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Reading: Revenant Gun
Jun. 30th, 2018 11:42 amRevenant Gun, the final volume in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series, opens nine years after the end of Raven Strategem with a seventeen-year-old Jedao waking up in the body of a 44-year-old. Jedao has been revived by Hexarch Nirai Kujen, a minor if significant character in the first two books but very much a key player in this one, to lead an army against the two successor states which sprang up after the hexarchate's demise, and restore the true hexarchate, but he has no memory of the intervening years of his life, his military career, or indeed of the centuries that have passed since his "death" following the massacre at Hellspin Fortress.
Like Raven Strategem, Revenant Gun combines multiple narratives with regular shifts of point of view. Jedao's attempts to make sense of the situation he finds himself in is set against the stories of those on the other side: the leaders of the sucessor states, and also the other half of Jedao himself, Cheris, once an anchor for Jedao's disembodied conscience, and now the owner of all the memories the Jedao leading Kujen's army has lost. However, where Raven Stratagem used its multiple viewpoints to expand the novel's action throughout the hexarchate, Revenant Gun uses them to draw the focus inward, everything homing in on a final confrontation.
There's so much to like in this book; I love the way Lee's characters are rounded humans, with lives and relationships outside the events they find themselves part of (and I particularly love how many of his political and military leaders practice handicrafts to deal with frustration, boredom, idle moments and the burdens of power). I love the casual inclusivenss of a society where most people have dark skin, where there are multiple genders which explicitly don't always coincide with biological sex, where same-sex and poly relationships are utterly unremarked. I love the complicated moral greyness of a narrative where the antagonists can sometimes be likeable and sympathetic and the forces of progress have to make terrible, indefensible choices. It's at least as complicated and challenging a read as the earlier books, and I have to admit that I found the teenage/amnesiac Jedao a less enagaging viewpoint character than most of the others and wished there had been more focus on them, although I think that may just mean I need to re-read it to try to get a better handle on him. All in all, Machineries of Empire has been a terrific series.
Like Raven Strategem, Revenant Gun combines multiple narratives with regular shifts of point of view. Jedao's attempts to make sense of the situation he finds himself in is set against the stories of those on the other side: the leaders of the sucessor states, and also the other half of Jedao himself, Cheris, once an anchor for Jedao's disembodied conscience, and now the owner of all the memories the Jedao leading Kujen's army has lost. However, where Raven Stratagem used its multiple viewpoints to expand the novel's action throughout the hexarchate, Revenant Gun uses them to draw the focus inward, everything homing in on a final confrontation.
There's so much to like in this book; I love the way Lee's characters are rounded humans, with lives and relationships outside the events they find themselves part of (and I particularly love how many of his political and military leaders practice handicrafts to deal with frustration, boredom, idle moments and the burdens of power). I love the casual inclusivenss of a society where most people have dark skin, where there are multiple genders which explicitly don't always coincide with biological sex, where same-sex and poly relationships are utterly unremarked. I love the complicated moral greyness of a narrative where the antagonists can sometimes be likeable and sympathetic and the forces of progress have to make terrible, indefensible choices. It's at least as complicated and challenging a read as the earlier books, and I have to admit that I found the teenage/amnesiac Jedao a less enagaging viewpoint character than most of the others and wished there had been more focus on them, although I think that may just mean I need to re-read it to try to get a better handle on him. All in all, Machineries of Empire has been a terrific series.
