Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Bujold)

[cahn]

3/5. I was too unenthused to buy it or even to put it on hold at the library, but interested enough to check it out once it appeared on the New Books shelf at the library. And, I mean, it was fine? I had been thoroughly warned about the Babieeeees theme and the Bujold Thinks She Can Do Romance theme and the This Has No Plot property, so those didn't bother me overmuch.

In fact, the only people who are crazy about babieeees are Cordelia and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Jole, which I think makes a certain amount of sense in both cases. Cordelia makes a lot of sense; in canon she has always desperately wanted loads of kids, and if I'd spent 20+ years in a limbo where I desperately wanted kids but couldn't have them now but there was, like, this chance that I could have them later, I'd be… a little crazy. (In fact, I was a little crazy, and it was only, like, a year or two. 20+ years, even with a much greater lifespan and a bigger chance of success at the end, is not something I want to think about.) I'd seen a spoiler that said disgustedly that there was talk of Mark and Kareen having kids, but as far as I could tell it was mostly Cordelia thinking wistfully and greedily about it; it seems clear to me that Mark and Kareen are not telling her anything (and rightfully so) about their reproductive plans, or lack thereof.

So what no one warned me about (although I had been warned, now that I look back at my flist, that it was deeply boring, which I agree with and which is, I think, related) is how the main characters have… basically… no character, which is kind of a problem when your whole book depends on the reader buying the romance between them. Jole in particular is just incredibly bland. Here are the things I now know about Jole:

1. He has blue eyes. Really bright blue, you guys. No, really blue. As blue as Alexander Hamilton's. So blue that even I, who regularly skip over descriptive words and phrases, noticed it at about the tenth time it was mentioned. Also he is tall. And greying blond. These descriptors are also repeated at fairly regular intervals.

2. He likes boats. Because he takes Cordelia sailing once in the book, and [mild spoiler]. I mean… I think this may have been a little better set up than I'm giving it credit for (I did read this while trying to run herd on two kiddos and house chores), but I got the sense that Bujold wanted to give him A Well-Rounded Interest, and this was it, without really thinking about it more closely.

3. He likes… zoology, or something? I am actually not really quite sure about this one (is it biology in general? zoology in particular? or does he just think looking for new species is cool? which are sort of conflated in the text). So as far as I can tell, the principal pieces of evidence for this are (a) he thinks the sea life on the aforementioned boat trip is kinda neat — even though, I might add, he has never apparently noticed it before (the in-text reason given is that the hull is clear on this boat, but… seriously, he's never looked over the side of a boat and seen the Sergyan equivalent of fish or dolphins, and been interested enough to watch them for a while and see how they behave?? And we're supposed to buy that he is really into animals??) and (b) he tells a professor of biology that he's read his papers. We never actually see him reading said papers, mind you, or applying the concepts to… anything… I don't know, I just wasn't at all convinced by it. I was especially not convinced that it was a large enough interest that it could drive the ending the way it does.

That's it. That's what I know about the guy. He doesn't seem to have friends except one guy at work whom he sort of vaguely talks to about his hypothetical kids (okay, those part were really great! More of that! More, dare I say it, characterization!) — in fact, I feel like this guy, General Haines, who appears in several scenes but is definitely a rather minor character, was more fleshed-out than Jole, I got much more of a sense of what he actually thought about things, how he'd react to something, than I did about Jole. I would happily have read a lot more conversations with him!

And then there's Cordelia. Cordelia herself is kind of low on character, which is weird… I mean… in the last several books she's kind of swooped in as Betan Counselor As To How People Should Run Their Lives Extraordinaire. And, well, she's in that job again, and that's it, amen… I think part of the problem is that Jole is so incredibly bland that all their interactions are kind of… well… bland. Also, she is even lower on people to interact with who aren't Jole. I would looooove to have the scenes where she and Alys talk about Jole, or she and some Sergyar friend… does she have any Sergyar friends? Where are they? I mean, hasn't she been there for a really long time?

There were some parts that were great and rang very true, like the bit where Cordelia says about Jole's talking about his potential news of being a parent at work, "You may find out you've joined a club you never knew existed." (Yeah — this absolutely happened to us; our work social circle, for example, shifted dramatically once we had kids; not just because of that, but it was certainly the catalyst). And every time Ekaterin communicated anything (especially nonverbally) was pure gold. But these moments were relatively rare.

There's also a LOT of exposition about what happened in previous books, most of which didn't really seem all that relevant to me. If you knew what happened, then you didn't need the exposition, and if you didn't, it didn't seem to me like it would really add much, most of the time. (It concurrently suffered from Flashbackitis, which I've seen a couple of times lately in other contexts, except that there wasn't even any plot payoff to it.)

I also really want the fic where Cordelia realizes, after having two or three kids, that she can't, actually, deal with six hyperactive little gits, and what she does with the fertilized eggs she's saving once she realizes that. And/or where Cordelia and Jole decide they're great, er, romantic buddies, but terrible co-parents. Now that, I think, would be a very interesting book!

Comments

[thistleingrey]

The positive aspects I've heard about this book have to do with the sense of aging and consequent changes in personal priorities. I don't know--despite that, your review is kind of the last nail in my inclination not to read it at all. (Plenty else tbr.) Thanks? :)

[cahn]

Yeah... I mean... I can see that... Jole, especially, is grappling with a lot of these questions. (Cordelia's grappling with these questions has mostly been done off-screen.) But I feel like the changes are made with pretty minimal angst -- so spoilers, since you're not going to read: Jole angsts over whether to take a promotion or have some babiiiies, and after a couple of weeks of thinking about it in between having hot sex with Cordelia, eventually chooses the latter, with a career change from military to zoology surveying. It's all very neat and pat, and also (to me, at least) not very well motivated.

This is honestly the first Bujold book I've ever read that I had trouble getting through because of being bored. I've had my share of problems with her books, but at least I've always found them compulsively readable. This one, not so much.

[thistleingrey]

Well, specifically, a few readers I know who're aged 55+ seem to have liked it better than all the 55- readers of my acquaintance put together, and it doesn't help that the 55+ ones had comments like, "People probably won't understand it till they're older." I dunno. (I have always been older artificially--not to my advantage!--yet I don't know why having or wanting to have a biological legacy, in particular, should suddenly come into sharp relief when one feels sunset approaching more nearly.) Anyway, characters capable of having hot sex are not really older in the sunset way in which chronic pain precludes some things . . . and all of these things are orthogonal to the patness that most 55- readers of my acquaintance have mentioned.

Suspect as far as data sampling goes, is all. :) ETA I realize that that's particularly unclear--I mean that I wonder a bit to what extent the book's narrative(s) have become a handy object of projection for some readers, partly perhaps because having older characters want and take action upon anything at all is sadly rare.

[cahn]

Yeah, I mean, the book does get props for having older characters who go after what they want, which as you note is really rare -- and I think that's great! I even don't mind it being relatively easy to get what they want (hey, it happens sometimes in real life) -- but the way in which it was easy seemed... just not very emotionally realistic to me. I mean, no one I know has found it really quite that easy to have kids and give up or change careers to do so, for example.

On the larger theme of projection -- I also can say that there are lots of bits to the book that I appreciated as a parent that I wouldn't have understood and/or appreciated before trying for/having kids -- there are a lot of (second-hand) observations and thoughts about parenting that I found interesting and telling but that my childless-not-interested-in-children-25-year-old-self wouldn't have. And yet... lack of character is still boring for all that.

I am certainly looking at it from a 55- point of view, but my observation has been that 55+ people of my acquaintance don't so much want a biological legacy as kids as they want to have grandkids which they don't have to full-time raise themselves :) I think that's one of the reasons why Cordelia's six-kid family didn't quite gel with me... I get that she feels cheated out of having the multiple-kids experience (I know our experiences here differ, but it was something that I really wanted to have and would have been really disappointed if I couldn't have), but six...

Anyway! I think that there definitely are a lot of interesting ideas in there that could have been explored much more thoroughly; it's the lack of thoroughness of the exploration that annoys me, not the ideas themselves.

[thistleingrey]

my observation has been that 55+ people of my acquaintance don't so much want a biological legacy as kids as they want to have grandkids which they don't have to full-time raise themselves :)

YES, absolutely. I think it must work differently for Betans given expectations of continued vitality past, say, sixty or seventy--but then the nostalgia and reflection ought to work differently than it does for mainstream US culture(s?), and it doesn't sound as though it does. Arrgh, I dunno.

With a different co-parent and with having begun a bit earlier, I would have liked two, but without both those things together, there's no chance of it. :)

Noted re: lack of thoroughness--that does seem to be a key, alas.

[cahn]

Yes, if one takes Cordelia to be, oh, in her mid-40's in mainstream-2016-US culture (Jole says in the book that she looks about 50, so that's maybe not so far of a stretch), I could see the theme of "okay, gotta take my dreams and really go for them, because I'm not getting any younger." But yes, it then feels like the other emotional reactions are a little off. (Also! Six! I can't get over that, clearly.)

Still, I would have loved the book about Cordelia as a meddling grandmother and all the tensions as a result -- pressuring Mark and Kareen to have kids, figuring out how much she could meddle in the grandkids' lives...

[morbane]

I got it out of the library, but gave up after two chapters because I was really not interested in the things the book thought I should be interested in. It seems like that was the right decision - for me, anyway! I admit that after seeing some reviews, I picked it up not hoping to enjoy it on its own merits, but to enjoy boggling over it. To its credit, GJRQ was not that kind of entertaining, either.

I had a bit of a problem with Ivan and the love interest in CVA, too - that is, similar to what you describe for Jole and Cordelia here, of low characterisation - one of a few reasons I didn't get very far into that either. Ah well.

[cahn]

Yeah, that was probably the right decision :) I'm not sorry I read it, but mostly in terms of closure than in terms of because it was worth reading on its own merits. If I had never read a Vorkosigan book before, I wouldn't have gotten through it.

So I didn't think the problem with Tej was so much low characterization as it was characterization that didn't make any sense to me in the larger worldbuilding Bujold does (used to do?) so well. I mean, sure, your heroine is bright-eyed and bushytailed and idealistic and impressed by Barrayan authority, okay... but... in that case maybe don't make her from Jackson's Whole?

[wendelah1]

Without enthusiasm, I put a hold at my library for this book but I'm still waiting for it. The premise wasn't promising but I've at least enjoyed her other books to the point of being able to finish them. Some of them I've loved and reread many times. I loved A Civil Campaign.

It's been a long time since I've read the books specifically about Cordelia so I didn't remember the part about her wanting more children. I assume her not having more kids with Aral was predicated on the impact of another heir to his title? Once Miles is ensconced as Count Vorkosigan, she just...goes for it?

[metaphortunate]

Yes; the thing about the kids is one of the heartbreaking little bits of plot/character that Bujold used to do with these characters so well. Miles explains at one point to someone from off-planet that because of his birth defects, if the Count had had any other children, the pressure to disinherit Miles would have been unbearable. So...they just didn't have any.

And when you think about Cordelia being wooed to Barrayar specifically with the promise of being able to have her own baseball team's worth of kids...ouch.

[cahn]

*nods* I'd forgotten Miles was the one who actually talked about it. Poor Cordelia :(

[cahn]

Yeah, what metaphortunate said. It always made me very sad for her :(

I loved Civil Campaign too! Memory will always be my favorite, but Civil Campaign is definitely way up there.

I have to say that this is the only Bujold I've ever read that I actually thought was boring. I've had issues with other of her books, big issues with a couple (hi Sharing Knife!), but they were always very absorbing.

[metaphortunate]

Well....dammit.

[cahn]

Yeah. It was very disappointing, in a way I feel like I have never felt about a Bujold book before, even the ones that other people didn't really like. I kind of see the bones of what she was trying to do, and there were some good bits where they flashed through, but mostly... not so much.

I wish that she had been able to really commit to writing domestic chicklit (which is what I got the sense this wanted to be but never actually became), because I would have been all over that -- Cordelia figuring out how to deal with baby sibling rivalry and a new romance and relationships with her daughters-in-law while going on girl nights out with Alys and Sergyan friends? That would have been awesome!

[ase]

It's so... so... so bland. Should we have children? Should we have a party? These two questions have roughly the same narrative tension. It doesn't speak to me.

[cahn]

HA. I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're right!

Just -- it really does have a lot of good ideas in it, but there's no exploration of those ideas! It wouldn't have to be super angst like Memory or anything. I would be fine with chicklit-level exploration of relatively minor problems -- but I felt like we didn't even get that. It's really a little sad that in my head I'm thinking "this wants to be chicklit... but it doesn't quite get there."

[thistleingrey]

Have you seen this contextualization? For once, I'd say, read the comments as well.... I think it's notable that it must be called contextualization and not analysis of the most recent book itself, but hey.

[cahn]

Thanks for the link! That was really very interesting. (And for the suggestion to read the comments, which otherwise I would not have done.) You know, after reading that and thinking about it some more... I do really like the idea (as I sort of said above) that Cordelia goes after what she wants, and that what she wants has changed, or at least changed priority. And I really like that Bujold writes those things. I loved Paladin of Souls for this reason -- although I suppose it helped that Paladin had a plot :)

I think most of what I object to is that the way in which it's emotionally very easy seems not to ring true to me. Compare Paladin, again, where the actual romance is in fact pretty easy, but it's in the backdrop of letting go of a lot of emotional turmoil, and acceptance of her own personality and role in the world, which happens during the course of the book. In Red Queen, all of this has happened off-stage or is going to happen once these kids all show up, which doesn't... leave much to happen during the actual book.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, the distinction makes sense. And Cordelia has a staff to help with the tedious or overwhelming-at-once parts....

For me, the sense that I'm unlikely to read GJ&RQ has to do with an increasing gap between what the books are interested in and what I'm interested in, since Cryoburn or so. My loss, I imagine.