white_hart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_hart) wrote2022-08-19 06:58 pm
white_hart) wrote2022-08-19 06:58 pm
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Reading: The Hands of the Emperor
I think I first heard about Victoria Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor from the Be The Serpent podcast. I bought the Kindle edition on their recommendation and spotted it last week when I was flicking through my unread books (of which there are...A Lot) trying to decide what to read next.
My goodness, I adored this.
The Hands of the Emperor is a huge, slightly rambling fantasy about a middle-aged bureaucrat who passionately longs to make the world a better place. Cliopher Mdang is the first person from his remote archipelago ever to enter the civil service in an empire spanning multiple world; his hard work and complete integrity have enabled him to rise to become the Emperor's personal secretary and head of the civil service. When he returns from a visit home and suggests that the Emperor takes a holiday, he finds that he has set in motion a chain of events that will fundamentally change both his relationship with the Emperor and, ultimately, the entire world.
This isn't a perfect book - it's very long, and, as I said, rambles a bit. Some things end up coming up multiple times, and the pacing is odd - a single evening can have multiple chapters, and the next one glosses over years almost without acknowledgement. Despite that, I loved it. The characters feel utterly real and likeable, the world they live in is fascinating (Goddard throws us in at the deep end, and the novel is full of references to earlier events that we only find out the details of later). As an administrator myself, I adored reading about another thoroughly competent administrator (and occasionally found myself wincing in sympathy at the pressures of Cliopher's job). And more than anything, I loved that this is 900-odd pages of people being kind and thoughtful and trying to make the world a better place. Wonderful, utterly absorbing comfort reading.
My goodness, I adored this.
The Hands of the Emperor is a huge, slightly rambling fantasy about a middle-aged bureaucrat who passionately longs to make the world a better place. Cliopher Mdang is the first person from his remote archipelago ever to enter the civil service in an empire spanning multiple world; his hard work and complete integrity have enabled him to rise to become the Emperor's personal secretary and head of the civil service. When he returns from a visit home and suggests that the Emperor takes a holiday, he finds that he has set in motion a chain of events that will fundamentally change both his relationship with the Emperor and, ultimately, the entire world.
This isn't a perfect book - it's very long, and, as I said, rambles a bit. Some things end up coming up multiple times, and the pacing is odd - a single evening can have multiple chapters, and the next one glosses over years almost without acknowledgement. Despite that, I loved it. The characters feel utterly real and likeable, the world they live in is fascinating (Goddard throws us in at the deep end, and the novel is full of references to earlier events that we only find out the details of later). As an administrator myself, I adored reading about another thoroughly competent administrator (and occasionally found myself wincing in sympathy at the pressures of Cliopher's job). And more than anything, I loved that this is 900-odd pages of people being kind and thoughtful and trying to make the world a better place. Wonderful, utterly absorbing comfort reading.
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