Jhegaala, by Steven Brust
May. 13th, 2010 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaJhegaala, by Steven Brust
While escaping from his enemies, Vlad Taltos travels to the East, the country of his own people. Though his first priority is avoiding being found by those pursuing him, he also wants to learn more about his mother's family. But his arrival in the town of Burz destabilizes a delicate balance, and leads to a gruesome murder—and solving that murder and getting vengeance soon prove more important to Vlad than staying one step ahead of trouble.
(It's getting to be incredibly hard to summarize these books without being spoileriffic for earlier volumes!)
If you aren't familiar with the Vlad Taltos books, they're essentially... how shall I put this. They're snarky first-person narratives about an assassin in what is, from the outside, an epic fantasy setting. Or to put it another way: they're high fantasy done as noir. I enjoy them tremendously, mostly for the main character, Vlad, the aforesaid snarky assassin, and for his familiar, the equally sarcastic scavenger-lizard Loiosh. They should be read from the beginning (that is, starting with Jhereg) and in publication order rather than internal-chronological order. In fact, given that Brust likes to play games with the narrative, reading them in internal-chronological order is very difficult.
Anyway, Jhegaala. As many others have noted, Jhegaala is interestingly placed: after Issola and Dzur, with questions of what happened to Lady Teldra and what will happen to Vlad fresh in our minds, Brust skips backwards several years, to the time period right after Phoenix, when Vlad first got in serious trouble. (Well, more serious trouble than usual.) At first, I was teeth-gnashingly frustrated by that, but after a couple of chapters I was sufficiently interested in the mystery of the city of Burz to not be too bothered.
And the book is a mystery story, as are many of the Vlad Taltos books. There's the mystery of why Burz is such a peculiar town, the mystery of the brutal murders, the mystery of who has it in for Vlad and why (besides the obvious). But it's also a story of transformation. One thing about the Vlad Taltos books that I hadn't recognized until it was pointed out by Jo Walton at tor.com is that, in each book, Vlad takes on the characteristics of the house the book is named for. (Each of the seventeen Dragaeran houses have certain psychological and social traits which determine both their individual personalities and their political efficacy.) In Yendi, Vlad had to be sneaky; in Dragon, Vlad was a soldier; in Issola, he negotiated. In Taltos, he was an Easterner, in name, in nature, and in behavior. And in Jhegaala, he transforms: now he is a witch, now he is a representative of the Empire, now he is an assassin, now he is a sleuth. As such, this is a book in which we get to see a lot of faces of Vlad.
It's also a book in which we get to see Vlad among his own kind, in contrast to... well, pretty much all the other books, in which he interacts mostly with Dragaerans. But more about that below the cut.
One of the interesting things about Vlad, in the early books, is the way he justifies (to himself and others) the fact that he's an assassin: that he kills people for a living. The justification is that he kills Dragaerans because he hates them (with a few exceptions), and refuses to kill Easterners because they're his own kind. Even though many of his closest friends (Morrolan, Kiera, Aliera, even Sethra) are Dragaeran, and even though he disdains many of Cawti's Easterner revolutionaries, he clings to that distinction: he kills Dragaerans because they are oppressors and bad people, and he doesn't kill Easterners because they're better, or at least his.
In Jhegaala, he has to reconsider that division.
In Jhegaala, Vlad is surrounded by Easterners, most of whom want bad things to happen to him. Some of them kill his distant family members simply because he asked after him. Some of them seek to sell him out to the Jhereg, who want him dead. Some of them want to manipulate and use him to their own purposes.
And, yes, some of them aid him, some of them are kind to him, some of them are good-hearted and generous. But not all. And this is the book where Vlad has to come to terms with the fact that Easterners are, well, are people: not his idealized vision of Better Than Dragaerans, but people.
And it really makes his relationship with Lady Teldra, in Issola, make a lot more sense. By then, Vlad has learned to take Easterners on an individual basis... and perhaps he's learned that for Dragaerans as well.
While escaping from his enemies, Vlad Taltos travels to the East, the country of his own people. Though his first priority is avoiding being found by those pursuing him, he also wants to learn more about his mother's family. But his arrival in the town of Burz destabilizes a delicate balance, and leads to a gruesome murder—and solving that murder and getting vengeance soon prove more important to Vlad than staying one step ahead of trouble.
(It's getting to be incredibly hard to summarize these books without being spoileriffic for earlier volumes!)
If you aren't familiar with the Vlad Taltos books, they're essentially... how shall I put this. They're snarky first-person narratives about an assassin in what is, from the outside, an epic fantasy setting. Or to put it another way: they're high fantasy done as noir. I enjoy them tremendously, mostly for the main character, Vlad, the aforesaid snarky assassin, and for his familiar, the equally sarcastic scavenger-lizard Loiosh. They should be read from the beginning (that is, starting with Jhereg) and in publication order rather than internal-chronological order. In fact, given that Brust likes to play games with the narrative, reading them in internal-chronological order is very difficult.
Anyway, Jhegaala. As many others have noted, Jhegaala is interestingly placed: after Issola and Dzur, with questions of what happened to Lady Teldra and what will happen to Vlad fresh in our minds, Brust skips backwards several years, to the time period right after Phoenix, when Vlad first got in serious trouble. (Well, more serious trouble than usual.) At first, I was teeth-gnashingly frustrated by that, but after a couple of chapters I was sufficiently interested in the mystery of the city of Burz to not be too bothered.
And the book is a mystery story, as are many of the Vlad Taltos books. There's the mystery of why Burz is such a peculiar town, the mystery of the brutal murders, the mystery of who has it in for Vlad and why (besides the obvious). But it's also a story of transformation. One thing about the Vlad Taltos books that I hadn't recognized until it was pointed out by Jo Walton at tor.com is that, in each book, Vlad takes on the characteristics of the house the book is named for. (Each of the seventeen Dragaeran houses have certain psychological and social traits which determine both their individual personalities and their political efficacy.) In Yendi, Vlad had to be sneaky; in Dragon, Vlad was a soldier; in Issola, he negotiated. In Taltos, he was an Easterner, in name, in nature, and in behavior. And in Jhegaala, he transforms: now he is a witch, now he is a representative of the Empire, now he is an assassin, now he is a sleuth. As such, this is a book in which we get to see a lot of faces of Vlad.
It's also a book in which we get to see Vlad among his own kind, in contrast to... well, pretty much all the other books, in which he interacts mostly with Dragaerans. But more about that below the cut.
One of the interesting things about Vlad, in the early books, is the way he justifies (to himself and others) the fact that he's an assassin: that he kills people for a living. The justification is that he kills Dragaerans because he hates them (with a few exceptions), and refuses to kill Easterners because they're his own kind. Even though many of his closest friends (Morrolan, Kiera, Aliera, even Sethra) are Dragaeran, and even though he disdains many of Cawti's Easterner revolutionaries, he clings to that distinction: he kills Dragaerans because they are oppressors and bad people, and he doesn't kill Easterners because they're better, or at least his.
In Jhegaala, he has to reconsider that division.
In Jhegaala, Vlad is surrounded by Easterners, most of whom want bad things to happen to him. Some of them kill his distant family members simply because he asked after him. Some of them seek to sell him out to the Jhereg, who want him dead. Some of them want to manipulate and use him to their own purposes.
And, yes, some of them aid him, some of them are kind to him, some of them are good-hearted and generous. But not all. And this is the book where Vlad has to come to terms with the fact that Easterners are, well, are people: not his idealized vision of Better Than Dragaerans, but people.
And it really makes his relationship with Lady Teldra, in Issola, make a lot more sense. By then, Vlad has learned to take Easterners on an individual basis... and perhaps he's learned that for Dragaerans as well.
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spoilers for Jhegaala but not I think any of the others
Date: 2010-05-14 07:54 am (UTC)The first time I read Jhegaala I didn't like it at all. I liked it much, much better on second reading-- the first time through it was too long since I'd read Phoenix, and also it really is very depressing.
But I think it's one of the best of them, actually, on a technical level, if not the best, and here's why: the first time through, I was really disappointed that the book didn't have a person of the title House the way they usually do, and then the second time I realized that it does. Because except for the brief and offstage Jhereg assassin, there's only one Dragaeran in the book, and that's Vlad, and he's not a Jhereg anymore, but he is a Dragaeran, different species or no (after all part of the book is him finding that out, that in some ways culture trumps nature). So for the course of this book, and for some while afterward maybe, I think we can take Jhegaala to be Vlad's House (metaphysically), which he passes through, appropriately, on his way to being something else. In other words I mean I think the metaphor from the science book bits should be extended even more than obvious, to the point where it really isn't a metaphor.
(I'd love to know what House he is eventually, but ever since leaving the Jhereg he's been taking on the characteristics of the Houses of the book names very much more than he did while he was a Jhereg, I think.)
And that's what explained the detective play to me (because otherwise it's pretty random): the murderer the two detectives are trying to catch is a Jhegaala, and if you see Vlad as the Jhegaala in question, the detectives' fumblings and accidental success line up very well in a black-comedic way with the way all the different Eastern factions are stumbling around Vlad trying to catch him out at something. (Which leads me to think that the detectives probably have as little idea of what really happened in their case as most of the Fenarians do about Vlad, as would be suitable in a play written in a witty, ironic, elegant mode about people who while funny to read about and very polite are also fairly drunk and incompetent.)
I really admire that. I also like Vlad's emotional growth here, though I agree with people who say there must be more after this one than 'and then I spent a year in the capitol recovering and then I went back to the Empire the end'.
So yeah, this is the one I go incoherently admiring about, even though it's also the one I enjoy least and reread least frequently because, seriously, really depressing.
Re: spoilers for Jhegaala but not I think any of the others
Date: 2010-05-14 06:52 pm (UTC)That's a really astute observation. I was struck, reading it, how much Vlad is culturally Dragaeran, and in many ways thinks like a Dragaeran. In earlier books he convinces himself that he doesn't think like a Dragaeran because many of his closest Dragaeran friends are of House Dragon, and he definitely doesn't think like a Dragon. So he, and I-as-the-reader, accepted that the difference was that he was Easterner and they were Dragaerans.
But when he travels East, he's the alien; he definitely has more in common with the Empire he left behind than with the people who are genetically his own people. It's not just the environment he's used to (his puzzlement at the width of the roads and the fact that women don't drink in bars), it's much deeper than that. I was particularly intrigued by the scene where one of the townspeople spoke proudly of their land being two thousand years old, and Vlad thought, rather disparagingly, that that was just one lifetime to a Dragaeran. Which is fascinating because, from his own point of view, two thousand years ought to still be a long time: he isn't a Dragaeran and will be dead many times over in two thousand years, even if, like Zerika's lover, he lives longer than a normal Easterner. But he thinks like a Dragaeran, and that's something that means that he's not really an Easterner anymore except physically. Which is both why the Burz townsmen can't figure him out and why he can't figure them out: even though it's where his ancestors come from, he isn't like them, or at least isn't anymore.
And I agree that in this book he's in a state of profound transition, which means that he is very Jhegaala. He cannot be Jhereg anymore; he is learning that he isn't really Easterner anymore, or at least not in the ways that count; he can't use either sorcery or witchcraft properly anymore; he isn't an assassin anymore (though his actions lead to people being killed, on purpose, he doesn't kill anyone himself even once); he isn't a husband anymore; he isn't a player in the upper echelons of Dragaeran power anymore. What is he?
I am curious, in the post-Issola books, how much Lady Teldra will influence what he becomes.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-14 04:24 pm (UTC)(I suppose it _is_ easier for people who can remember names worth a damn though.)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-14 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-22 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 07:37 pm (UTC)In Athyra he threw witchy mind control around like air -- which given that it was the one 3rd person book, makes me wonder what he's been leaving out of his own narratives, in which witchcraft is used rarely and completely ethically.
In Phoenix he got 'reborn', I guess, from Jhereg corruption. Teckla... was he cowardly? Orca had him looking at finance a lot, or maybe making deals.
Didn't notice he didn't kill anyone. Does that make this book unique? Not sure...
I wonder how long Vlad could live. Laszlo's centuries old now, Sethra's lived 100x longer than Dragaerans normally do (and I get the idea she turned undead fairly recently by her standards), the Sorceress in Green may be 10x older than usual.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 07:53 pm (UTC)In Phoenix, he got reborn, and he also acted in a way that was specifically to the benefit of Empire (fitting as regards the 'most noble' of houses). I haven't reread Teckla recently, but as I recall he was very much in favor of Cawti keeping her head down and not pissing off the Powers that Be, which isn't quite cowardice but it's definitely in keeping with (the majority of) Teckla.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 07:56 pm (UTC)Huh, I haven't noticed his Morganti attitude changing, thought it was always "Brrr" -- wotcha got?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 07:59 pm (UTC)Of course, now that post-Issola he's technically carrying a Morganti blade that he cares for very much, so I will be interested to see how that changes things. (Although as I recall, Great Weapons can choose whether to eat souls or not, which complicates things.)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 08:11 pm (UTC)And yeah, GWs can avoid chomping, though this probably requires more control or communication than Vlad's established. Instead, Lady Teldra made a *ranged* Morganti attack on that Left Hand sorceress.