What Makes This Book So Great (31 page)

This book is undoubtedly a fairy tale. It’s also undoubtedly set in Dragaera which is easily seen as science-fictional. The orange overcast that covers the Empire is here as the “hand of Faerie” and in the same way the magic here is infinitely more magical. There’s a lot less of it. In the Vlad books, people routinely make psionic communication and raise the dead. Here a bit of magical healing is very unusual. But what there is, isn’t taken for granted, isn’t routine, is magical, perhaps even magical realist—there’s a taltos horse (which raises questions about why Vlad is called “taltos”) that can talk, there’s a tree that becomes a palace, and a river with an agenda. All the magic in the Vlad books can be categorised, repeated, relied on. Here, none of it can.

I find myself reading it now with double vision. Looked at one way Miklos goes into Faerie and labours for two years and comes back as a wizard. Looked at another he goes into the Empire, becomes a Teckla, gets a perfectly ordinary connection to the Orb and learns a little sorcery. There’s the whole thing of killing Verra and stopping sorcery from working. It’s a very weird book, and I suspect it contains some keys to the universe if only I could see them clearly. Certainly, standing here I never had any confusion about the overcast, that the Furnace is the sun and that you never see clear sky.

The book starts with the legend of Fenarr, which is seen from the Dragaeran side in
The Phoenix Guards
. This is clearly the same incident, the same set of events, seen through that doubled vision—from the Eastern side it’s ringed about with fantasy, mist, legend, magic, from the Dragaeran side it’s a clever bit of diplomacy. This may have something to do with the length of time an Easterner lives. Fenarr is a legend in Fenario, but “Lord Kav,” with whom he arranged the peace, is still alive.

It doesn’t say so in the book, but I have heard as extra-canonical information that Brigitta’s baby (the one people will have to look out for) is Cawti. Interesting if true, and a bit mind-boggling.

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

77.
Frightened teckla hides in grass: Steven Brust’s
Teckla

The first time I read
Teckla
(1987) I hated it. Hated it. I like it now, but it took quite a lot of time for me to come around to it.

Teckla
is set in the same fun fantasy world of Dragaera as the first two books of the series, but unlike the romps that are
Jhereg
and
Yendi
it’s a real downer. The animals the House of the Teckla are named after are mice, and the Teckla are the peasants and proletarians of the Empire. The book takes places chronologically immediately after
Jhereg
and it is about a proletarian uprising among the Teckla and Easterners (humans) of South Adrilankha. It’s about ordinary people getting caught up with the Jhereg and the nasty side of assassins—it’s no fun at all when it’s killing ordinary men and women who are threatening the profits of organized crime. It’s also about the messy end of a relationship. It’s about passing and being proud or ashamed of what you are.

What I hated about it was that it was grim and depressing and realistic in a way that turned the first two volumes inside out. That’s what I now appreciate about it.
Teckla
provides some necessary grounding, some chiaroscuro to the palette of Dragaera.

Spoilers.

Brust really uses his American-Hungarian heritage in these books. The Easterners, Fenarians, have Hungarian names and Hungarian culture, and he also uses Hungarian mythology and ideas about magic and witchcraft. But it’s not only that, it’s also the whole thing of being an immigrant in a wider culture, either getting trapped in a ghetto or getting out and despising those who don’t. Vlad is a third-generation immigrant. His grandfather came from Fenario and lives in the ghetto, his father got out and aped the Dragaerans he lived among, and Vlad is uncomfortably caught between cultures. He knows he can’t really be a Dragaeran, but he has a Jhereg title and there’s the whole question of his soul that came up in
Jhereg
. He’s uncomfortable with all this, and when Cawti gets involved with the revolutionary group he gets uncomfortable about that. There’s a lot here that demonstrates understanding of what it is to live on the underside of a rich culture and the kind of things people do about that.

Vlad spends a lot of this book literally hiding, and being frightened and miserable. As
Yendi
was the beginning of his marriage with Cawti, this is the end. This is a closely observed example of one of the ways a couple can split up—Cawti is more interested in what she’s doing in South Adrilankha than in her marriage, and Vlad can’t won’t and doesn’t want to change. She has moved on and left him behind, and what he wants he can’t have—if the Cawti of his imagination was ever real, she’s gone.

The Teckla of the title is probably Paresh, who tells Vlad his life story at length. This is one of the most interesting bits of the book, how Paresh, a peasant, became a sorcerer and a revolutionary. Vlad isn’t solving a mystery here, as in the first two books. He tries to deal with a problem, and finds some answers, but the conclusion is at most only a deep breath—the real conclusion is in
Phoenix
. (If there were any sense to the multiple volumes,
Teckla
and
Phoenix
would be bound together.)

None of Vlad’s noble friends from the earlier books appear here. Morrolan tries to contact Vlad once, but we don’t see any of them and they’re barely mentioned. This is in keeping with the general Teckla tone of the book, and the general depressing tone too. It would be livened up with some of Morrolan and Aliera’s sparkling dialogue. There’s not much that sparkles here at all.

The peasants are unhappy, the urban poor are unhappy, they’re getting organized—that’s really unusual for a fantasy world. It could be described as socialist fantasy, and it’s certainly informed by a Marxist worldview—which we learn in
Phoenix
is the view from the wrong world. That isn’t how things work in Dragaera. (So clever he should watch out he doesn’t cut himself.)

Teckla
has a fascinating organizational structure. It’s the usual seventeen chapters, but the book begins with a laundry list—a list of clothes sent to the laundry with instructions about cleaning and mending them, and each chapter is headed with a little bit of that list like “remove bloodstains from cuff,” and in that chapter you see how the cuff got bloodstained, or how the cat hairs got onto the cloak, and so on. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that done before or since.

NOVEMBER 25, 2009

78.
How can you tell? Steven Brust’s
Taltos

Taltos
(1988) is set before all the other books in the series, or at least all the books written so far. It’s a great place to start, especially for people who like reading by internal chronology. It’s also a very good book, one of the best. It’s surprising that Brust preferred to circle back and tell this story instead of finishing the story he’d started in
Teckla,
but I’m sure he had his reasons.
Taltos
is the story of how the young Jhereg assassin Vlad Taltos grew up, met some of the friends and colleagues he relies on in the earlier written later-set books, and how they get him embroiled in larger events and have an adventure.

Spoilers, including a spoiler for
Orca
.

Taltos
is the first of the Vlad books to have a weird structure. The book is ordered in seventeen chapters, as usual, but each chapter begins with an account of Vlad doing a spell that, if written chronologically, he does in the last chapter. Each chapter also contains a flashback to Vlad’s childhood and youth—these are in chronological order in themselves, but not in terms of the overall story. There are two threads, Vlad growing up and Vlad’s buttonman going to Dzur Mountain and the consequences of that. That’s three threads with the spell. Fortunately this is all held together by Vlad’s voice and by the interest of the events.

Reading in publication order, the reader is already aware that they succeed in rescuing Aliera—Aliera is a major character in the later-set books. However, seeing Vlad meeting Morrolan and Sethra and Aliera, and discovering something about the Paths of the Dead, is so inherently interesting that this doesn’t matter at all. Also, if you read the books in chronological order, you get
Taltos
and then
Yendi
(well, you used to), which gives you two books in sequence in which a new Dragon Heir is discovered. This way, they’re well separated.

Taltos
is very much about Vlad as a human, and what it means to be an Easterner among Dragaerans. It’s also strongly about Vlad doing witchcraft. If “taltos” has the meaning that “taltos horse” has in
Brokedown Palace,
then it definitely has something to do with innate magic. Vlad creates a spell to move an object.

It’s clear to see how the object itself, the god’s blood that Kiera gives Vlad, lets Morrolan escape. It’s less clear why Kiera/Sethra gave it to Vlad with such vague instructions. Surely it would have been more useful for her to tell him to take it. I’m not sure what odd rules Sethra is playing by—I don’t know if it’s possible for us to understand. Maybe making Vlad work it out for himself is part of it. Similarly, seeing Vlad without Spellbreaker makes it clear how powerful sorcery is and how much Spellbreaker does for Vlad.

Taltos
is one of my favourites of the series. I like Loiosh, I like the stuff about Noish-pa, I love the way people in the Paths of the Dead keep being surprised they’re alive and Vlad keeps asking them how they can tell, I like the first meetings, especially with Lady Teldra and with Morrolan. I like the way Vlad doesn’t understand why Verra is so pleased Aliera’s soul has been found. (It must have been an awful shock for Verra when Aliera’s body and the Orb showed up.)

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

79.
Phoenix rise from ashes grey: Steven Brust’s
Phoenix

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like when things are going wrong—your wife is ready to leave you, all your notions about yourself and the world are getting turned around, everything you trusted is becoming questionable—there’s nothing like having someone try to kill you to take your mind off your problems.

Phoenix
(1990) completes the story begun in
Teckla
and starts a whole new phase of Vlad Taltos’s life. It’s the story of how Vlad Taltos the Jhereg assassin is sent on a mission by a god, and everything changes. It’s written in the general form of a “how to assassinate” manual, and yet it’s the furthest from that pattern of story of any of the books so far. I don’t know if it would be a good introduction to the series—I suspect not, I suspect that it works best if you already know the characters. For the first time, we meet Zerika, the Empress. For the first time we get to see somewhere outside the Empire. It’s a different kind of book. Did anyone start here? Did it work? I really can’t tell.

This is the first one I have in a nice edition—the British publishers gave up after
Taltos,
perhaps surprised that nobody bought books with such awful covers.

If you hate
Teckla,
you may hate
Phoenix
too, but I never did. Unlike
Teckla
it has many saving moments—“where I come from, we call this a drum.” There’s trouble between Vlad and Cawti, there’s an Easterners and Teckla uprising, but that isn’t the whole focus, the book doesn’t get sunk into it.

The phoenix is a bird, mythical in our world but presumably real in Dragaera, though we’re never shown one. It “sinks into decay” and “rises from ashes grey.” Vlad seems to believe that nobody is born a Phoenix unless a phoenix is passing overhead when they’re born, but in the Paarfi books we see ordinary members of the House of the Phoenix, they just almost all died in Adron’s Disaster. The Cycle is in the House of the Phoenix and Zerika (the only living member of the House of the Phoenix, a reborn Phoenix rising from the ashes) is Phoenix Empress. It’s hard to say what it’s like to be a Phoenix apart from being Empress, what they’d be like in another House’s reign. If it’s true that as Alexx Kay has calculated the Cycle will turn in 61 years, perhaps Vlad will still be alive to see. In any case, Zerika is the Phoenix that the book mentions, and for Vlad to behave like a Phoenix means putting the good of the Empire above his own concerns. Vlad’s constantly sacrificing himself for something or other in this book, and ends by betraying the Jhereg to the Empire and going into exile.

Brust must already have been gearing up to write
The Phoenix Guards
when he wrote
Phoenix
. There are a number of mentions of how things were before the Interregnum, which has never been mentioned before, and one mention of Paarfi himself, when Cawti is reading one of his romances. My favourite of these is when Vlad and Cawti have a choice of crossing the city by weary walking or nauseating teleporting and they wish that there were another option, like the carriages people used to have before they could casually teleport everywhere. The amulet Noish-pa makes Vlad against the nausea caused by teleporting, or “crossing fairyland” as he puts it, is one of my favourite moments—the nausea has been established and taken for granted and it turns out that there’s been a way to fix it all the time.

I tend to think of these books as having progressing time and gap filling. In progressing time,
Phoenix
is the last of the books in which Vlad Taltos is an assassin based in Adrilankha with an organization and an office with a secretary (genuinely shocking betrayal by Melestav, after so long) and Kragar coming in unnoticed. Vlad’s spent a lot of time away from the office in the books, but that’s always been there behind him. There is a sense of death and rebirth about Phoenix, endings and new beginnings. Whatever Vlad is in the subsequent books, he’s not that.

In chronological order it would be
Jhegaala
next, and I’ve never read them like that. (Next time!) In fact, onward to
The Phoenix Guards,
and thence
Athyra
.