Reading: Mirror Dance

[white_hart]

After not really enjoying Brothers in Arms it has taken me a while to get back to reading Bujold. I wasn't actually planning to read Mirror Dance, but on Monday I discovered while on the bus to work that after nerving myself up to read Children of Time despite it being about spiders I didn't actually own it, and I couldn't just buy a copy there and then as my kindle is wifi-only and doesn't like eduroam, so I wouldn't have been able to download it until I got home. I was definitely in the mood for space opera, and trying to look up synposes and decide on which of the completely new to me books on my kindle I should go for seemed like too much work for 6:20 on a Monday morning, so picking up the next in a series seemed like the logical thing to do.

Mirror Dance is set a couple of years after Brothers in Arms; it alternates point of view between Miles and his brother Mark, although Miles is missing in action (literally) for a lot of the book. I struggled a bit to get into it, and actually nearly abandoned it about a fifth of the way through, at which point it had been pretty much all action sequences and bad decisions and things going terribly wrong and I wasn't sure if I wanted to carry on. I even picked up another book instead, but went back to Mirror Dance later that day, and by yesterday I found that I was completely absorbed by it and read about the last three-quarters of the book in two sittings.

I think, really, that I'd been coming at the book the wrong way. The early Miles books had set me up to expect a space-opera romp: fun, some mild peril, possibly some unpleasant-but-not-terminal violence and the regrettable deaths of a few redshirts. Mirror Dance is not a space opera romp; it's a complicated, serious novel about identity and consequences which just happens to be set in space (and on non-Earth planets). I was really struck by how much the structure and imagery echoes the mirror theme; there are lots of actual mirrors, and lots of moments which mirror back thoughts and actions from earlier in the novel (and I think from earlier books in the series, too - the central section seemed to echo Barrayar in places), which made me wish I had a paper copy and not a kindle edition so I could easily flick back and forth to check. I liked it a lot, but it wasn't the uncomplicated read I was expecting, and I think I'll need to approach the later books in a slightly different frame of mind if I want to get the most out of them.

Comments

[antisoppist]

I like Mirror Dance, but my reading order was weird because The Warrior's Apprentice was too much young bouncy Miles and spaceships and I stopped for 2 years until I happened to find Komarr in a charity shop, then read Civil Campaign and then worked backwards in loops of about three books at a time, finally ending with WA, which I could cope with by then in the light of the others. So Mirror Dance for me was more like the later ones. I can see it's a jump if you're coming at it in the other direction like you're supposed to.

novel about identity and consequences which just happens to be set in space
That's a good distinction. I wasn't a SF reader when I was young apart from Wyndham and LeGuin, which are much more books about something else that happen to be set in space/the future/somewhere else.

[white_hart]

I think all the really good SFF is basically novels about Something which happen to be set in space/have dragons/etc. Which doesn't mean that there isn't also room for the fluffy stuff.

When I read The Warrior's Apprentice I thought Miles was like Francis Crawford in space, and the first quarter of Mirror Dance actually felt a lot like the bits of Dunnett I felt I wanted to read with my eyes shut (if you see what I mean). Which is not something I dislike, but just wasn't what I was expecting!

[antisoppist]

I thought Miles was like Francis Crawford in space
That is exactly why I can't stand him in it :-) Ages ago ankaret said young Miles might give me "an attack of the Lymonds", by which she means "run away screaming after one chapter" and she was very right. It is good for novelists that we are all different.

[alithea]

Lymond is a good comparison actually. The series has the same thing for me of the main character growing on me, but reading them for the secondary characters. And yes, I believe Bujold is another Dunnett fan.

[perennialanna]

I am fairly sure I emailed caulkhead halfway through my first reading of The Warrior's Appearance saying pretty much "This is Francis Crawford in space and I have to keep putting my hands over my eyes to read it".

See also the bomb on the tube train episode of Sherlock. That was Francis Crawford in a fancy coat.