of Game of Thrones, a sequence for which I have no great love due to its repeated habit of introducing vaguely sympathetic characters and then killing them off in brutally unpleasant ways. Still, all credit to Abraham for telling in one book a story that George R.R. Martin has conspicuously failed to complete in seven.