A Swamp King and a Very Small Admiral, Part II

Last week we pondered why I'd rate a book which took me an entire year to finish over a new awards-darling I finished easily in two weeks. As it turns out, sometimes what makes reading easy is when the content is simply not that deep despite the author's protestations.

Themes as a Tool for Producing Narrative Pay-Off

At the end of A Drop of Corruption (ADoC), Robert Jackson Bennett offers up a lengthy author’s note explaining how the book is about the foolish, dead-end nature of the concept of monarchy. I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything Bennett says in this note.

However, I didn’t get any of this from Bennett’s actual book, and as you know I am not an indolent or analytically unengaged reader. 

Yes: the king character in ADoC and the villain who wants to usurp him are both bad guys. Both are fairly ancillary and insignificant characters, though. Neither are well-drawn or fleshed-out. Their crimes occur mostly offscreen and are described or discussed rather than experienced viscerally. They make little impact compared to other notes of the narrative which have little obvious connection to Bennett’s stated theme.

Without the world context which would ground me, I also don’t particularly believe the people ruled by this bad king would be better off under The Empire. It’s not clear to me how The Emperor is distinct from a king. I’m not sure how Bennett expected me to ingest his anti-monarch message as delivered by people who pay homage to an immortal god-emperor. There’s cognitive dissonance everywhere but I can’t tell if it’s intentional, if our heroes will ever recognize it for themselves.

While I’m always slightly wishing that Miles Vorkosigan and Emperor Gregor would decide to overthrow their own government and enfranchise all the serfs, they are strong enough characters that I understand why they won’t. They are not mere vehicles for my self-projection, but well-drawn enough to have actual themes hang upon them. The long sequences of Miles lamenting his firing or Simon Ilyan struggling to understand himself as a new person after the loss of his cognitive faculties pay off when we discover that Memory’s villain committed his crimes because he believed he could be a better servant of Barryar and Emperor Gregor than Miles or Simon. His egotism serves as a foil to Miles’ own arrogance, and so spurs growth on Miles’ part, actual self-reflection about how he wants to serve Barryar.

Disability as an Actual Thing

Last year I particularly enjoyed The Tainted Cup’s subplot about Din’s dyslexia. It was a small but engaging note in the story, as he struggled to accomplish his goals while working around his print disability. Trusting Ana with his secret and her recognition of his value became an important character beat. Like most Holmes-derived characters, Ana herself expresses various autism-adjacent characteristics, and The Tainted Cup allowed her sensory sensitivities and lack of social graces to add some light comedy without becoming wholly mocking.

In ADoC Din’s dyslexia receives a few off-hand mentions and Ana reveals she is a sort of autism…werewolf? The Empire’s Area 51 black site proves to be stocked with magic analysts empowered by a drug which gives users super-autism. The villain is of course one of these, defeated in the end by the manipulation of his own sensory sensitivities.

I found the sequence where Din encounters the magical analysts fairly off-putting. The imagery likens them to possessed people, highlighting their weirdness and incomprehensibility, and hints that they are too freaky to ever be understood by Din and other normal people.

I didn’t care for this. It felt like a bit of a rug pull. The Tainted Cup set up interesting disabled characters and explored how their disabilities affected their work and daily lives. ADoC reveals those roles as extremely marginalizing for those who can’t mitigate or make useful their disabilities as well as Ana and Din. It’s not fair to project or demand a specific attitude from an author, but I do wish we could find some sense of solidarity or sympathy among these disabled characters, if Ana or Din could recognize themselves in the imprisoned, maltreated analysts. But they seemed to see only means to the end of solving the mystery. I wish I had faith in Robert Jackson Bennett to make Book 3 the shocking twist wherein Ana and Din realize they are the disposable servants of an unjust regime, but I can’t find the evidence in the text.

Miles sometimes realizes he’s a disposable servant, but he fits this actively into his worldview and so makes himself more coherent and compelling. The Vorkosigan Saga as a whole never loses sight of disability as a critical theme. Miles regularly acknowledges how much of his identity has been shaped by his disability. Some of the most poignant moments of Memory involve him recognizing his beloved mentor entering painfully into his own era of disability.

Miles is never only disabled, though. He is never unaware, at least after a critical moment in his early career, how privileged he is by his class position and his other advantages. He experiences and expresses his intersectional subject position, which drives him to grow and change in various ways.

I struggle to locate Ana and Din at any intersections other than that of “individual book plot” and “multi-book myth arc”.

Again: Plot Development Is Not Character Development

Looking back, I realize I read ADoC despite my misgivings about The Tainted Cup because I hoped we would begin questioning The Empire. I’m still wish-casting this for the third installment, but I’m losing hope.

I see now that the plot of each book in this series is more important than any character development, any growth outside the Holmes/Watson dynamic of Ana and Din. They serve at the pleasure of King Book Plot, and above him Emperor Myth Arc.

I want to log here my prediction for the series myth arc. This won’t make sense to you if you haven’t read the book; I just need it down on paper in case I’m right. Eventually our heroes will learn the Leviathans are the long-lost Khanum, The Emperor’s fellow-folk, now mutated horrendously and harvested for their unstable and useful bodily fluids. If everyone knew The Empire depended on butchering the glorious superrace of the past, The Empire would fall to chaos and everything would end. When Ana and Din discover this, they’ll have to decide whether to reveal the secret or suppress it to ensure stability and continuity. My heart hopes this will be the final straw for them, but I’m afraid they’ll keep quiet for the good of The Empire. They’re just cops, after all. They don’t seem eager to be more.

Meanwhile, in every book of the Vorkosigan Saga I’ve read, Miles or one of his close friends changes. Whatever the plot, whatever the level of risk to the galaxy, developments happen inside and out.

Bennett’s books are much more #aesthetic than the dated and sometimes corny ambience of the Vorkosigan Saga. Bennett explicitly claims to be mounting a political project I agree with in ADoC. But, man, he’s only got the surfaces down, not the substance.

And we didn’t even have time to get into Bennett’s continued uses and abuses of orientalism! Maybe I’ll have to read Book 3 after all…