Recent Reading: The Goblin Emperor

[rocky41_7]

I first read The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison last year, but I never got around to reviewing it, in part because I didn't know what to say about it. My friends had loved it, and while I'd found it enjoyable, I was still percolating on what I liked (or didn't!) about it. Listening to The Witness for the Dead, a book in the same universe, got me thinking about TGE again, so this month I gave it a re-read. This time, it all clicked.

 

This book is truly such an enjoyable read. The basics of Maia's tale are not unfamiliar—a seeming nobody is thrust into a position of power no one ever expected them to have—but Addison puts her own fascinating spin on it. It has the same feeling I got from The Witness for the Dead, where the story prioritizes doing the right thing and many if not most of the characters in it are striving to be good people (whatever that means for them). It makes a nice contrast to the very selfish, dark fantasy where you know from the start every character is just in it for themselves (and I do enjoy those too, not to say one is better than other!) The protagonist Maia in particular is put in any number of positions where he could misuse his power for personal gratification—such as imprisoning or executing his abusive former guardian, Setheris—but he, with conscious effort, chooses differently. That is not the kind of person—not the kind of emperor—Maia wants to be. And honestly—there is very gratifying fantasy, particularly today, in the idea of someone obtaining power and being committed to some kind of principles of proper governance, of having some code of honor above their own personal enrichment.

 

As a longtime Tolkien fan, Addison's focus on fantasy titles and linguistics was delightful to me, even if it kept me flipping back to the opening pages on pronunciations (adored the use of the formal singular "we" and the you/thou differentiation). The various layers of manners, societal expectations, customs, and practicalities with which Addison builds up the elven court makes for such a rich and realistic picture of a fantasy court. You can just imagine how the court's current processes built up over centuries, and Addison does a great job of using the characters around Maia—who are far more familiar with these things—to help define them. Not through infodumping, but through their own reactions and behavior, which create a firm outline of customs and expectations with which Maia and the reader are completely unfamiliar.

And Addison's characters stand out. She pays particular attention to giving details or characterization even to passing minor characters, which serves both to flesh out the court, and to indicate the attention Maia pays to those around him. While a reader—particularly a first-time reader—may be a little baffled by the jumble of fantasy names, I doubt anyone will be mistaking Cala for Beshelar for Kiru, even though they all serve the same function within the story (Maia's ever-present bodyguards). It's clear what a three-dimensional picture she has of this world in her own mind, and I think she does a wonderful job of letting the reader in on that picture.

They're all layered, too. Despite Maia's efforts to be good, he's not a perfect person—he has his own selfish and childish impulses to reign in. Two characters who would have been the easiest for Addison to paint black and white—Maia's father, Varenechibel, who exiled Maia's then-17-year-old mother from court because he disliked her—and Maia's guardian from age eight, his drunkard cousin Setheris—she instead takes time to show had other sides, too. Even the heart of the conspiracy to down the airship whose crash instigates Maia's rise to power by killing everyone else who would have taken the throne before him is given sympathy and rationality, never made into simple hateful caricatures whose downfall we can cheer unreservedly. 


I was further charmed by the eventual choice of Maia's future empress, who is allowed to be both passionate and flawed, and who is specifically noted to be physically unattractive. Fantasy as much as romance is often filled to the brim with heart-stoppingly beautiful princesses and queens and warrior women, so it's always nice to see something else. This empress to be may not be beautiful, but I do believe she's the best woman for the job, and that she, like Maia, will do her best.

Then there's the politics! I've said it before, I'll go on saying it: I love fantasy politics. All the fun and thrill of politics with none of the real-world stakes or consequences! I've seen this book described (lovingly) as a story where "nothing happens," but much of what's happening is politics. Maia is not only dropped into a role he wasn't remotely prepared for—he's dropped into a group of people all of whom had/have their own goals and schemes ongoing, and a significant part of Maia's introduction to court is having to figure these things out. Just as there are many keen to rid themselves of an inexperienced and potentially useless emperor, there are many equally eager to find a way to make a potentially pliable and ignorant emperor sing their tune. Addison's writing is very strong here; she balances a number of factions within various parts of the court, and their roles and positions are logical and believable. In fact, one of Maia's strongest skills proves to be his ability to trace a person's opinion or attitude down to its root, and then use that to reach understanding with them.

On the whole, this is such a lovely book, and I'm so glad I bought the copy I have so that it was available for a quick re-read. I will definitely read it again in the future, and I will proceed with the rest of the trilogy about Thara Celehar (who appears here as a side character). I just love the world that Addison has created, and I want to live in it a little longer if I can.

Crossposted to booknook 

  

 

 

 

 

Comments

[labingi]

I'm reading The Goblin Emperor right now, and I need to do my own post about it, but I'll just spill a few off-the-cuff thoughts here. In a word, while I understand why people like it--you express it well above--I don't understand why people love it, and I am flabbergasted that it swept all the major awards.

Disclaimer 1: This book was recced to me on DW when I was asking for "escapist" reading that would get my mind off our current world. It has done that; it was a 100% appropriate and successful rec in that sense, and my gratitude goes to those who recced it.

Disclaimer 2: As I write this, I'm about 5/6 of the way through the book.

As far as I can see, the book has these virtues, which you explain well in more detail above:

* It foregrounds people trying to do good and this is a relief and change of pace.
* It understands/presents how politics works well.
* It goes against many stereotypes of fantasy.

I agree with all that, and all those factors are probably why I will read the whole book and am decently enjoying it chapter by chapter. But here are some of the places I'm stuck:

* It has no plot in the conventional sense: a bewildering array of events, but there's no real rising or falling action. It's like the Picaresque if its vignettes were not about heroes getting in fun scrapes but about a beleaguered boy having to do politics. (I don't generally like Picaresque stories, so maybe that's only a problem for me.)

* It has no (real) character arcs. I think nominal arc is "Maia learns how to cope as emperor," but Maia 90% knew how to do that on page 10 and spends the book acquiring knowledge and a bit more confidence but undergoing no real change.

* Maia doesn't make psychological sense as a character. He was raised in appalling circumstances with the only significant good influence being his mother, who died when he was eight, yet he grows up to be almost saintly and an instinctive political virtuoso by age 18 with no significant character flaws from ten years of trauma. (Yes, he's not perfect, but showing an occasional flare of anger or bitterness--while welcome--is not exploring a psyche.) Compare, for example, Winter's Orbit, which does a nice job depicting the weird kinds of behaviors abuse survivors develop as coping mechanisms. Maia has nothing like this. I'd argue his political acumen at the start could not exist. He was mentally too young at eight to learn it from his mother, and he wouldn't be learning the people-reading, empathetic bits from Setheris.

* None of the other characters are fleshed out (though I agree they are realistic and differentiable). The closest second to Maia for development is probably Setheris, who has a character sketch I can follow. But we see so little of him that I can't feel it. This lack of development in other characters makes sense given the storytelling choices: all Maia's POV, with Maia being bombarded by hundreds of different strangers, none of whom he can get close to. That's all really plausible--but not compelling.

* Language: Addison's skill with language is amazing. This is an aspect of worldbuilding I love, but the sheer bombardment of almost identical names for dozens of characters with numerous different honorifics rapidly turns to mush in my head. (The character list in the beginning is essential but not very helpful given so little info.) Another niggle: the Goblins are a very different people, yet their names/words all feel like the same language, seem to use the same letters, have almost the same pronunciations. I don't understand that on a worldbuilding level.

/end rant.

I apologize for unloading in your thread: I understand if you wish to delete this comment. I'm glad you enjoyed it, and agree with you that one huge factor in why it's so popular is the deep desire to see characters who are good. I share that desire and utterly agree that we need more books that really foreground this.

[rocky41_7]

I think the difference between a "like" and a "love" is probably very personal, so this story may just not hit the right beats for you that it does for me, or for other people who loved it.

It has no plot in the conventional sense You're not wrong! This is why I assume people frequently describe it as a book where nothing happens. But this doesn't bother me. The fact that there's no overarching plot outside of Maia learning to be emperor works just fine for me.

It has no (real) character arcs. I would disagree that Maia's learned how to be emperor early on in the book. I think he continues to struggle with his own ignorance and inability to balance the many factions at play here much further into the novel. If you're 5/6th of the way through the novel, I'm assuming you've already reached the part about Shevean and Chavar--these things went unnoticed by Maia in part because he is still learning how to do this job and wasn't able to head off what happened before it happened.

I think part of his learning how to be emperor is also not merely the function of the job, but accepting his role: his lack of privacy, the natural isolation that comes with being THE guy in charge, never quite knowing who's trustworthy, being frequently approached by people who are nice only because they think they can get something from him. Part of the struggle is simply learning to adjust to the lifestyle of the emperor, and in some ways I think that does take him longer than adjusting to his role as a political adjudicator.

There is also his efforts to make alliances within the court. When he arrives, it's pretty clear no one wanted to see him on the throne, and his loneliness and the danger of political isolation is something that pervades most of the book. By the end, he has a number of people in his corner not merely as allies, but also as friends, and that relationship-building I would argue is something of a character arc.

Maia doesn't make psychological sense as a character. I would also disagree with this. Perhaps Maia's response is less likely, but it is certainly possible, and I didn't find it incriminatingly unlikely. By eight, a child is old enough to have constructed a certain worldview, and Chenelo obviously went out of her way to teach Maia kindness, understanding, and humility. While that could definitely be wiped away by years of Varenechibel's neglect and Setheris' abuse, it's not a certainty. And if Maia seeks to define himself in opposition to Setheris--he notes they disliked each other from the very start--then he may have positioned his mother's virtues as ways to be apart from and different from this guardian he so disliked, who comes off to Maia as mean, selfish, and arrogant.

And on a narrative level, it's simply crucial that Maia grows up to be a good person. Otherwise, the whole story falls apart. There has to be a good person to take the throne, and it has to be someone no one expected would take it. Perhaps there is also a fantasy here, realistic or not, about growing into a kind person despite abuse and neglect without needing years of therapy or unlearning toxic behavior or coping mechanisms.

I don't see him as someone with political acumen, so much as someone who's relatively good at reading people and their motivations, which is something that anyone can have a natural disposition to, although honing it would take more time and effort. He spends significant chunks of the book with no idea what his courtiers are talking about, and frequently stays silent just to avoid looking like an idiot, which is how they're able to slap him with the epithet "Edrehasivar Half-Tongue." He's being tutored both by Berenar and by Arbelan, both much older, far more experienced courtiers, and he'd be completely useless without Csevet, who is more or less running the show for much of the first I'd say half of the book. He's helped along by a number of other characters and it's by making use of their advice that he manages to get by in the court. This is where his kindness is an actively helpful attribute, I think: it makes people (some people, at least) WANT to help him, and people wanting to help you is critical in his position.

None of the other characters are fleshed out To some extent, I don't disagree. This is Maia's story and he is always at the center of it, and everyone else orbits around him (as befits an emperor, I suppose). However, I do think we get depth on many of the characters around him. For much of the book, the people around Maia are no looking to open themselves up to their emperor, which does not facilitate our as readers getting to know them. They keep a courtly distance from Maia, which often includes hiding their feelings or intentions, at least in part. But I do think we get to learn things about them that give us a more three-dimensional look at them, like Celehar's backstory, or Csethiro warming up to Maia and speaking more of her personal life and opinions, or the Avar obviously trying to do better with his family after how he treated Chenelo, or the arc of Min Vechin's relationship with Maia.

Language It can definitely be overwhelming, I completely understand why anyone would be put off by this. My first read-through I definitely ignored chunks of the language stuff because I was busy with the rest of the story. But on the whole even then it didn't bother me, and I felt like the many titles and names etc. gave flavor to the court and its customs. After reading The Silmarillion (can't have a character without at least 3 unrelated nicknames) and associated texts, I think I have a pretty high tolerance for fantasy language-building and usage XD

I know the frustration of reading a book and being baffled by how it is so popular. I do hope you enjoy the end of the book, but if you never come to love it, that's fair. Like I said in the beginning, I wasn't in love with this book the first time I finished it either. I thought it was nice, but couldn't cobble together enough to say to write a review on it. It was only on this second read that I fully came to appreciate it.

If you have other fantasy books you liked better that you would recommend, by the way, I'm all ears 👀

[labingi]

Thanks for all your engagement with my rambly rants. Here's some more ramble in response. (I'm really enjoying this by the way - I've needed an outlet for book talk, thank you.)

Re. character development and arcs: You’re right in that everything you say is there is there; I just think it could have been there more effectively. I agree the characters read as real people. They just read as real people I don’t know. By analogy, I fully believe my neighbors who I see walking their dog are real people with complex lives, but I’m not privy to the details of their lives, so I don’t have a deep sense of connection to them.

As to arcs and psychological realism, I’ll give an example of the gap between the narrative I am perceiving and where it could be. In the book, Maia has been offering friendliness to Beshelar and Cala, whom he likes, and there’s a moving bit where Cala tells him they can’t be friends, and Maia’s a bit stung/chastened and sort of thinks, “Oh, okay,” and withdraws, rapidly, if a bit sadly, readjusting his expectations to the fact that he’s never going to know these people he sees every day on familiar terms.

Here's one way this could have gone: Maia has grown up pretty much friendless. It makes sense that he would be hungry for friendship and that, with much the same external behavior we see, he builds up Beshelar and Cala in his head as people he thinks of as friends, starts to daydream about how they might be a close team as he spends years of his life with them. Then, in response the same behavior as in the book, Cala tells him they can’t be friends, and it pulls the rug out from under him because it removes the figures he’s already begun to emotionally rely on as a needy, lonely boy. But, good person and good emperor that he is, he sucks it up and (as in the book) accepts it at once, in the sense of taking deadly seriously what Cala says and living by it. But it will be a much longer journey toward acceptance in the sense of the last stage of grief. He will have to go through a grieving process—all alone—of denial, some anger, etc., being pulled up by the realization that he’s been daydreaming again about conversations they might have and chastising himself for his foolishness. Over the course of time, he does adjust until this finally fades into his acceptance that he’ll just never be close to these people, and he does start to take them for granted often as just part of the woodwork (as in the book), and, thus, learns that sad, hard lesson. That’s what I’m missing when I say there’s a lack of character development and arc.

Re. Other Books
I wish I had a good fantasy rec for you. I am terribly hard to please as a reader, which leads to a vicious cycle of not my reading very many newish works. (Side bar/plug: This is one reason I’m working on an advanced search tool for fiction, but it’s in the very early conceptual stages.)

I can offer some comparisons, but they virtually are all unfair, being to famous, old works. The exception is Winter’s Orbit, which I don’t exactly recommend; I think The Goblin Emperor is better, but I do think WO writes the psychological toll of abuse better, and its chief abuse victim is a Very Good Person. I have written commentary on it here. Rereading this, I see I complained about the writing of abuse there too though! (The post is locked because I didn’t want to send out public negativity about the author. Glad to give you access, but if you’d rather not, I’d be glad to cut and paste it for you in a PM.)

Okay, some unfair comparisons:

Dune – TGE makes me think of Dune in that it’s an adult book focused on an adolescent ruler who is amazing. Dune sells this to me where TGE doesn’t because Dune explains very clearly why Paul is amazing (eugenics, massive training from early life, etc.). Now, Maia is not meant to be amazing on the level of Paul, but I would have welcomed more discussion of why he is the way he is. For example...

The Brothers Karamazov - Maia reminds me of no literary figure as much as Alyosha from TBK. They are both late teens who are essentially presented as “modern saints.” They are both, in my opinion, relatively static characters, as their saintly role model status somewhat demands. Both learn stuff and grow, but neither fundamentally shifts from insightful, empathetic, paragon of virtue. Now, comparison to Dostoevsky is utterly unfair. That acknowledged, Alyosha (whom I adore) works better for me for two reasons:

1) The book explains why he is as he is. He also has a wonderful mother who dies when he’s small. He also has a screwed up, abusive figure in his life (Dad), who has impacted him, but, in addition, he is raised by another family that is pretty normal and gives him a basis for psychological stability. Then as a teen, he connects with the Elder Zosima, who introduces him to the monastic life and deeper religious morality. This collection of forces, plus native personality, make sense for shaping him. With Maia, it feels to me like pieces are missing.

2) Alyosha, like Maia, makes a weird protagonist as a largely static character, so weird that Dostoevsky has to tell us in a preface that he is the protagonist, lest we think it’s brothers Ivan or Dmitri, who have more typical arcs. The narrative works, I think, because of the interplay between the three of them, and the fact that Ivan and Dmitri have clearer arcs allows for story movement with Alyosha as a foil, but he is a very morally powerful, memorable foil. Maia has to carry the whole book himself, which is a tall order for a largely static character (I do maintain he's largely static in the fundamentals and/or the shift the text is going for is not much emphasized/explored).

3) More on writing Very Good People convincingly. Oh, I agree we need more of these. Utterly unfair comparison 3 is The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien can write cardboard characters with the best of them, but he can also write nuanced psychological realism when he wants to, which he does with Frodo, Sam, and Bilbo. I’ll pick on Frodo. Frodo is a Very Good Person from start to finish, but he’s complex and interesting. Here’s my take on why.

Frodo was shaped, I think, by having an intense trauma in his youth within the context of a loving, healthy, and secure family in a healthy, secure society. The trauma was his parents sudden death in a boating accident, compounded by his being an only child and the only Baggins in a sea of Brandybucks, which necessarily isolated him in his loss. However, it’s clear that his Brandybuck relations loved and accepted him, while the Shire itself is a stable society, well-balanced with nature, where even the poorest have food and shelter and the richest are not so rich as to be divided from daily interaction with the common people. Pre-War, there’s essentially no precarity, no real insecurity. And, of course, Frodo is then adopted by Bilbo, with whom he has a warm and close connection.

As a result of all this, he grows up to be a well-adjusted, emotionally secure, mature person who is neither inflated nor self-flagellating in his sense of self, who is conscientious and compassionate, and who knows how to love and knows himself to be loved. And he also grows up at arm’s length from most hobbits (partly down to native introversion), slightly avoidant in his attachment patterns and agile in rapidly adjusting to having his whole world ripped out from under him (verging at times into a tendency toward hopelessness). I think the reasons he’s able to agree to exile himself from the Shire with the Ring within, like, a couple hours of talking to Gandalf are threefold: 1) his true conscientiousness and love for the Shire; 2) the agency of the Ring, which makes him inclined to stick with it; 3) that ability to rapidly accept radical loss, which he learned from the death of his parents. I could go on, but I’ll stop and say, this is a nuanced, psychologically realistic representation of a Very Good Person. Of course, I’ve had 45 years to think about Frodo, and not Maia, so I am certainly missing textual details.

Anyway, that's some of where I'm coming from. Thanks for the chance to hold forth.

[labingi]

One other unfair comparison--and I'm not saying TGE should have done this. It's a move for a totally different story purpose but a good example of doing something compelling with characters the protagonist/POV character can't get close to: C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces.

Here, we have a "Good Lieutenant" figure who serves the protagonist faithfully for most of their lives. In the end (vague to avoid spoilers), she realizes that there was a whole side to his life she never saw, and it really packs a punch. The moral of the story is that she was too absorbed in her own troubles/self-pity to think deeply about his life. That's almost the opposite of TGE purpose; it couldn't have done this move. But it's a great example of using just a sliver of exposure to a non-POV character to pack a strong narrative punch. What it has, that TGE might use more of, is a sharp turn: from anything to anything, I almost don't care what.

[rocky41_7]

Sure thing, that's what this group is for, right? I started writing and posting reviews because it forced me to really think about what I'd read, and this is similar.

I see what you mean about this particular arc of Maia's, but I would also suggest that something of what you propose does exist already within the book--that is, I feel, the reason why Cala's words echo in the narrative. On at least two or three occasions after, Maia explicitly thinks of that statement "We cannot be your friend," usually when he's feeling lonely already or rebuffed by someone else. I think the process of accepting this state of affairs does take time--and it does come up again, hoping not to give any spoilers, before the end of the book.

I do have to agree these comparisons are somewhat unfair; I'm not here to claim TGE is great literature by any means! Just a fun book that I personally enjoyed.

I can't argue that TGE is anywhere on par with Tolkien; Frodo IS far more layered and complex than Maia, but LOtR is also a masterpiece of English fantasy lit. TGE is telling a much smaller story in a much simpler way. I think the development of Maia's confidence is a part of the story, as well as his settling into and growing into his role, and having to think about the kind of emperor he wants to be, but yes, he does undergo less character change and development than Frodo.

[labingi]

Sorry for a late reply. You make me reflect on a quirk of mine as a reader. I don't expect every work of fiction to be a masterpiece, but I do have a few different buckets I slot my SF&F reading into:

* For intellectual edification
* Ecological fiction (a subset of the above that I've studied academically)
* For catharsis

The last is my "for fun" reading, and I almost never find it fun if it doesn't give me a strong cathartic hit (in the Aristotelian sense): that's what I'm there for. This means my expectations for it are, in some ways, weirdly high--although, this category also encompasses a few works I love though they are bad on multiple levels (ex. Ai no Kusabi, The Vampire Armand). The bad (or not great) works that make this cut tend to be works with poor sentence-level writing, plotting, worldbuilding, etc. but something really deep and powerful about characters and relationships. For me TGE is kind of the opposite: good writing, (plot is not super relevant), worldbuilding, mild hit off the characters. This is, of course, a matter of taste.

Anyway, synchronicity has shown up to inform me that I can do book review lists on Bookshop.org, so I've started putting one together, which might partly fill your earlier request for rec's to titles I endorse, not all of which are major classics or world-class lit.

[rocky41_7]

No worries, I firmly believe in absolving ourselves of the responsibility of responding immediately to every message we get. No rush here!

This is true, I think we all have those books/movies/games that we know aren't necessarily GOOD work, but they scratch something particular in your brain. I certainly have some things that I enjoy that I wouldn't recommend to others.

I will definitely take a look at your list, I'm always happy to get recommendations. I can already see you have some great stuff on here--TLOD is one of my all-time favs (*^▽^*)