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Published: 2020 Acquired: August 2020 Read: September 2020 |
If The Traitor Baru Cormorant was a razor blade-- sharp and focused and incisive-- then the middle duology of this trilogy, The Monster Baru Cormorant and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, is a Swiss army knife-- still sharp but full of bits that I don't understand why they're there. I reserved judgment on Monster until I finished Tyrant, but now that I've read both, I have to admit... I don't get it.
Let's start with the end. So, um, some spoilers, though I'll try to keep them light. The book ends with Baru-- an agent of the Imperial Throne, but secretly dedicated to overthrowing it-- establishing a trading concern. The ostensible purpose of the trading concern is to enable the Masquerade's exploitation of a new country; the real purpose is for Baru to ultimately destabilize and overthrow the Masquerade, replacing it with something better. The climax of the book is Baru's machinations pulling this off. But the climax sits awkwardly on the rest of the book, because the trading concern is largely a background element, and it comes together mostly offscreen. The actual plot of the book is Baru first trying to escape from the Cancrioth (a weird group of people who pass memories over generations via tumors) and then trying to contain their threat. We spend the first two hundred pages just with Baru trying to get off a boat! The climax feels like it comes from a totally different novel. You can write a book about someone trying to fight an enemy, but then the climax needs to be about that! Or you can write a book that climaxes with an economic coup de grâce, but then the book really needed to be about economics (as the first Baru Cormorant book was) throughout. It feels like Dickinson had an ending in mind, but didn't know how to get there, or like he had a plot in mind, but his editor told him he couldn't write an 1,100-page story about economics. I don't know that either of these is true, but that's what it feels like, and the result is an unearned ending.
The result is also an uninteresting book. The beginning especially piles complication upon complication, but if Dickinson was going for one of those situations where things keep escalating, it instead just feels messy. Person after person after person shows up, and Baru keeps getting jerked around, but it goes on so long, it loses all sense of urgency. Even once Baru gets off the boat, the book still kind of limps along. Supposedly a deadly plague ship is coming... but Baru has the time to attend a fancy masked ball and flirt, which really drains the book of the feeling that there's any kind of imminent danger. The periodic insertions of flashback chapters does so too; yes they kind of end up plot relevant, but there are too many of them, and they go on too much, and tell us too little of interest. Ultimately, I'm not really sure why the cancer people are even in the book. They feel like a neat idea that belongs in a different story that is actually about them; there is an attempt to analogize them to imperialism, but I didn't think the analogy really took off or did anything interesting. I came here for a book about Baru taking down an evil empire from within and getting corrupted in the process... instead I got a book about her trying to get off a boat and stop a plague ship. Obviously authors shouldn't do exactly what you expect of them, but I feel like the end of Traitor made a promise that Monster and Tyrant failed to keep.
Aside from the plot, a big point of contention for me is Baru herself. Supposedly Baru is a super-competent agent-- but this is undermined by two things. One is that she far too often blurts out naïve or revealing questions or statements. The other is that so many people turn up who can tell what she really thinks... far more than ones who seem to be fooled by her! When one character states that surely Baru must have yet another selfish, out-for-herself plan, I was like... what? why? Almost nothing Baru does in this book or the previous one would lead me to believe she's fooling anyone; everyone seems to know she's really out to destroy the Masquerade on behalf of her dead lover.
But like I said, the book is sharp at times. The bit where Baru goes home is good; I liked Baru's relationship with the Clarified woman; the ideas are often interesting; the worldbuilding is strong; the book raises (though sometimes too obviously) questions about complicity and resistance with authoritarian regimes. And the series still has a lot of goodwill from me on the basis of Traitor. I think I will still be there for a fourth book, so I can see it through to the end, though the author's afterword makes it seem as though he might not be there for it! It looks like it will be a long time before book 4, if ever.
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