Cordelia vs. Barrayar, or The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object
Rating: 5/5
Pros:
Humor, intrigue, suspense, action, romance... did I forget something?
Cons:
Beats me!
The Bottom Line:
I know it's not polite to shout, but just this once, a one-word descriptor: FANTABULOUS!
Recommended:
Yes
Barrayar won the first round. Says Cordelia to her unborn child, poisoned in her womb, "Welcome, my son, to Barrayar, the abode of cannibals; this place didn't even wait the usual eighteen or twenty years to eat you." Ravenous planet.
She thought she had nothing left to fight for, when she met the man who offered a thread of hope. The other doctors said that if her son survived, he would be a jellyfish. The woman whose baby's bones were slowing sloughing away from his flesh within the poor protection of her body ignored them royally and asked, "A viable jellyfish, Dr. Vaagen?"
The Story
Cordelia Naismith, Astronomical Survey Captain of Beta Colony, -ex, recently married Admiral Lord Aral Vorkosigan, of Barrayar, and came to live on what was, to a Betan, a "third-world" planet. She was currently employed full-time in "gestating" her baby. An important job on Barrayar. Just ask her suddenly doting father-in-law. Lord Aral Vorkosigan has got a new job: he's appointed Regent to four-year-old Gregor, who becomes Emperor on the death of his curmudgeonly grandfather, Ezar.
Life abruptly takes interesting turns. There are fascinating people to meet. New and inexplicable social customs to get used to. One of which is the venerable Barrayaran custom of taking potshots at the Regent. A Regency being the best time to lay hands on the power of the Imperium, you see. Cordelia would not have minded quite so much if the Regent had not been her husband; a husband she most definitely wanted to keep. It had taken long enough to find him in the first place, after all.
But Barrayarans are persistent, and, um, tradition-bound. And Aral was holding down a tough job, making tough decisions every day. One of those required him to condemn a man to death. In retaliation, the man's brother threw a gas grenade through Aral and Cordelia's bedroom window. Poison gas. Both Aral and Cordelia survived, but the antidote destroyed bone development in a growing fetus. It appeared that Cordelia's baby was to be the price of the eye...
A political coup that mushrooms into an almost-war provides an action-packed background, which quickly moves to the foreground, of the struggle for survival of the baby. He should have been named Piotr Miles Vorkosigan. He survived, but he was called Miles Naismith Vorkosigan instead. On the mutant-loathing world of Barrayar, he was too damaged, looked too much like the mutant he wasn't, for his grandfather, Count Piotr, to stomach. Or to give his name too.
No Plot Details Revealed Beyond This Point. Almost.
Barrayar, a part of the Vorkosigan Saga, is the story of Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, woman, wife and mother. As a novel, it seamlessly weaves together elements of science fiction, romance, humor, political intrigue, and explosive action. Laid down as bedrock underneath all that is the theme of motherhood.
Ms. Bujold, affectionately known to her fans as LMB, describes this winner of the Hugo Award, and the Locus Poll, in these words:
Though the back-blurb dwells much on the heroine's quasi-military adventures, it's really a book about the price of becoming a parent, and a deeper commentary on the romance in the previous book [Shards of Honor], being about how hopes are betrayed by realities, but also about how such betrayals are survived.
I think LMB created one of the funniest, fiercest, gutsiest, most lovable women in science fiction, or any fiction, when she created Cordelia. Witness the snippet of breakfast table conversation with Count Piotr, her conservative, aristocratic father-in-law. He was appalled at her stating that he had the same gene complement as the "great unwashed" in his district:
"My dear girl! They most certainly do not! My family have been Vor [Barrayaran aristotocracy] for nine generations." Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "How do you know, if you didn't have gene typing till eighty years ago?"
Or the case of Aral's political opponent, who delicately informed her, in passing, that her spouse was bisexual. "Was bisexual," she corrected absently, looking fondly across the room. "Now he's monogamous."
And then, of course, there was the infamous shopping expedition to Vorbarr Sultana near the end of the book. If a shell-shocked audience reaction to what you brought were a barometer of a shopping trip's success, then Cordelia had the game all sewn up. Revealing what the, um, interesting item was would, at this point, be telling. But oh, Aral's reaction!
And what of Aral Vorkosigan, the man Cordelia met, fell in love with and married? When Count Piotr questions his ability to do the job he had undertaken properly, his reply is, "One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me." Yeah. That kind of guy.
A whole slew of other characters, good guys and bad guys, well-developed and believable, people Bujold's Barrayar. The ubiquitous Count Piotr, Kou and Drou on the Vorkosigan payroll, Count Vordarian with the Imperial ambitions, and especially Sergeant Bothari, Cordelia's "very own personal monster", her first gift to her son (yes, we are talking of a living, breathing man as an object here) � are all people who take up residence in your imagination and cling to life there long after you've put the book aside.
Bujold's prose is liberally peppered with wit and humor. She's funny, and she gets funnier with every re-read. (Since you asked, I'll be nice and tell you: I read Barrayar every few weeks. No kiddin'. The e-book lives in my hard disk.) Yet her handling of the emotional scenes are near-perfect; understated, but resonating with power. The scene where Aral explicitly forbids Cordelia to risk herself to rescue Miles lives so vividly in my imagination that I get goose-bumps when I read that passage.
The author's style is inextricably linked to Cordelia's spirit: brisk, blunt, straightforward, humorous, strong, competent, so well-grounded and logical that it's sometimes unintentionally funny to the observer; yet with layers of character and depths of emotions that grow on you. The Vorkosigan universe, or Vorkosiverse, is solid, three-dimensional.
Since this is a review and I'm supposed to give a recommendation, give me a nanosecond to make up my mind what to tell you. Or do I really have to, at this point? ;) It's not that I'm a rabid fan-atic or anything. No no, not-a-tall. Ab-solutely not. It's just that I feel obligated to issue a caution. If you have never read a book in the Vorkosigan Saga before, be advised that they are highly addictive. If you do read this one, be prepared to go hunting for all the other titles. None of them will disappoint. You have been warned.
As a point of interest, you might like to know that Bujold is the only author, other than Robert Heinlein, to win the Hugo Award three times. One of those Hugos was for Barrayar.
A Note on the Series from Lois McMaster Bujold
"My structural model for the most satisfactory sort of series was the Hornblower books; each volume a stand-alone story that, when put together, gave the over-arcing biography of a character's life. This seemed to me to provide all of the pleasures of a series, the ability to tell a large story over a huge range, with fewer of the readerly frustrations that go with not being able to find missing parts in the bookstore or library at any given moment."
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