Vorblogging: The Warrior's Apprentice

[owlmoose]

A few days after finishing Cordelia's Honor, I attempted to find Young Miles at the bookstore (which, for me right now, means the Borders closest to work). They didn't have it, and so rather than going on a mission, I made my way to Amazon, where the book was eligible for the 4-for-3 promotion. As a result, I now have a stack of Vorkosigan omnibuses (plus Memory) on a table in the living room. I suppose that means I'm committed to this project now...

Anyway, I finished The Warrior's Apprentice today. Before I get into more details, one thing: I kept expecting the title to actually have some relevance to the book, but as far as I could tell, it never connected. Anyone know what it's supposed to mean? Or was it created by the publisher?

This was a fun read. Although it shares its less-mature writing style with Shards of Honor, it had less of a fanfiction-y feel to it, possibly because the worlds and the characters seem better developed. I liked Miles right away. justira had warned me that some people find teenage Miles to be annoying. He certainly is a young male child of privilege -- hard to avoid, when you're the only son of a wealthy and powerful house in a patriarchal, hierarchal society -- but those aspects of his personality tempered a lot by his having grown up disabled. There's a tension there and Miles is keenly aware of it; one of my favorite bits in the book is when someone, perhaps his cousin Ivan, says something wistful about "the old days", and Miles responds by pointing out that, under the old order, he'd have been killed at birth. The balance works, even when he's overcompensated by being theatrical. He feels real to me.

Elena is great, too, as are Baz and most of the mercenaries, especially Thorne, Tung, and Auson, plus the little bit of development we get on Elli toward the end. I wish we'd gotten more time with Thorne -- the concept of a society with a fully-integrated intersex population is a pretty fascinating one. Even if I found the use of "it" as a personal pronoun jarring; I had to pretend it was a translation error. The concept that Miles's habits of picking up strays and bluffing his way through tough situations eventually snowballs into the creation of a mercenary fleet is maybe a little much, but each small step was so believable that I was able to go with it. He also has a real talent for turning enemies into allies, which I expect to become more important over time.

justira had asked me for my thoughts on Bothari. Those thoughts are complicated and not fully formed, and I found his death so jarring that I'm not sure what to make of it. I had fully expected Bothari to be one of the main characters in this series, so I'm still adjusting to the idea that Bujold killed him off so quickly. Also unexpected was Elena marrying Baz -- when a character starts off a series of books secretly in love with a childhood friend, I expect the tension around that relationship to play out over several books, rather than being resolved, unhappily for the protagonist, in the very first one. I'm not complaining, really; I enjoy a good subversion of expectations. But it's still a shift that I have to adjust to in my reactions.

Anyway, Bothari. He is a difficult character, in many respects: a man who has committed horrors, cannot remember the specifics but knows in an abstract way what they were, and has spent the rest of his life trying to atone for them. (Possibly this is just because I watched it recently, but I'm reminded of the Babylon 5 episode "Passing Through Gethsemane".) I find it interesting that Bujold killed off Bothari and Miles's grandfather -- the two people in Miles's life most tied to the old Barrayaran traditions. Clearing the decks for a new order? Maybe.

I have to wonder how thoroughly Bujold had plotted out "Barrayar" before writing this book, because there are call-outs to things that happened in that time frame that are really specific, like the deaths of Vorhalas's sons. So far, I haven't noticed any plot holes caused by jumping back and forth through the timeline; hopefully that stays the case.

Comments

[seventhe]

I have to say, I adore Bel Thorne and find everything about it (also jarring to me) fascinating.

I actually read the books in the other order Ira suggested - Young Miles first, and then Cordelia second. So my awareness of Bothari is/was a bit strange; with Miles, Bothari is just kind of a screwed up bodyguard -- UNTIL the story about Elena comes to fruition, and I sat up and went, "What." Then I read Cordelia and my mind got blown. Bothari's so complicated that he really is difficult to comprehend - you want to say he's a good guy until you realize that he both is and isn't, and the main things keeping him "good" are his relationships with the ("good") Vorkosigans: he uses Aral and Cordelia to direct his own muddled and confused moral compass.

[owlmoose]

If you can say without it being a huge spoiler, does Bel Thorne appear in any of the other books?

I can see how it would be a lot harder to build a clear picture of Bothari as a character if you read "Warrior's Apprentice" first. Everything that happened to him, that made him who he is, is either vague or missing from Miles's context. It'll be interesting to see how he takes the whole truth, if he ever learns it.

[justira]

(I debated a long time over whether I wanted to start a new thread or hijack this one, decided to do both, and will probably just end up dumping everything here instead)

Oh god, spoilers. It's so hard to judge in retrospect; I get all paranoid and think EVERYTHING is a spoiler. But it's the kind of series where characters show up repeatedly anyway, so I'm hoping it's safe to say that you'll see Bel again. I really like Bel, too.

The "it" pronoun was a little weird but not too bad back when I first read the series a decade ago, but certainly pings me pretty hard now. The terminology in general (including "hermaphrodite") is a product of its times, and it seems stuck with that now =\

But speaking of when I first read the series, I also read Young Miles first and Cordelia second, so I also had the kind of strange experience with Bothari. But weirdly, I grew really attached to him in Warrior's Apprentice alone, and then I read Cordelia and found that he was EVEN MORE INTERESTING. So it worked out all right for me, but I always read Cordelia first in all my rereads.

But yeah... Bothari is really complicated. I agree with Sev -- I keep wanting to think of him as essentially a good guy, but it's not so straightforward. I spent quite a while right here trying to articulate some views about his morality but it got seriously muddled... trying to decide if he has any inherent sense of good and bad at all, or if he just cribs off others. I can at least say that he's a very interesting depiction of a sociopath, and I loved all the parts in the books where he got a little more space to function, like when he and Cordelia were alone in hiding with little Gregor, or going after Miles in Vorbarr Sultana. It was interesting watching him expand in those times -- seemed very much in keeping with Aral's observations about him, a kind of meta-showing of how he changes to fill roles.

Anyway. Bothari. One of my favourite characters in the VK books, somehow.

As for how thought-out the backstory was -- actually, this is something I've seen others remark upon with the VK books: Bujold seems to have a really neat trick of expanding her universe in an organic and internally consistent way even though it was written in the most random order. Seriously, he publication order is ALL OVER THE PLACE. But I've almost never seen her really slip up in this way (in fact I have only caught one instance across ALL the books taken together) -- stuff that's thrown out offhand or only vaguely mentioned in one book will suddenly grow into its own fully articulated world in another book. Someone put it like this: it doesn't feel like those other worlds and details aren't THERE yet, but just that Bujold has not turned our attention to them; they feel like they're there, extant, waiting around the corner.

For the title, I do have some theories, but I think I want to keep them under my hat at least until you've read the short story/novella that comes next.

[owlmoose]

I'll save a more detailed response for when I get home to my computer, but I did want to say that I have read "Mountains of Mourning". I haven't posted about it yet because I was planning to combine it with my post on The Vor Game, when I finish that. So if you are holding off for fear of spoilers there, no need.

[owlmoose]

Bothari does make for an interesting sociopath, more sympathetic than such characters are usually drawn. It's hard to tell how much of that is just Bothari, and how much is a reaction to the abuse he suffered at the hands of Ges. One of the most striking moments, for me, is actually back in "Barrayar", when he's playing the thug in the brothel, how naturally he slips into that role and, in some way, seems more like "himself" than we've ever seen him before. Like every other role is just a role, but this is the "real" Bothari. It was chilling, to see a mostly-sympathetic character turn on a dime like that. I don't know that I'll ever think of him as a favorite character, but he's definitely interesting.

In terms of how thought out things have been, I was thinking mostly in terms of specifics of backstory. The most memorable example, for me, was during the trial, during which Gregor selects the Vor whose son is responsible for Miles's disability as one of the witnesses. Bujold is pretty detailed about the fates of the sons, so either she wrote that in offhand and had to make it work in "Barrayar", or she had already scripted that part of Barrayar out. I think I may have to re-read the Afterword of "Cordelia's Honor" after I finish this volume; I recall that she went into detail about a few things like that, and I imagine they will make more sense knowing more context.