K J Parker: Devices and Desires

K J Parker (2005) Devices and Desires, Book 1 of the Engineer Trilogy. Orbit pbk, 706pp, £7.99.

A birthday present from tamaranth, who noted that although I wasn't a huge fantasy fan she thought I'd probably like it. She wasn't wrong: I may have received a book, but I ended up losing most of a weekend in return, not that I begrudged that at all. I don't often read books as thick as this inside a weekend - I usually seem to need to come up for air after 300 pages or so - but Devices and Desires gripped me too strongly to leave it for anything else.

Rather that attempt to review this book in full I'll commend the excellent reviews by Tamaranth and SFFWorld; both sum up my views much more eloquently than I could, and the following comments are just my own addenda.

I'm fully sure that K J Parker isn't a pseudonym for Lois McMaster Bujold, but their styles bear a lot of comparison. Both writers excel at well-drawn, complex and above all interesting male characters; I say 'male' because Veatriz has rather a thin presence for much of the book, seen in detail mainly through her letters. (Given the sort of society Parker depicts though, there is little in comparison with the major male characters that she can actually do until things get Very Bad, other than write the letters that end up being an aggravating factor in just how bad things get.) Like Bujold, and perhaps even more so Mary Gentle, Parker also succeeds in depicting a medieval / renaissance society as comprised of people just like ourselves rather than fantasy stereotypes. Some readers may indeed find elements of this anachronistic, although in no small part this happens when Parker is gently, or not-so-gently satirising bureaucracy. The Perpetual Republic of Mezentia is Gormenghast as run by a Sir Humphrey clone with a fetish for weights and measures, or maybe the historical ancestor of the state seen in Terry Gilliam's Brasil. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the Mezentine state is the way that just about all of its functionaries are perfectly nice, very dutiful people who diligently follow its rules so as to plan and execute (to a strictly-planned timetable and budget) appalling atrocities, because it would be unthinkably slack of them to do otherwise. This may sound very grim, but Parker manages a fair degree of Pratchettian humour; I must admit a good chuckle at the following exchange, so horribly reminiscent of some of my own meetings with finance managers in the MOD:

   'I've spent the last eight hours trying to find some money for you to hire your soldiers with.'
   'Ah,' Psellus replied. 'Any luck?'
   Maniacis nodded. 'Pots of money,' he said. 'It's all there, you can go down to the cellars with a lamp and look at it, all heaped up on the floor. The problem's finding it on paper. Backdated appropriations and contingency reserves and five-year retentions and God only knows what. Your best bet, if you really want this war of yours, is to hire a bunch of pirates to break in and steal it. Cut through all the formalities, and we can write it off as hostile action, make our lives a whole lot easier.'

The other passages that had me laughing out loud were the ones where Parker shows her own legal background. Diligent and intelligent, Valens finds that running a statelet features less dragon-slaying than he had imagined when younger, and rather more chopping through decades of Vadani legal precedent.

   The fifth petition made up for the three easy ones; it was something to do with uses on lives in being and the perpetuity rules, which he'd never been able to understand, and there was a barred entail, a claim of adverse possession and the hedge-and-ditch rule thrown in for good measure.

You don't need to make up weird legal traditions and terminology for your fantasy kingdom; just dig into the hardest and most obscure bits of English Land Law and it's all there.

And then there is Ziani Vaatzes. By the end of the book, I was wondering if Ziani has mild Asperger's, is a clinical sociopath, or is just far, far too clever for his own understanding. If you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you; Parker seems to suggest that if you stare too long into the world of components, blueprints and schedules, they too stare back and reconfigure your mind in their image. Ziani plans the way back to what he has lost the only way he knows: construct a machine to do it. That the machine is made of people, countries and souls is beside the point. As an engineer, I find much of his worldview (and that of the Mezentines at large) understandable and indeed seductive, yet so much of the imagination has been bashed out of it that it is at the same time utterly alien. Showing the horror in the fulfilment of what enthrals us is a storytelling gift that Parker is in full possession of.