Neal Stephenson's SEVENEVES

Neal Stephenson has never disappointed me, but he sure has tried my patience, and that has never been more true than with his 2015 time sink, Seveneves, which novel I have had on Mount TBR since it was published but always kept misreading the title of. Lots and lots of sexy things distracted me from a big ol' chunk of text called Seveneyes.

I finally got around to it this winter, in audio book form, narrated in part by one Mary Robinette Kowal and while I know she wasn't chairing giant international genre conventions back then, I still wonder how in the world she found the time to record all of this audio, to say nothing of rehearsing it, figuring out how she was going to handle character voices* and mastering more technobabble (albeit probably 100% scientifically accurate, because this is Neal Stephenson) than Stephenson has thrown at us to date** all while writing, rewriting, editing, promoting and narrating her own books. I mean, wow.

At bottom, Seveneves, the first third or so anyway, is a generation ship story, with a twist, in that the ship doesn't go very far away from its point of origin. 

Disaster has struck and is going to keep on striking for thousands of years and the good old blue marble of Earth will be uninhabitable long before those thousands of years are up. Humanity has been caught napping, in that it doesn't have any other stores of DNA in the solar system yet, as in nope, no colonies on the Moon (heh), not Mars, nobody in the asteroid belt, nothing but the good old International Space Station and a bunch of satellites and whatnot in orbit around the good old blue marble that's soon gonna be a good old red marble and look a bit bigger, but there was a very small window of time between the original disaster and the level of recurring disaster that means the end of the world as we know it, so humanity realized it had two options for survival: burrow deep underground and hope to survive as a subterranean population, or expand our presence in orbit. As things progress, some half-assed individual effort is done off-page about trying for the first, but Seveneves is about the second: expanding our presence in orbit, by expanding the International Space Station itself and also building a distributed swarm of little space-arks, holding like four or five people each, set up with basic life support and some possible capacity for growing algae for food and oxygen and whatnot. The "Arklets," as they come to be known, are thus not meant as individual arks but as parts of a scattered whole held together by the power of computation and based around the ISS, which is nicknamed Izzy. It's a cool and highly plausible scenario that I've not seen a lot of yet, so this is more than enough to grab and hold my interest, but...

Of necessity, when something is scientifically plausible, and being imagined by a writer like Neal Stephenson, there's going to be more passages explaining more math and science than most people are ever expected to page through in normal life. But we are Science Fiction Fans and normal standards do not apply, am I right?

But still, for every line of dialogue or description of actual things happening, there's about a paragraph of background information to put the dialogue or happenings in context, and I cannot advocate for its exclusion or reduction but, golly.

As you might expect, most of the characters are scientists, and they are unquestionably heroic as they get problem after problem thrown at them: how much can the ISS be modified and how can it be accomplished; how much raw material is needed to build how many Arklets and how fast can we get them made; who gets to fly on those Arklets; who gets to live on the ISS after all the Arklets are up and the Earth has gone from blue marble to red fireball; how can we keep everybody breathing and eating and pooping and not getting cancer from cosmic rays; how are we gonna keep everybody from going crazy; how are we going to keep everybody safe from micrometeorites and other space hazards; what are we going to do when all the propellant is used up... which of these problems need to be solved first; how many of them can be postponed until later; how can we make sure there is a later in which to solve them; what kind of stuff do we need to focus on making on earth to enhance the Ark Swarm's chances...

All of that is drama enough for a whole novel right there, but that's just one-third of Seveneves. Like my favorite Stephen Baxter novel that I will never read again (Evolution; it's an amazing book but I Just Can't), Seveneves is more interested in what can go wrong *after* the Anthropocene world we know is gone, and wants to extend that after way farther than most books do.

Anyway, as you might expect, all of this doesn't leave a lot of room for us to get to know characters beyond what their scientific or sociological specialty is, but Stephenson does at least try. Unusually for him, this time his greatest success at this is with his villain figure, and man, oh, man, in this villain figure and her effects he kind of perfectly prefigured our big socio-political dilemmas in the 2020s because his villain figure (in the first third of the novel) is the abruptly former President of the United States, a woman named Julia Bliss Flaherty (referred to as "JBF" most of the time), and it's a pity she's a cishet woman because she really needed a mustache to twirl. At first she just seems like the kind of tough but charismatic figure we wish we could have voted for in 2016 instead of the the choices we got, and she seems to handle the disaster on her hands with admirable clarity and honor, pushing for an international accord that includes in some of its finer print a very firm declaration that World Leaders Are Not Allowed On The Ark but hoo dogies, look at that: the very first major hazard post-red marble is an unexpected hunk of metal sort of lurching around in the middle of the ark swarm, causing near collisions and scrambling the algorithms that govern the swarm almost to the point of not being able to govern the swarm and who do you think is inside that hunk of metal? Armed with a gun, aka the single worst thing to have in an outer space scenario? 

Yeah.

And JBF still thinks she's in charge of everything, despite not understanding anything except how to convince people she is in charge. And when she finds out she isn't in charge anymore, instead of accepting things as they are and just being grateful there was a Swarm for her to illegally escape to and looking for a way to maybe actually be useful in the Roslin mode***, she almost immediately starts stirring up shit and honestly, I was bracing myself for her to start convincing people that spacesuits aren't necessary, that's just a lie told by Big Spacesuit to keep us all dependent on them, man. But what she does is almost as bad.

Mary Robinette Kowal, by the way, had *way* too much fun delivering JBF's lines, which without exception made me want to reach through my soundbar and knock out some teeth or something.

JBF's presence in the Swarm puts the reader in an interesting and uncomfortable position. While she is shit-stirring, the person whom the governing bodies of the Earth actually did put in charge, a German scientist, has had to declare what amounts to martial law in the days immediately following the complete destruction of everything left on Earth, because in the early days of a disaster cooperation is more important than feelings even when the conditions are not as extreme as they are when there's just a few millimeters of metal between the people with feelings and hard vaccuum and the feelings are every human left alive (amounting to just over a thousand; almost exactly the size of my little hometown) mourning the billions of dead left behind. The realities of physics and biology give compelling reasons to demand the kind of control that is established in these early days (as all the former goverments and the scientific community of Old Earth understood and codified in the Swarm's constitution) and the reader's rooting interest is thus pulled toward the side of the tightly-controlled soft martial law society the German and the rest of the scientists aboard the ISS have established, at least temporarily.  Which, look, it feels really, really weird in January of 2022, just a few days after the first anniversary of the biggest coup attempt in American history, which aimed to establish a right-wing authoritarian government in place of the pluralism we've always strived for, to be rooting for the authoritarians and against the people who are opposing it and claiming that the majority of the population is not getting its fair say in decision making, OK?

Dammit, Neal!

But all of this is just build-up, really, to the big question that Stephenson wants to pose to us. Uh, big spoilers ahead for this seven year old book, Seveneves (whoa).

All that prologue just explains how a genetic bottleneck comes to be. And it's a hell of a bottleneck. Break the book's title into two words: Seven Eves. That's right, the human race gets narrowed down to just seven fertile women, heiresses to the failures of every attempt to establish genetic diversity in whatever version of the human race survives to recolonize a future Earth.**** Fortunately they still have the equipment and the know-how to use it to create children via parthenogenesis. But wait, there's more. Because the know-how and equipment also come with the ability to screen for the kind of genetic disorders that become such a big problem when a population gets inbred, screen for and correct it. Like, way beyond CRISPR, or at least CRISPR plus a lot more specific knowledge about the human genome and how it's expressed in bodies than we have now.

But so then, what do we want to screen for and eliminate from the future human race, ladies? What heritable medical conditions count as diseases and what are just traits? What about mental illnesses? What about the autism spectrum? What about hairiness? And what genetic babies are we willing to throw out with the genetic bathwater, given how little we still understand about what genes code for what traits -- but we do know that it's not a simple one gene to one trait ratio there, and what if it turns out a gene for an undesirable thing is also linked to a desirable thing or carries the potential to develop a favorable trait in a future environment that we just haven't imagined yet?

These questions matter a lot to me as I continue to cope with one of those disorders that has both a genetic and an environmental component but may also be related to exposure to viruses. It's left me semi-crippled and, due to a whole passel of medication allergies, unable to do much about it and so virtually unemployable. The Nazis would definitely have euthanized me. I'm sure a lot of my neighbors in a blood red state will be eager to do so if certain scenarios they dream about come to pass and that sort of thing becomes possible and acceptable again (which, it kind of already is, as any casual look at what horror stories the disabled community routinely share online about dealing with the U.S. healthcare system, insurance companies, physicians who are trained to blame patients for all of their problems especially if they're fat, etc.). But the genetic component is actually a very common one in the Northern European gene pool and has persisted for so many generations. It must have some survival value, not to have been eliminated long ago by Natural Selection, right? Yet here I sit, reaching for my cane to go back to bed to try to get some sleep after having been wakened in the middle of the night like I always am when the one weak-ass pain medicine that doesn't make me projectile vomit or go straight into anaphylactic shock wears off and all the joints in my body take turns setting off the kind of alarm bells that are really kind of meant for only the dire injuries like a limb having been hacked off or crushed, but in my body just means "hey, we're still alive, I guess."

But I digress.

But so, you can see why that scene smack dab in the middle of the book where seven women have the power and responsibility of deciding what genes the future human race can and can't have but only the really bitchy psychotic cannibal (who just sort of appears in this part of the story but whose back story I really wish I could have gotten in at least as much detail as I got about the evolution of Every Kind of Robot) among them is really making any argument about how maybe some genes we think are bad because of how they're expressed now might not be bad in future scenarios and how it's the potential for new combinations that's the important thing we are going for in trying to assure genetic diversity in the first place and...?

Egads. I listen to a lot of audio books when my body won't let me sleep. Usually I catch myself drifting off, rewind about 15 minutes or so to reset the bookmark, and turn over to conk out for a while. But ending Part 2 of the audio book on that note, that scene, had me lying miserably awake the rest of the night just appalled and terrified and unable to get the scene out of my head.

That's a new achievement for Neal Stephenson, in my personal experience anyway. I mean, bee tee dubs, I had already been up way past my (gigglesnort) bedtime just listening because, you know, the book has lots of good stuff in it and I wanted to find out what was going to happen next and stuff.

Unfortunately, what I most wanted to see as far as what was going to happen next and stuff takes place off the pages. While I am no stranger to and sometimes a fan of books that stretch out over eons of time a la Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, a 5000-year-leap between the Meeting of the Seven Eves and the next section of the book robbed me of what I'd really been looking forward to: seeing how these seven women (actually eight, but one of the eight survivors of the Swarm was already past menopause) would rebuild a whole civilization from the products of their own wombs and the genetics lab. We get glimpses of this in the form of flashbacks, but not nearly enough and I spent a good part of the last third of the novel, one big undifferentiated mass (even moreso in audio book form, in which it's a 10+ hour slog of a "chapter" simply called "Five Thousand Years Later", narrated by drowsy-voiced Will Damron instead of Kowal), resenting that Stephenson had skipped the most interesting thing in the book.

But Stephenson was more interested in extrapolating what humanity would be like divided into seven "races" according to the heredities established for them by the Seven Eves, and, of course, Neal gotta Neal, in describing in minute detail all of the fancy futuristic technology these races develop for living and thriving in space and for slowly recolonizing the Earth.

But about these "races"... The descendants of JBF and a nasty piece of work who is the only other survivor of JBF's dumbest plan named Aida are basically in a cold war with all of the other kin-groups, 3 billion strong after 5000 years and living in Stephenson's version of Alastair Reynold's famous Glitter Band -- a ring of habitat satellites circling the Earth, waiting for it to become habitable again. The "Julians" and "Aidans" have dominion in about 1/4 to 1/3 of the habitats, conveniently contiguous, while the "Moirans" and "Teklans"**** and "Dinans" and "Kamalans" (or whatever her descendants are called; rotten thing about audio books is you don't see how names are spelled) and "Ivans" try to give them a wide berth but now that Earth is almost ready for resettlement, the question basically becomes just how much of humankind's worst ideas and tendencies are going to accompany it back down the gravity well.

But really? If I wanted to re-read Clans of the Alaphane Moon, I would just do that, am I right? 

At least there's some neato technology to enjoy, like gliders that are basically inflatable suits that ride the thermals up to "hangars" in the upper atmosphere that lift passengers up into orbit without burning any chemical or nuclear fuel, to say nothing of giant orbital habitats that can house, e.g. complete ecosystems including things like 800 year old fir trees. I mean, this is the future we want, kind of? Maybe? Except for all the dumb factionalism, which I thought is what the original Seven Eves really meant to do away with, didn't they? Or did they?

Oh, and there's kind of a plot to this last section, involving the assembling of a working group including one member of each race, to take on a mission that is kept secret from them and us for far too long; by the time the characters found out what they have been sent to earth to do (it involves problems that have arisen since bands of "Sooners" jumped the gun on resettling the earth and the discovery that some of the undergrounders survived and have their own ideas about who should get to do what with New Earth and zzzz) I really didn't care. I came very close to not finishing this one, my friends. I really liked the first two-thirds but this last part couldn't end fast enough for me. If had been anyone but Stephenson, I probably would have just marked this DNF. The sunk cost fallacy is losing its hold over me as I age, but it's Neal Stephenson, man! He's never let me down!

Except, he almost did. To the point where I kind of want to give the Battlestar Galactica advice to anyone considering reading this who hasn't yet. Stop when you hit "Five Thousand Years Later." Like with BSG, you'll feel this is a horrible thing to do and you'll be so curious about how all of this is going to end but just let your own imagination end it for you instead. Stop watching BSG after the first half of season three; stop reading Seveneves after the Council of the Seven Eves. Maybe even just before the Council. You'll have enjoyed two-third of a terrific story without losing your faith in the guy what made it.

*About which, sigh. While not quite as irritating as when male narrators put on a breathy falsetto for female characters and make them all sound like Bambi the Big Busted Brainless Blue-eyed Bimbo, the reverse strategy of Elizabeth Holmes-ing it up is pretty damned close, and sounds painful. I wish more narrators would just let the dialogue and its tags do the job -- and that their producers/directors/etc would let them. It would be fine, really. As long as the author did their job.

**I haven't read his new book yet, either, so I may be wrong.

***For those who don't click through and haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin is a head of civilian government on a space fleet who, when a new planet is settled by its population, steps down and resumes her original work as a schoolteacher.

****And oh, get this: Moirans and Teclans are understood to share a special bond because the original Moira and the original Tecla were lovers. That's right. Five thousand years later, we're to understand that generations and generations of a couple's parthenogenic children are still mostly attracted to one another. Eyeroll.

****And holy mother of fuck, I wonder if Neal Stephenson is a Gene Wolfe fan because wouldn't this be a bang-up prequel to the Solar Cycle?

Max Barry's JENNIFER GOVERNMENT

Reading like an updated Snow Crash from the point of view from the point of view of characters who actually live in our future instead of one with made-up names for corporations (and minus all the pseudo-Sumerian hive mind stuff), Max Barry's Jennifer Government is a good old-fashioned page-turner dressed up in an ultramodern (well, circa 2003, but its satire hits as hard now as it did then) "suit so cheap that it shines."

Our title character, Jennifer, wasn't always Jennifer Government. Once she was Jennifer Maher, when she worked for a marketing firm called Maher, because in this version of Next Sunday, AD, instead of corporations buying naming rights to years, they instead bestow their names on their employees in lieu of surnames. This extends even to little kids, who take on the name of the school they attend, which school is itself named for the corporation that owns and operates it; hence a character we meet even before we meet Jennifer is a school girl who rejoices in the name of Hayley McDonald's. Because of course she does. And Jennifer's own daughter (she is a single mom in addition to being a stupendous badass with a gun or judo moves) is Kate Mattel, because she goes to a Mattel school. They're really good schools, you guys. Just ask all the Barbie dolls. Which, we later learn, is one of Jennifer's nicknames, but that's not important right now.

If you can't guess already, I really kind of love Jennifer Government, you guys. She's deadly with any number of weapons or her own killer gams or fists, and her catch phrase is an all-purpose conversation stopper that works as well on her offspring as on the bad guys protesting their innocence as she hauls them in: "And yet."

And yet.

Jennifer lives in a world in which the Neoliberal dream came true beyond its dreamers' wildest desires. The United States itself has become a sort of supercorporation, and has franchised out its (heavily revised) Constitution and power structures to huge swathes of territory around the world, including, most recently, Australia (author Max Barry's own home), where most of the action of this novel takes place. There is still a cold war of sorts, but it's between competing customer loyalty clubs. Etc.

As the story begins, a hapless boob named Hack Nike (tah-wang! Bullseye), an unhappy Marketing Operative for the sneaker and sportswear giant who owns his last name, blunders into a conversation between some high powered sociopaths on another floor of Nike's Australia headquarters, and the sociopaths offer him an on the spot promotion if he'll take on a very special assignment for them. They've got a dynamite campaign to capitalize on the success of the company's Cartmanesque strategy of not letting anyone buy their newest sneaker line, then only letting a very few buy it, driving demand to a fever pitch. The company has chosen to next announce that each of its Niketown stores around the USA (which, remember, includes lots more territory than just the original 50 states) is getting four pairs of the new shoes to sell, but they're actually shipping many more. The plan is to just fool their deranged fans into paying too much for sneakers they still think are totally exclusive, but the two Johns Nike whom Hack has met want to go this one better. Actually, many more better. And instead of "better" they really mean "worse." As in, they want Hack to stake out the Sydney mall where their local Niketown is and shoot up to ten customers or would-be customers outside of the store. As in with an actual gun. Because remember how once upon a time people were killing each other in "the ghettos" for coveted shoes? That was such good buzz, man. That drove everybody crazy. Let's do that, but more!

But Hack deserves his first name, and cocks it all up, partly out of queasiness, partly out of naivete, and the ensuing bloodbath draws the attention of the legendary Jennifer Government, who, for reasons we don't learn until much later in the novel, already had her barcode-tattooed eye on the Johns Nike and was ready to pounce.

Caught in the crossfire of the Niketown Incident is the aforementioned Haley McDonald's, who was there at the store hoping to make an investment in these shoes to sell later for much more than she paid, except none of the ATMs at the mall are willing to loan her the cash to do it (because of course ATMs in this world can also issue loans; since they have offered cash "advances" on credit cards for yoinks in the real world, it's really not that weird, if you think about it*). "Lucky" for her, a young stockbroker Buy Mitsui, who's been down on his luck until a friend tempted him into some insider trading that saved his bacon, witnessed her distress and decided, what the hell, he's kind of celebrating, and just gives her the money outright.

Not long after, Buy is desperately administering first aid to a bleeding out Haley and Jennifer Government is in a gun battle with mercenaries from the NRA in the background. Because of course the National Rifle Association has become a mercenary corps.

The whole novel goes at this blistering pace as we also meet the hapless-but-really-good-with-guns Billy, who kind of by accident becomes Billy NRA and is quickly mistaken for another guy named Bill NRA and gets swept up into a series of NRA operations in the wake of the Niketown Incident; Hack Nike's girlfriend Violet No Last Name until she becomes Violet ExxonMobil when the petroleum giant agrees to purchase her bespoke intrusion software for three million dollars that she has trouble collecting on; and even get a bit of goodness from the point of the view of one of the Johns Nike. The one whom Jennifer Government knew back in the day when both of them shared a last name.

For all that its milieu echos that of Snow Crash, what Jennifer Government wound up feeling the most like was a Bruce Sterling novel. Jennifer is an action hero par excellance but Kate keeps her grounded and gives her a vulnerability that makes her a more interesting and well-rounded character. By the time she and Buy Mitsui get around to getting to know each other, well, what you want to happen, happens, in much the way Greta and Oscar come together in Sterling's greatest novel, Distraction** but almost before the reader realizes what is taking place, she is off, gun in hand, to hunt her quarries in London and Los Angeles while the aforementioned Loyalty Club Cold War starts heating up. There are gun battles and chases and bizarre confrontations and the John Nike that is still standing delivers a seriously whackadoo speech in Parliament (yeah, that Parliament) that writes more checks than 75 asses could cash, let alone his.

Can Jennifer Government and her fellow operatives save the day? Will she get a chance to give John Nike a piece of her mind and/or put some holes in his hide? Will Corporate American finally once and for all achieve the entirely unregulated marketplace of its dreams? Gotta read to find out.

It's almost obscene how much fun this book is, you guys.

*Lots about this book are going to make you need a shower. Many showers.

**Which, why is that still not available as an ebook, man? It's so good! I've worn out my original mass market paperback of it even though my hands can't freaking handle paper books anymore.

Francis Bengtsson's THE LONG SHIPS

As anyone who follows me on GoodReads already knows, I spent the first few chapters of The Long Ships pretty much just giggling at the character names. I kept imagining Danish King Harald Bluetooth* wandering around the tenth century equivalent of a supermarket looking like he was talking about himself, for instance. Toke, well, that's pretty self-explanatory. And then there's Brother Willibald, the Christian monk who comes home with Orm from his adventures in Ethelred the Undready's England. Heh. Willibald. And there's another man named Ugge the Inarticulate. I mean, come on.

But then there's our hero, Orm. My reaction to this name only makes sense to fans of Walter Moers' Zamonia books, in which "Orm" is the name of the universal source of creative power, especially in literary terms. Here, of course, it merely means "serpent", and is usually accompanied by the epithet "red" because of his hair.

So, the cover and the era in which this book is set and the ethnicity of its characters should give away that this is, in fact, a Viking novel, but what they won't necessarily tell you is that it is regarded as a veddy veddy literary work, bearing the aegis of no less an entity than the New York Review of Books, who published it as one of its NYRB Classics series,** which is how I came across it. And there is good reason for it to get this stamp, for it's an ambitious and interesting work; more than just an adventure tale (though it's a very good adventure tale), it's also the story, really, of how Scandinavia went from the rough, violent, pagan land as depicted in the sagas to the more settled, orderly, responsible and overwhelmingly Christian one of, say, Sigrid Undset's work.

But don't let the high culture imprimatur deter you from the great fun to be had here, for The Long Ships has enough fun and fighting, and very funny imagery (like a huge stolen bell from a church in Asturia being hit, gong-style, at regular intervals, to help a bunch of untrained galley slaves row from Spain to Ireland) to satisfy even the guy who only wants to read Terry Brooks and David Eddings and Robert Jordan over and over again until the end of time (and yes, those guys really do exist; there's one on my old bar trivia team).

For me, well, Orm reminds me a little bit of Jack/Bobby Shaftoe, Neal Stephenson's hilariously hapless bad ass adventurer from the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon. He shares the Shaftoes' bumbling heroism, right from the start with how he comes to go a-Viking: he is knocked on the head while defending the family farm from the followers of Krok (Worst Viking Chieftain EVER, is Krok), who are on a provisioning raid. They bear away the sheep and the young man, whose mommy had kept him home for one more season because he was her favorite and was too young and delicate yet.

But, he acquitted himself well before getting knocked out, even killed some of the raiding party, so he is allowed to join Krok, Toke and the gang on their rather slapstick voyage. As I said, Krok is the WVCE. But that's just the first bit of the book, which is basically told as Orm's life story, and once he's free of Krok (but he takes vengeance, oh yes he does, because he is a Danish Raider a-Viking) he starts gallavanting all about the known world, Moorish Spain, Ireland, Aenglaland... and, we learn later, his big brother spent quite a lot of time in Byzantium, which news drives most of the plot of the last quarter of the book.

Really, the only thing I don't like about The Long Ships is the way the narrative is framed, though it's a common enough device. Throughout the story we are treated to authorial/narrative intrusions indicating what Orm said about a given situation as an old man. It's usually something wise and often something witty, but never enough of either to justify the constant intrusion and the robbing of scenes of any sense of jeopardy. See also Doctor Who.

Maybe it's just George R.R. Martin's fault that this bothers me now? That makes me expect primary characters' danger to be real? At any rate, knowing ahead of time that the hero is going to make old bones often robs his story of some, or a lot of, its joy for me these days. I'd probably bitch about Conan the Cimmerian, too, nowadays, though maybe not because Conan!!!

At any rate, Orm's Viking picaresque is still plenty enjoyable. And as an added bonus, depicting as it does a society in which "any man who could not understand poetry would be regarded as a poor specimen of a warrior", there is more than a little bit of what amount to tenth century poetry slams, in which burly, drunken, beardy men strive to outdo each other in witty and lyrical depictions of their adventures and, sometimes, pratfalls. I'm not sure how well their efforts survive this translation into English, but the flavor of them is still there in trace amounts, as is the overall dry wit of the narrative tone; Halldor Laxness did not invent this tone, he just won a Nobel with it. As have so many of his regional fellows over the years.

The Long Ships is not necessarily Nobel material, but it's high quality entertainment -- rendered even more so by my contemporaneous choice to start playing Skyrim at long last. Skyrim is The Long Ships with dragons and lizard men, you guys. Well, sort of. At least it looks and sounds that way. But I haven't even found High Hrothgar yet, so, you know...

*Who is not himself much of a character per se, but the events take place during his reign.

**I had better just get this out right here: I am a big fan of NYRB Classics, and regard them as sort of my highbrow Angry Robot Books (which I doubt they'd appreciate) in that they are a go-to house for quality reading material when I want literary rather than genre fiction. They, like AR, have not yet let me down, at least inasmuch as what I've chosen from their offerings I have always, always liked. And lookie, they've sort of, kind of, taken a page from AR's playbook in that they now have a subscription program! Alas, it is dead tree only, and until my elbow/arm problems are sorted I'm ebook-only. I tweeted them about considering offering an ebook subscription but so far have gone ignored. Tristesse.

100 Books #91 - Jean Plaidy's CAROLINE THE QUEEN

Like a lot of readers of my generation, I first encountered the fascinating figure of Caroline of Ansbach in Neal Stephenson's giant Baroque Cycle, which touched upon her early life as a refugee princess in Germany who finally washed up in the court of the redoubtable Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Hanover and there was a pupil of Gottfried Liebniz. She finished those novels as the wife of Sophie's grandson George Augustus, the future Prince of Wales and thus the future George II of England. All signs at the end of the third novel, The System of the World, pointed to her as being a figure on which many hopes are to be pinned, a future champion of reason and science, the reconciler of Liebniz and Isaac Newton, perhaps even a latter-day Elizabeth, albeit with a lunkheaded husband...

It's hard to reconcile that portrait with Jean Plaidy's though. Caroline the Queen picks up Caroline's life many years after the Hanoverians came to power on a wave of Whig adoration. She has learned to manage her difficult husband and endured many years of his father's somewhat ridiculous rule, but at great cost to her intellectual life and continued education. The death of George I, who had all but exiled George Louis and his pretty, clever wife, is the first act of this novel and caused a flutter in this Baroque Cycle lover's heart, but this Baroque Cycle lover knew better than to expect anything remotely like more of Stephenson's version of Caroline and her life and times. No, this is Jean Plaidy -- not really a bad thing, just a very different thing.

Long before Stephenson was anything but just another beardy, computer nerdy face in the crowd, Jean Plaidy (and her various alters ego, Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, Eleanor Hibbert, et al) reigned supreme as a chronicler of the lives and times of British royalty, especially those of its queens. Some of the first books I truly shared with my mother were Plaidy's cycle of Plantagenet novels, chiefly concerned with the amazing Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of both Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, mother of Richard the Lion-Hearted and John Lackland, Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitiers and kickass heroine in her very own right (she even accompanied her first husband on the Second Crusade to the Holy Land). Plaidy's books made Eleanor one of my first not-made-up heroines, even though I knew I was reading fiction. So when I found out she had written a book about Caroline, I knew I was going to have to hunt it up at some point.

But so, like in her Eleanor books, Plaidy is much more interested in the domestic and personal life of Queen Caroline than in any of her intellectual pursuits -- except for Caroline's exercising of her considerable political acumen in partnership with Robert Walpole, the Whig Prime-Minister-before-there-was-a-Prime-Minister whose power was already considerable before Caroline became queen but who really came into his prime at her side and with her help. Plaidy's version of this duo* is the real governing power in Britain, with Walpole proposing and Caroline persuading her husband that disposing was all his own idea in the first place through a campaign of swallowing insults and bad behavior in public and making subtle suggestions during royal pillow talk, the latter form of influence she was only able to exercise by concealing from pretty much everyone the umbilical hernia (a result of multiple pregnancies and bad luck) that ultimately claimed her life when it caused her womb to rupture. But in her heyday, as depicted in Caroline the Queen, she winds up ruling Britain outright as Regent four times when her husband hares off to Hanover, his native land which she has convinced him he prefers to Britain. After all, there's no Parliament or Cabinet to deal with there, and the Hanoverians are ever so much more docile and respectful than the bratty, chatty English, aren't they, dear? I'll miss you terribly while you're away, and I'm just a girl in the world, but I'll do my best to make do... Hey, Sir Robert, dust off all those treaties and plans we've been saving up!

Thus Plaidy's Caroline is a poster child for the most old-fashioned version of female power: great indirect influence at great personal cost and sacrifice. She may be brilliant, she may be educated, she may have more ability in her little finger than her husband has in his whole strutting body, but she's still a she, so that's how it has to be. Did Caroline dream of better? I'm pretty sure Eleanor did. Did Plaidy?

In any case, the real fun of the book doesn't surface until just past the halfway mark, when the redoubtable Sarah Churchill, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough (widow of John Churchill, whose exploits are given a fun airing in the Baroque Cycle) turns up as a minor villainess, trying, mostly in vain, to recover her lost glory from the days when she bullied Queen Anne and ruled behind the scenes the way Caroline does now. Proud, shrewd, calculating, litigious, shrewish, scheming, she is by far the most entertaining character in the book, and never more so than in defeat. This may not be an entirely fair portrait of her, but it's an amusing one. I would have liked to have seen more of this, but alas, Sarah and Caroline were too far apart in age to have much to do with each other, and it's likely that Plaidy beefed up Sarah's part as it is.

But of course the real villain of this piece is Caroline's eldest son, Frederick, the Prince of Wales**, raised in Hanover on the orders of George I, come as an adult stranger to his family to take up his post after a long delay he has always resented, ready and willing to be a tool for Walpole's enemies once he realizes that his parents are going to keep him on a tight leash in perceived poverty. He spends most of the novel doing what he considers to be his best to annoy them (though of course he never stoops to attempting to improve his means by his own actual efforts). The courtiers jockeying for his favor reminded me rather tiresomely of perhaps my least favorite of Plaidy's books, The Follies of the King, though here, at least, none of the men are competing to be the Prince's lover, just his pal and maybe also his creditor.

The result of all this is an entertaining little stew of a book, if salted a bit too much by the repetition of the same observations over and over again. Yes, Ms. Plaidy, we get that George liked to write letters to Caroline about his love affairs; yes, we get that Caroline found Lord Hervey especially amusing; yes, we get that Frederick liked making his parents angry. Telling us once and then just showing us would have been fine, really.

As I look over Plaidy's catalog, I see that I've only read maybe 15-20% of her total output (and that's just using this particular pen name). I can't at this point decide if I feel like a peasant at a banquet or a student in a cafeteria, contemplating this fact. I can't decide if all of those other books are going to be richly varied courses and delicacies or blandly similar steam-table offerings. Right now I'm inclined to suspect the latter -- but I believe I have felt that way before. And sometimes, one is just plain hungry.

*Which seems pretty factual. Plaidy always did her homework, that's for certain.

**Whom we know from history never got to be king, but whose son grew up to be George III. Yeah, that George III. Which maybe makes Frederick an even better villain, eh?