Orca

(Originally posted to The Library of Babel in late 2001, this is the second of several Brust reviews I'll re-post here.)

This review contains massive book-destroying SPOILERS. Read on at your own peril.

Steven Brust is one of those authors who's almost too clever for his own good. He plays all sorts of weird little games with the narrative in his books-- one of the Vlad Taltos novels is structured around a laundry list, another takes place at two different points in time, Agyar is written as an accidental diary, and he's written two thick books of Dumas pastiche-- and he delights in confounding his readers (see his comments on Dragon). He gets away with this mostly because he writes such compelling and fun-to-read stories that you get sucked in despite any little games he may be playing (I'm told this makes his books damnably difficult to edit, and accounts for some of the stranger features of Vlad's world...).

Orca is an excellent example of this. The book opens with a letter from Kiera the thief to Vlad's ex-assassin ex-wife Cawti, inviting her to meet for lunch at which Kiera will tell Cawti all about her recent adventure with Vlad (who's on the run from the Jhereg after the events of Phoenix). It's then alternates sections narrated by Kiera with sections narrated by Vlad (describing the events of his day to Kiera, during the course of the events narrated by Kiera), with occasional interludes of dialogue from the Kiera-Cawti lunch meeting which indicate that the version of events we're reading is not, in fact, what Kiera is telling Cawti.

Confused yet? It gets even better when you discover, at the end of the book, that Kiera the thief, who regular readers of the series have known from the very beginning of the books, is actually Sethra Lavode, the vampiric quarter-million-year-old Dragaeran Enchantress of Dzur Mountain, who's practically a force of nature in the Empire. Which casts everything that preceded it in a whole new light. And if that's not quite enough for you, the very last sentence of the book reveals that Vlad and Cawti actually have a son (which Vlad doesn't know, and Cawti wouldn't let Kiera tell him. One hopes that Noish-pa at least has been told of his great-grandson...).

Article Author: Chad Orzel

Visit Chad Orzel's author page — Chad Orzel's Blog