a desolation called peace
Dec. 6th, 2020 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaI was given an ARC of A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to Arkady Martine's debut novel A Memory Called Empire, and read it as quickly as I could, around the obligations of adulthood. This culminated in a Saturday where I did research all morning, gave a math talk in a virtual room in Ottawa, made dinner out of cauliflower and black cumin seeds, and then curled up under an electric blanket with a whiskey sour and two cats and kept reading till one in the morning, a set of life choices that seemed thematically appropriate.
A Desolation Called Peace opens like a war book, with a talented general facing an alien enemy whose ships appear from nowhere. In structure, though, it's a political book--a personal one, with prediction balanced against prediction, desire against desire.
Desolation's balances are arrayed in twos and threes and sixes. The threes make a fair summary. There are three civilizations, the lonely station Lsel, the empire Teixcalaan, and the encroaching aliens, and three central viewpoint characters: the Stationer ambassador Mahit, the Information Ministry emissary Three Seagrass, and the eleven-year-old imperial heir Eight Antidote, who is a delight. There are also three technologies for linking minds to minds, though Mahit only knows of one, the imago memory implant that connects her to young and old versions of the murdered ambassador Yskandr. Sixes are for large-scale politics: six Councilors jointly rule Lsel, and together the branches called Six Palms create the Teixcalaanli Ministry of War.
I trust these counts have meaning because A Desolation Called Peace is consciously and gleefully crafted. It's not a book that hides its artifice. It wants you to glory in the layers. There's a joy in watching the conveyances of plot draw Mahit and Three Seagrass onto the same ship. The mirroring between Mahit and Yskandr is more complete than it was in A Memory Called Empire, and there's a pleasure in the skill they learn to share. The center of the book is a scene where their memories match perfectly, hand over hand.
There's one place where the layers may seem thin, and that's the ways in which Teixcalaanli is and is not Nahuatl. The references to the Aztec empire are there; but Nahuatl is a living language. I'm not the right person to make a full accounting, but as the child of a gardener, I wondered about the flowers. Teixcalaanli culture is full of symbolic chrysanthemums and lotuses, Old World flowers. I only caught one nasturtium from the Americas. A twenty-first-century US perspective on internationalism weaves in and around Desolation's old images of sun and sacrifice. It might be safest to think of its City as another triple: Tenochtitlan, maybe, but at least as much Byzantium and New York.
Mahit first earned Yskandr's memories through the aptitudes, tests that measure both realized and potential skill and psychological compatibility. I have the impression that as writers, Arkady Martine and I share a particular aptitude, an aesthetic preoccupation with pattern, color, and the way light falls, and an impulse to make that kind of beauty carry story with it. There's a particular trick of foreshadowing in the shape of a tattoo, for instance, that struck me with the force of resonating intuition. We don't approach people the same way, though--that's clear to me even when I make allowances for a story turning on everyone's potential to seem alien. I'm glad of the surprises, and for a dynamic balance that doesn't end in desolation at all, but in hope.
A Desolation Called Peace opens like a war book, with a talented general facing an alien enemy whose ships appear from nowhere. In structure, though, it's a political book--a personal one, with prediction balanced against prediction, desire against desire.
Desolation's balances are arrayed in twos and threes and sixes. The threes make a fair summary. There are three civilizations, the lonely station Lsel, the empire Teixcalaan, and the encroaching aliens, and three central viewpoint characters: the Stationer ambassador Mahit, the Information Ministry emissary Three Seagrass, and the eleven-year-old imperial heir Eight Antidote, who is a delight. There are also three technologies for linking minds to minds, though Mahit only knows of one, the imago memory implant that connects her to young and old versions of the murdered ambassador Yskandr. Sixes are for large-scale politics: six Councilors jointly rule Lsel, and together the branches called Six Palms create the Teixcalaanli Ministry of War.
I trust these counts have meaning because A Desolation Called Peace is consciously and gleefully crafted. It's not a book that hides its artifice. It wants you to glory in the layers. There's a joy in watching the conveyances of plot draw Mahit and Three Seagrass onto the same ship. The mirroring between Mahit and Yskandr is more complete than it was in A Memory Called Empire, and there's a pleasure in the skill they learn to share. The center of the book is a scene where their memories match perfectly, hand over hand.
There's one place where the layers may seem thin, and that's the ways in which Teixcalaanli is and is not Nahuatl. The references to the Aztec empire are there; but Nahuatl is a living language. I'm not the right person to make a full accounting, but as the child of a gardener, I wondered about the flowers. Teixcalaanli culture is full of symbolic chrysanthemums and lotuses, Old World flowers. I only caught one nasturtium from the Americas. A twenty-first-century US perspective on internationalism weaves in and around Desolation's old images of sun and sacrifice. It might be safest to think of its City as another triple: Tenochtitlan, maybe, but at least as much Byzantium and New York.
Mahit first earned Yskandr's memories through the aptitudes, tests that measure both realized and potential skill and psychological compatibility. I have the impression that as writers, Arkady Martine and I share a particular aptitude, an aesthetic preoccupation with pattern, color, and the way light falls, and an impulse to make that kind of beauty carry story with it. There's a particular trick of foreshadowing in the shape of a tattoo, for instance, that struck me with the force of resonating intuition. We don't approach people the same way, though--that's clear to me even when I make allowances for a story turning on everyone's potential to seem alien. I'm glad of the surprises, and for a dynamic balance that doesn't end in desolation at all, but in hope.