Sirens Conference discussion

Welcome – and welcome back – to the Sirens Book Club! I hate to tell all you northerners this, but I spent a couple days last week sitting on my deck, in Denver, in January, reading The Goblin Emperor in the sunshine. Nice work if you can get it.

I confess: The Goblin Emperor and I had a bit of a rough go of it. In many ways, it’s brilliant – but in many ways, I find its brilliance cerebral, rather than compelling. I’m almost always a plot-and-characters girl, rather than a language girl, and The Goblin Emperor is a (mostly) single-character, very-little-plot sort of book. Let’s chat.

The Goblin Emperor is about, as you might imagine, a goblin emperor. What the flap copy tells you is that Maia, last and least favored son of the Emperor of the Elflands, is suddenly thrust onto the throne when his father and his older brothers die unexpectedly. Maia is half-elf, half-goblin, born of the emperor and his fourth (I think?) wife, a goblin, whom he married in a political alliance, had sex with a single time, and then cast off. She died when Maia was eight, and Maia was then sent to live with an abusive cousin in the hinterlands, until the day that a courier arrives to tell him that he’s emperor.

What follows is a book that is several things at once. First, a story of an 18-year-old emperor with no political savvy, no experience with intrigue, no useful knowledge or skills, and no friends. We’re supposed to be sympathetic to Maia, and in many ways he is sympathetic: He wants to do better than his often-cruel father, and he has far more egalitarian principles, through sheer instinct, than the Elflands have seen in a very long time. His government is a bureaucracy, his courtiers are idiots and connivers, and when he tries to make friends with those closest to him, he is rebuffed by the fact that they, like everyone else, are wary of the power imbalance that one necessarily experiences with an emperor.

The Goblin Emperor is, despite being facially about Maia, truly about power. Who has it, and who doesn’t. How it shifts in conversation. How it is exercised. How sometimes, even emperors don’t have it – or won’t wield it. It’s about subtleties and unseen alliances. It’s about perceptions and appearances and misdirection. It’s about things said and, more importantly, things unsaid. It’s a phenomenal examination of the game of life, played on a chessboard of intrigue and malice. As a negotiator by trade, you couldn’t find a topic more dear to my heart, and Katherine Addison knows the game well. I loved that this book turns on a word here and a subtle glance there. If only I could find believable that an 18-year-old ignorant emperor, unskilled at court or intrigue, who has known few people in his life, nearly none of them well, were as skilled a player as Maia is. Because while Maia knows nothing about pretty much anything, he’s preternaturally amazing at reading people and discerning their intentions and fears.

If you are a lover of language, you must pick up The Goblin Emperor at once. Words are important to Addison, and she wields them cleverly, sophisticatedly, as weapons. She demands much of her readers: the names are all unfamiliar, not only people, but places and forms of address. Everyone has a couple names, at least, and there are hundreds of characters. While written in English, The Goblin Emperor feels a bit like reading a foreign language that perhaps you know, but don’t know well. (The good news is that the book has both guidance to forms of address and a glossary; the bad news is that you need both, even – perhaps especially – well into the book. When a book is about intrigue, characters are important, and if you, the reader, keep confusing the second bodyguard with the chancellor’s son with the emperor’s half-sister, it makes a bit of a mess.) And even if you don’t thrive on the idea of detangling hundreds of unfamiliarly named characters, there is much to appreciate about the details that Addison applies to language: in one scene, a character notes that the goblin culture has a word for deciding while deliberately not deciding (that is, staking a prisoner below the tide line while you continue to argue) – and notes that the Elflands need no such word because that isn’t a common occurrence in elvish culture.

The Goblin Emperor, likely because I loved the intrigue while struggling mightily with the intricacies of its language and the predominance of unfamiliar names, caused me to think about books that I love. Everyone loves the full package, whatever that might be for you, but I have also loved, truly loved, books that were rather single note: the main character, or perhaps a secondary character, the setting, the language, the plot. (I once cheerfully told a friend that I was on page 300 of Bleeding Violet and nothing had yet happened in the least, and I did not give a damn because I was loving Hanna and Portero so freaking much.) But what I did realize reading The Goblin Emperor is that I’m far more able – or perhaps willing – to love a YA book despite writing style that doesn’t click with me (or frankly, is unremarkable or bland) than an adult book. I suspect because YA books are so much shorter; adult books get so many more words, for use on so many things other than plot, that when the writing style and I don’t click, it feels a bit like a slog – and I have a very hard time loving the book despite the writing, even when there is much to love.

Which is, perhaps, the very long way of saying that The Goblin Emperor is brilliant, but it wasn’t my kind of brilliant.

Amy

Hi:
I just finished losing sleep to finish this book. I have to admit it IS my kind of brilliant, and I'm rather sad that the author has stated it's a stand alone. Mostly, I loved Maia! He was a character I understood down to the very ground ... bullied but unbowed, and terribly afraid of mucking it all up.

Did you know Addison is Sarah Monette's new pen name?

Kristen

Hi! And since we haven't talked in FOREVER, how are you?

It's always so awesome to talk to people when they've found one of their books: you know, one of those books that has claimed them, and that they claim in return. :) And I'm so glad that this is one of yours! There's lots to love -- and there's lots about Maia to love.

I did. I saw something about how it was a weird thing because it had a different publisher? Or because this is adult rather than YA? I forget, but if I'm remembering correctly, it was born of one of the weirder pieces of the publishing industry.

What else have you read and loved lately?

Amy

Hi, Amy:

I am mostly just the same. I have a partially empty nest, with both kids in college. So, I'm learning how to reclaim my time as my own. Mostly, I workout a lot. How are you doing? Please say HI! to Hallie for me.

The two Ancillary books by Ann Leckie are the ones I feel like I've raved about to everyone. So thoughtful and thought-provoking. I learned how to not see gender, and it was amazing. Otherwise, I'm stalking Helen Lowe's web site to find out when Daughter of Blood is being published. You probably read my review of Heir of Night a couple of months ago. These have become comfort reads.

What's next on your TBR pile?

KB

Changed jobs, bought a house, travel all the time, and dream of working out. And that, believe it or not, is a LOT more balance than I used to have. :)

I read Ancillary Justice last fall, and it was a fascinating read. I loved that Leckie turned her world of pronouns upside down; I wish she'd also created a gender continuum, rather than a binary. I also read The Mirror Empire last fall, which does some interesting things with gender as well (including non-binary gender), some good, some bad. I'm kind of poking around at a gender presentation for Sirens.

Well, obviously, I must read Helen Lowe. :) I just finished Intisar Khanani's Sunbolt, which is next month's book club book. I'm in the middle of Amy Bloom's Lucky Us, which isn't fantasy, but is quite well done. And then, I think, The Paper Magician.

Amy