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.