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J’s Take on Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife #3: Passage

Passage wasn’t quite what I was expecting.. not that I was expecting anything too specific.
This is book three, so you definitely have to have read the first two. Dag and Fawn have left the Lakewalkers and gone off on their own, with a vague plan to bridge the gap between farmers and Lakewalkers and make […]

Passage wasn’t quite what I was expecting.. not that I was expecting anything too specific.

This is book three, so you definitely have to have read the first two. Dag and Fawn have left the Lakewalkers and gone off on their own, with a vague plan to bridge the gap between farmers and Lakewalkers and make the world a better, safer place.

I wasn’t quite sure where Bujold would go with their story, and it’s quite open-ended at the end of the last book. But I did think one possibility was to have them wander around the world, gathering up followers. And they do do that, though not quite in the way I imagined.

What was surprising to me was that this is a river journey story. There’s no clear hint of that from the picture on the cover. You have to look closely to see the river behind them. And I don’t normally look at covers too closely before I read.

The first surprising thing they do is go back to Fawn’s family. It almost feels like the story is backtracking when they do that. But they don’t stay there long. They’re just there long enough to pick up Fawn’s brother, Whit. He’s the first person they acquire. Then they go on to the river and hire a boat. The next surprising turn is that they sit on this boat without going anywhere for a few chapters. Normally you’d think if this is a quest story or a journey story or even any other sort of story, there’d be forward movement in the form of the boat actually going somewhere.

Of course they pick up other people along the way.. most before they even really get started moving the boat. Now, naturally their little band can’t be completely made up of farmers, so Dag manages to acquire some Lakewalkers too. Now, yes, this is entirely without them doing anything consciously to get a gaggle of followers. That’s the best sort of leader, right? Well.. I don’t know about that, but it’s a common idea in some books.

This book reminded me most of Mississippi Jack which is also a river story. Some of the minor plots are even similar. And I do like Mississippi Jack, as I like all of the Jacky Faber stories, so it makes me think favorably of this book as well. Which makes it my favorite of the series thus far.

Dag learns more ‘magic’ and plays around with it and stuff, which is interesting. We have another battle, which is less interesting. All in all, it’s not bad.

Where’s the story going in the next book? Well, I picture their band growing a little bigger, and then they’ll set about changing the world and saving it from the evil malices. Using Dag’s new, special groundsensing skills, and probably beating him up quite a lot in the process. And Fawn will of course be instrumental in it. And some people will die, other than redshirts. And then they’ll live happily ever after.

It’s a shame the last book is hardcover. I tend to have a different reading experience with books if they’re paperback versus hardcover. And hardcover doesn’t usually fare as well.

But, at least, only one more book to go!

The Sharing Knife: Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Having given up their attempt at living among the Lakewalkers, Dag and Fawn are at loose ends. Dag decides to fulfill an earlier promise he made to Fawn and show her the ocean. Accordingly, the pair set off. Along the way, they’re joined by new companions, including Fawn’s brother Whit, a young man accidentally […]

The Plot
Having given up their attempt at living among the Lakewalkers, Dag and Fawn are at loose ends. Dag decides to fulfill an earlier promise he made to Fawn and show her the ocean. Accordingly, the pair set off. Along the way, they’re joined by new companions, including Fawn’s brother Whit, a young man accidentally beguiled by Dag, the riverboat captain Berry, and some young Lakewalkers who have decided to run away from home. Dag’s powers continue to increase, and he begins to grow more and more worried over what he might be turning into.

My Thoughts
The first two books were written together as one book and then backedited to split them into two. I believe that is not the case with books 3 and 4, though they were also intended to be two halves of the same story (and together to form a second half of the story started by books 1 and 2). Bujold had given them the working titles of Wide Green World 1 and 2, but for publication they were changed to Sharing Knife 3 and 4, which I think was a wise decision.

We pick up in Passage very shortly after Fawn and Dag have cut ties with Hickory Lake camp. They have headed for the farm belonging to Fawn’s family, and stop there for a little while to figure out just what they’re going to do. Upon arrival they discover that Fawn’s twin brothers, the ones who had caused the most trouble back in book 1, have departed to the frontier to look for land. Fawn’s remaining family (her parents, aunt, two brothers and sister-in-law) are much more accepting of Dag and don’t question too deeply why the pair are out on the road again.

Eventually, Fawn and Dag move on from the farm, feeling refreshed and with at least some goal in mind: to go visit the ocean. They have also picked up Fawn’s brother Whit as a travelling companion for at least part of the way. That it turns out to be more than just part of the way should surprise no one, least of all them, and on the whole they don’t seem particularly shocked. They both acknowledge that there was little to hold Whit back at the farm, since he was not due to inherit and there was no other obvious outlet for his creativity.

Dag, freed from the oversight of Lakewalker superiors, begins experimenting a good deal more with his ground-based powers. He first has a sort of idea that he will heal the rift between farmers and Lakewalkers by allowing farmers to share in some of the medical techniques used by the camps. It doesn’t take him long to realize that this idea requires a good deal more thought than he gave it before starting. We discover that “beguilement”, the title of the first book, is an actual real state which can be caused accidentally (or on purpose). To me, at least, this was not clear before, because Dag’s original explanation was filtered through Fawn’s perception and seemed to be that farmers got obsessed with Lakewalkers because they were so good in bed. It turns out to actually be a bit more serious than this, a real problem needing a solution.

The solution presents itself partway through the book, as Dag comes to understand what it is that causes the beguilement and figures out how to remove it. This is fortunate, because the ‘big bad’ of the book turns out to be not a Malice, but a renegade Lakewalker who has been beguiling people left and right to make a troop of bandits.

This Lakewalker, Crane, is someone who was mentioned in passing before — a Lakewalker who got involved with a farmer woman and ended up thrown out of camp as a result of his support of her. I’m not sure if we’re meant to feel sympathy for him or not; in spite of his involvement with the farmer woman, he doesn’t seem to have much respect for them as a people. This may be born from his anguish at her death and his alienation from society as a whole, but it’s not clear. In any case, he is definitely full of contempt for others by the time we meet him here.

The encounter with Crane is a double-edged sword for Dag. Throughout the whole book Dag has been experimenting more willingly and aggressively with his groundwork: healing people, trying to figure out beguilement, trying to figure out how to replenish his reserves more quickly. But he’s also growing more and more tense as the techniques he seems to be discovering strike him as very similar to the methods Malices use to enslave and destroy others. Dag lashes out at Crane when Fawn is threatened and uses his abilities to paralyse him from the neck down. He fears very much that he has gone too far and is turning into a monster. But to the good, he manages to use Crane’s death to acquire a new Sharing Knife, something he has been feeling a lack of for the whole course of the book. And in so acquiring, he is able to use the activity as a teaching exercise for the large group of Farmers who assisted in breaking up the bandit group.

One negative aspect to the focus on Dag’s exploration of groundwork was that I felt Fawn was relegated here to a less prominent role. She was still around, being supportive and clever, but on the whole I felt the spotlight was mostly shining on Dag. On the other hand there were only a few points in the book where they were divided up, and then only for a few hours at a time. The Malices didn’t make any appearances on camera at all, which made for a nice change.

Aside from the main thread of plot, we have several subplots introduced here, along with some new characters. Berry Clearcreek is the captain of the boat in which our protagonists head down the river. She’s a young woman about Fawn’s age, and relieves her of the responsibility of being the only girl in the party. Berry is on a mission to try and find out what happened to her father, brother and fiance, who never returned from their trip downriver the year prior. Unfortunately for her, it turns out that her relatives are dead and her fiance has joined Crane’s bandits.

The group is also joined by Remo and Barr, two young Lakewalker patrollers who have gotten in big trouble with their families and their camp. Both exemplify the problem Dag is attempting to solve: they are arrogant and look down on farmers as inferiors. Over time, they begin to realize farmers aren’t as stupid as they thought. The question of what they plan to do next is still unresolved at the end of this book.

In Short
This one was by far my favorite of the whole series. Not only did Fawn and Dag manage to spend almost the entire book together, but what battle scene there was was quite brief and didn’t involve a malice at all. As an added bonus, we got another interesting female character, and some friends for Fawn. Dag’s angsting about his powers was a little tiresome, but his concerns were legitimate enough, and didn’t get in the way of the story (ie, he didn’t go making some dumbass speeches about not using his powers and then being forced to go back on his word only after tragedy had ensued.) We started to get a few inklings of how the central background plot point might eventually be resolved, but at the end of this book it still seems an enormous and unwieldy task for our small band of heroes.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold: B

From the front flap:
Young Fawn Bluefield has fled her family’s farm hoping to find work in the city of Glassforge. Uncertain about her future and the troubles she carries, Fawn stops for a drink of water at a roadside inn, where she counters a patrol of Lakewalkers, enigmatic soldier-sorcerers from the woodland culture to the […]

From the front flap:
Young Fawn Bluefield has fled her family’s farm hoping to find work in the city of Glassforge. Uncertain about her future and the troubles she carries, Fawn stops for a drink of water at a roadside inn, where she counters a patrol of Lakewalkers, enigmatic soldier-sorcerers from the woodland culture to the north. Though Fawn has heard stories about the Lakewalkers, she is unaware that they are engaged in a perilous campaign against inhuman and immortal magical entities known as “malices,” creatures that suck the life out of all they encounter, and turn men and animals into their minions.

Dag is an older Lakewalker patroller who carries his past sorrows as heavily as his present responsibilities. When Fawn is kidnapped by the malice Dag’s patrol is tracking, Dag races to rescue her. But in the ensuing struggle, it is not Dag but Fawn who kills the creatureâ€”at dire costâ€”and an uncanny accident befalls Dag’s sharing knife, which unexpectedly binds their two fates together.

Review:
For all that this book took me something like six weeks to finish, I find that I don’t actually have all that much to say about it. The description quoted above admirably sums up the beginning of the novel, in which Dag rescues Fawn from some bandits, her pregnant status provokes a nasty creature to kidnap her back again, and they end up taking down a “malice” together. I can’t help but think that the reason the blurb doesn’t touch on any plot after this point is that there really isn’t much of one.

Beguilement is really more of a romance than a fantasy novel, though Bujold has still done a good job with the worldbuilding, working in details on the differences between Fawn’s and Dag’s cultures throughout the novel. But after the malice is defeated, there isn’t much going on except them riding on horses, staying in inns, developing fancies for one another, finally consummating their relationship, doing it many more times and often outdoors in the company of bugs, encountering Fawn’s not-so-supportive family, convincing them to support a marriage, and getting hitched. I guess if I lay it out like that it looks like a lot happened, but really, how much of that sounds like a fantasy novel?

The fact that the characters are both likable makes up for some of the plotlessness, at least. Fawn has had a very sheltered upbringing where her thirst for knowledge was not encouraged. Now, with support for her quick wits, she proves herself to be pretty clever and resourceful. Dag is a very experienced patroller who was widowed before Fawnâ€™s birth (thereâ€™s quite a big age difference between them) and has been fiercely solitary ever since, so opening himself up to her is a pretty unique experience for him. Because thereâ€™s a lot that Fawn doesnâ€™t know and is curious about, it sometimes seems like youâ€™ve got the â€œwise man teaching ignorant girlâ€ dynamic going on, but itâ€™s not really pervasive. Thereâ€™s one scene near the end where Dag praises Fawn for a brilliant leap of logic that comes across as completely admiring and not at all patronizing. It even made me a bit sniffly after seeing how little her family appreciates her.

Too, Bujold simply writes really well. Without being overly wordy, she can paint a scene so vividly that itâ€™s incredibly easy to visualize. The best example is probably the part where Dag has found the maliceâ€™s lair and is taking in the layout of the area: I swear I could picture it perfectly after only a couple of sentences. And even if the parts with Fawnâ€™s family were rather uncomfortable to read, considering their dismissive treatment of her, they were still entertaining. Probably, enduring all that strife was necessary so as to be as relieved as the main characters when they were finally able to leave it all behind.

While I like Fawn and Dag both together and separately, I do hope that thereâ€™s more of a plot to the next book. A typical fantasy series would have an epic quest to wipe out evil, but I sort of doubt Bujold is going to adhere to standard genre tropes. Because I do admire her writing, Iâ€™m willing to stick around and see how the story develops, but if this was the first installment of a story by anyone else, Iâ€™m not sure Iâ€™d be too keen to continue with it.

Additional reviews of The Sharing Knife:Beguilement can be found at Triple Take.

The Sharing Knife: Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight […]

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight a surprisingly strong malice, and Fawn is left at camp for a time to fend for herself. The pair are finally reunited after several harrowing experiences that still don’t convince the Lakewalkers of Fawn’s worth as a person. In the end, Dag and Fawn break ties with the camp and set off on their own.

My Thoughts
In the first book, very little about the Lakewalker home life is revealed to the reader, and the reader is left to draw conclusions based on inference and a tiny bit of actual information. It’s very easy to fall into the assumption, which I freely admit doing, that because the Lakewalkers presented such a contrast to the farmers in how they viewed and treated women, their culture must be more liberal and open. We discover pretty quickly in Legacy that such is not the case. In fact, the Lakewalkers are mostly a bunch of dicks.

Dag begins the book immediately on the defensive, much to Fawn’s dismay. She feels that his family (and culture in general) can’t really be that bad, and that she’ll have a shot at winning them over in the way he did most of her family. Resulting events suggest that he was correct, though it’s not clear to me that the outcome was completely inevitable. All the same, it was not very evitable and the sequence of events did not strain my view of the characters or their world very much.

We spend the first third of the book dealing with Fawn and Dag’s arrival at Hickory Lake camp and the assorted reactions of the Lakewalkers to their marriage. It’s here that the arrogance and calcification of the Lakewalker world view becomes clear. We learn more about the background of the world, which is apparently post-apocalyptic: at some point in the distant, distant past, a group of genetically enhanced “Lords” caused a disaster from which sprang the seeds that grow into malices. This disaster also drastically reduced the human population and led to the loss of most advanced technology and historical records from that time. The Lakewalkers, with their abilities to see and manipulate ground, feel that they are the descendants of these enhanced beings, and spend a great deal of time patting themselves on the back over their decision not to rule over the inferior farmers.

It soon becomes clear to the reader, however, that the Lakewalkers, in separating themselves from the farmers, have completely lost touch with the reality of the world and are falling behind technologically. Though Dag attempts to cast the problem in terms of Malice threat — what if the Malice comes up in a farmer city with well-trained craftsmen — it isn’t hard to extrapolate that pretty soon the farmers are going to lose their last thread of patience with the Lakewalkers’ bad attitude and may be fed up enough to attempt to rid themselves of their presence. This, of course, would be a disaster for everyone, but the farmers don’t know it and the Lakewalkers are too full of themselves to pass this information along.

This problem eventually comes to a head when, after several situations where Fawn again and again proves herself as capable and smart as Lakewalkers, Dag’s mother and brother make a last maneuver to try and get her thrown out of the camp and the marriage annulled. Dag has had enough, and realizes that he’s never going to figure out how to solve the problem of Lakewalker/Farmer friction if he stays in camp, so tells everyone off and then declares that he’s getting the hell out. The Lakewalkers are shocked, since their worldview does not permit even the idea that someone would prefer to live other than with their awesomeness.

After this scene, it became clear to me that the whole book had been working up to this point, and that what I thought was the goal — for Fawn and Dag to work within the Lakewalkers to effect change — was never the point at all. Dag needed to see that a single pair within the camp was simply not enough pressure to dislodge their very entrenched attitudes. So they leave in search of more leverage, though I couldn’t figure at that point what it might be.

Throughout the book an additional sub plot continues with Dag’s exploration of grounds, healing, and the relationship between what malicies do and what the Lakewalkers do. It seems mostly incidental here in spite of Dag’s vague angst about it all, but will probably be important later.

In Short
I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as the first one. The romance seemed to take a backseat to the description of Lakewalker society and attitudes. While all of the information is useful and important to the continuing series plot, it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the character development of Fawn and Dag as individuals and more importantly the development of them as a couple. I find them far more compelling when they’re together and operating as a team than when they are apart, and it felt like they spent a great deal of this book divided. On the other hand, a weak Bujold is still much better than most other books, and this one was necessary in many ways to further the actual plot now that the romance was solidly established.

J’s Take on Bujold’s The Sharing Knife #2: Legacy

So we pick up where we left off in part 1, and find our intrepid heroes on their wedding night. And it seems we’re not yet over with the naive girl’s firsts. Fawn’s now healed up enough from her miscarriage that they dare try to do IT. But of course Dag’s still got a broken […]

Fortunately there’s a bit of magic and plot point in the middle of this sex scene. And also fortunately, once we get it over with, the story seems free to move on from there. Much like how the story got much better in the first book after the first sex scene was over with.

In this book, we’re off to meet Dag’s family. And we find out more about the sharing knives. Which seemed to me to contradict things in the first book. I thought any bone knife could be primed by any Lakewalker’s heart. Both bones and hearts being in short supply, it’d seem to be rather essential. But apparently a knife has to be set up by a maker in advance for a particular person. It can be switched later, but still requires a maker, and still has to be before it gets stabbed into someone’s heart. Except later on, they’re talking about killing a bunch of people and regretting their lack of knives available for the task.. except none of those knives if they did have them would’ve been ready for any of the intended dead people.

Dag goes off to fight some more malices and stuff, and Fawn’s left back at camp to deal with the in-laws. We get a bunch of domestic stuff and political stuff from her end, and some battle and stuff from his end. In that way, it was reminding me quite a lot of the Vorkosigan books. Domestic stuff, political stuff, tricky dire survival situation stuff.

Dag also reminded me a bit of Miles, mostly in the way Bujold was treating him. He’s missing a hand to start with, then she breaks his other arm. Fortunately we have Lakewalker healers who can fix him right up soon enough (when the broken arm thing was getting old plotwise). Then he’s free to run off and get himself hurt even worse, in more interesting ways. And, again, the healer magic can do some, but not everything. Likewise with Miles, advanced medical technology can fix him up quite a bit, so then he has to go and get himself beat up in more interesting ways that’re harder to fix.

I liked this book better than the first one. And I actually can’t really predict where this series is going in the next book. So it’ll be interesting to find out.