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Critical Review |
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The Book of Jhereg |
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From the Author
“I spent a delightful morning hanging out with Neil Gaiman, and, as usual, we talked about Stuff. If the following makes you go, ‘Splendid! Brilliant! Insightful!’ then Neil gets the credit, because it was his metaphor. On the other hand, if it makes you go, ‘Lame! Stupid! Strained!’ then blame me, because I stretched it to the breaking point. —Steven Brust, Livejournal (http://skzbrust.livejournal.com/)
This is not an altogether uncommon view of literature but we think it’s pretty clever to make it a food metaphor. Works very well, actually. In fact, one of the reasons Inchoatus exists is to help people identify steak and caviar while convincing people that it’s okay to enjoy popcorn as long as you don’t run around announcing it’s the best stuff ever written. We revised our rating system to try and make a similar sort of distinction among different audiences—for as hard as we’re going to be on this book within the genre it’s written in compares very favorably. So here’s Brust announcing pretty much the same thing. We certainly agree about his comments regarding Wolfe. And we’ll go ahead and fill in one of the celery names for you (John Clute’s Appleseed). Wonder where Brust would put his own work? After reading The Book of Jhereg, we’re going to opt for steak-flavored popcorn. This may end up irking the popcorn eaters who don’t really want some complex flavors interrupting their butter and salt while it may also irritate the steak-lovers who find that popcorn lacks the correct offering for their atmosphere of red wine, white tablecloth, and black cocktail dressed companion.
What We Say
Brust’s work wears the patina of lighthearted, comic-book style caper novel. He’s actually pretty good at it. His three tales chronicle episodes in the life of Jhereg boss (that is, the “mafia boss” equivalent in his world) Vladimir “Vlad” Taltos. Don’t attach too much importance to our use of the mafia analogy. Vlad is not an assassin made notorious (and cliché) in endless mob or über-cool action movies but rather an assassin in the vein of James Bond. He is affable, humorous, exceptionally ironic, and holds himself to a kind of contradictory-seeming ethical code. His escapades, despite being illegal, allow the reader along for the ride in these adventures and his ethics and affability provide a kind of permission to cheer for the criminal. Brust, through his character Vlad, is tapping a kind of outlaw hero operating outside of the bureaucratic system and provides a sense of chaotic integrity that is unclear or unknowable in the “civilized” world. Example: who is more popular—Luke Skywalker or Han Solo? Our instinct to cheer fr the outlaw is the freedom of piracy. There is a rather famous comic strip from Overboard where the pirates come to port once a year to “mail” their tax return in to the government. They mail it via a cannonball shot from a few miles out at sea. Who hasn’t wanted to do this? Who hasn’t wanted to just backhand the smarmy clerk or witless maitre d’ over some petty insult where the civilized world would not countenance a physical response… but the pirate! Ah, the pirate or the mob boss: they respond! They teach those people a lesson! Wipe that smirk right off the lout’s face! For all the excesses of our secret vigilante desires… Vlad Taltos and his like provide an outlet or even a hero.
This omnibus edition contains three stories that were originally published in the late 1980s… these sold well and Brust has been widely published since then offering a series of Dragaeren books. To date, there are 10 published stories out of a planned cycle of 19 (of which these were the first three published). Dragaerens are a kind of supernatural humanoid that are taller than humans and enormously long-lived (life spans appear to be in the thousands of years and it is unclear if there is any limit). In other respects, they are human. They appear to have human desires (at least as far as avarice goes) but are highly influence by their own genetic makeup, which they closely monitor. Each of the houses (Yendi, Dzur, Phoenix, etc) are given to specific tendencies and physical genetic markers—even physical overtones which tends to connote a kind of racial profiling. Humans themselves—those short-lived maggots of this world—are known simply as “easterners” and appear to mass in hordes to the East (hence, the name). There are some few easterners living in Dragaeren controlled land and are largely regarded as a kind of peasant class along with the Teckla dragaerens. Vlad Taltos is an easterner but one whose father bought a title in the house of Jhereg—a kind of mercenary / Mafioso house that allows dragaerens and humans entry into their world of organized crime for an initiation fee. Vlad is extremely capable—fueled by a kind of passionate hatred towards dragaerens due to their treatment of easterners (thought most specifically that abuse which he and his father received). The world itself is one fraught with magic—both of a mental sorcery and kind of physical witchraft—as well as some more conventional ideas of reincarnation and “undead”. There is clearly some Dungeons and Dragons™ (gotta put that trademark in or TSR might sue the daylights out of us… wait, we have no assets—never mind!) influence here—particularly with some of the spells—but the influence is neither overt nor problematic. The setting itself is exceptionally local: all the action takes place in or around the city of Adrilankha, which appears to be the largest metropolis in the dragaeren empire.
That’s a lot of explanatory text regarding the set but that’s going to become important in a moment: humans as short-lived maggots and dragaerens as a long-lived master-race.
So what gives? Why no love for this book? More pretension, O Inchoatus overlords? Can’t bring yourselves to love “popcorn?”
Well, as a matter of fact, in a manner of speaking it is pretension and an anti-popcorn stance. We will acknowledge that there is some popcorn like tendencies that recommend this book to popcorn lovers. For example, we insist that people who enjoy these sorts of lightly humorous but well-written reads like them to come fast and self-contained. You can read them out of order, on sporadic weekends, half-asleep and probably even backwards. These books are as versatile as flubber. This is particularly important when you’re going to have nineteen of these novels: pick up any of the nineteen in any order and don’t worry about it.
And Vlad is cool. Books like this absolutely must have a super-cool protagonist yet one that is human enough to identify with. They have to be suave, self-effacing, deadly, and humorous all at the same time. Most important, they have to be someone that the reader thinks they themselves could be in different circumstances, different training, etc. (Be honest, what male hasn’t portrayed himself as James Bond in his own mind…) Vlad is all of these things despite some clichéd settings that lead one into scenes that you swear you’ve seen/read before. Suave? Yeah, he gets the chicks. He gets a deadly wife in the mold of a hybrid Trinity/Xena. Self-effacing? With the best—ready to lay the hammer down he still has a way of wading through the world as if all the fortunes of earth were set against him and he’s just getting by on charm an good looks. “I wondered what was going on behind her mask. I always wonder what’s going on behind people’s masks. I sometimes wonder what’s going on behind my mask,” he says mocking himself at a dinner party where he verbally fences with his prey. Deadly? I’d take him in just about any fight; he casually talks about pinpoint accuracy with throwing weapons, an expert fencer, and the envy of all stalking assassins in literature. Humorous? Some menial dares snap back at Vlad asking his business with a boss and Vlad retorts, “I plan to leave all my worldly wealth to the biggest idiot I can find and I wanted to interview him to see if he was qualified. But now that I’ve met you, I can see there’s no point in looking further.” It’s the kind of stuff we all wish we could think to say at those crucial moments.
Vlad, in short, is way cool. We’d stack him up against just about anyone else we’ve ever read.
Amidst the humor and the cool, however, there are times when great moments seep through the text shock the reader with their poetry. They glisten like jewels among the action, the humor, the slayings, and the avarice. Think that line about masks was a throwaway? Look how Brust follows it up:
The funniest thing about time is when it doesn’t. In those moments when it loses itself, and becomes (as, perhaps, all things must) its opposite, it becomes a thing of even greater power than when it is in its old standard tear-down-the-mountain mood. It even has the power to break down the masks behind which hide Dragon turned Jhereg.
The problem with the books is not the writing… it’s in the mixture. Where each of these three books are self-contained they are very uneven in pace and temper. We move from standard caper, to political intrigue, to a very strange and very sad tale about Vlad and a rising revolution among the easterners. We get the humor and the philosophy mixed nicely but set like oases in long deserts of text: conversations, ruminations, descriptions, long monologues describing points of dragaeren history… it creates a lot of work for the reader to navigate before reaching these oases. Work is fine… but work for steak-flavored popcorn. There are times when there are definite diminished returns. One must prepare oneself for steak or for popcorn—they are different—and it is difficult to mix the two. To continue the analogy, we here have caviar flavored steak seasoning on our popcorn and that makes things difficult on the reader.
There’s also a problem with the setting at large. It’s hard to credit Vlad’s position in the world with the lifespan of the dragaerens in consideration. These creatures are supposed to be thousands of years old—but they have none of what we would regard as the hallmarks of age. Wisdom, perspective, sobriety, gravitas, patience… these things seem to be conspicuously absent. (Yes, they are dragaerens and not human but they’re human enough.) Many harder SF novels are beginning to contemplate extreme longevity and what it means. A confidence, a swagger, a look in the eye… these are things that are missing in dragaerens. Because of the age, it’s hard to credit Vlad’s position of relative power. How could a dragaeren boss whose career will span centuries feel threatened by a rival boss whose career will span decades (at best)? When Vlad at one point takes pains to point out his long-standing friendship with the dragaeren Morollan, he says “We’ve been friends for four years”… as if four years were a long time for these people! Hard to imagine them remembering Vlad’s name in so short a time. Finally, despite the revolutionary speak of the final installment of the omnibus, there is a complete lack of class consciousness. At times in the prose, its almost as if Vlad has to remind us that he hates dragaerens because he seldom behaves that way. That unevenness tends to spoil those otherwise poetic moments that would elevate the novel.
So, after all this criticism, we’re left saying that these books are not going to make the cut for Great Literature. Is there a fan base for this stuff, though? You bet. For a certain audience—and audience that will not feel compelled to linger over the moments of steak and caviar and consume them as readily as the popcorn—these are very decent books that move quickly and are much superior in writing and skill to many, many other offerings.
At the end, you get gems like this: “Everything is normal. It’s just that some normal things are weirder than other normal things.” That’s great popcorn.
Place in the Genre
These books share the most likely heritage with the myth-adventures of Robert Aspirin—which had a delicious blend of caper humor that Brust shares—combined with the Conan adventures of Robert E. Howard: kingdoms rising and falling on the merits of one man’s sword and will. They are serial, endless, and create fan bases. We pejoratively announce that Robert Jordan has become the comic book of the fantasy genre but really that label doesn’t have to be pejorative and Brust has made a kind of fantasy comic book that is really a credit to the name. He’s not afraid to try things and still maintain the genre. That these first books were uneven and wanting in certain regard has not held back his future publications or sales. We think it’s highly likely that these books will be picked up as a mini-series or movie, which should go to lengthen the series’ lifetimes. Still, we adhere to the notion that these sorts of serializations cannot stand a long test of time (though perhaps the cantos of Don Juan belie that statement). At least with these first offerings, we don’t see Taltos becoming a household name. But the name of James Bond wasn’t made in a single book either so we will see what later books hold.
Who Should Read This
Certainly adherents of caper novels will love these books and not give one tinker’s damn about what we have to say about longevity and philosophy. As we mentioned, Robert Aspirin fans, Robert Howard fans, Harry Harrison fans, and Tim Powers fans will all find the welcome mat laid out for them here. Buy these books—in any order—read them, and enjoy them. They’re certainly better written than quite a lot of stuff out there. You just can’t shelve them with the Shakespeare.
Who Should Avoid
Don’t dive into this series expecting a very even and consistent narrative. It jumps in temper, in time frame, and in subject matter. One has to be somewhat of a fan of Mafioso to get into the mood of the work and not be irritated by some of the speech patterns and concerns of the protagonists. Obviously, with a 19 book cycle, you’re not really looking for a concise story but at least they’re not the giant fat novels that are so ubiquitous in the publishing world. Finally, don’t expect gigantic world-building efforts on the order of Tolkien, Martin, Bakker, or Donaldson… there’s a world here replete with some puzzles and subtle story arcs but not the kind of detailed history that fans of that sort of work will desire. |
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Title: The Book of Jhereg, omnibus edition comprising: Jhereg Yendi Teckla Author: Steven Brust Publisher: Ace Books / Berkley Publishing Group Length: 471 pages in trade paperback Cover Art: (Stephen Hickman) this is actually a very striking cover of Loiosh the tiny dragon breaking free of his egg. It does not apologize one bit for being fantastic in theme but maintains a certain sobriety: not campy or cheesy at all. Would that all covers were so well executed.
Rating Buy this book for a great caper novel and some very keen writing sharpened by moments of poetry. Just don’t expect consistency. Mystery/Caper SF: BUY! (5/7) Speculative fiction fans: BUY! (4/7) General Literature: PASS! (2/7)
Other Novels Exploring this Theme The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran Another Fine Myth by Robert Aspirin Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds King Rat by China Miéville Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
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