Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold

[rowyn]

This is an enormously painful book; unlike most of the Vorkosigan books, I remembered significant sections of it with uncomfortable clarity. It's not so a matter of implausibility or coincidence in the action, but just that a lot of the events are agonizing. Even knowing how it would resolve was not enough to buffer against the rawness of it. It's an important book, but I was tempted to skip it just for it being so full of horror. I read it again anyway, and it does have a nicely satisfying denoument, so there's that. I am only giving this one a 5, though. I don't think I'll be reading it again.

Next up is Memory, which I don't particularly recall. I think I'll finish the ninth Aubrey/Maturin novel first, Treason's Harbour, first -- I'm around halfway through it already.

Comments

[mrw42.livejournal.com]

Do you have a list of all of the Vorkosigan books in order? I am not sure I have read all of them, and I read them out of order, so it might be interesting to go back and do them again...

[rowyn]

Wikipedia's got the list in internal chronological order, which is what I've been going by. Although I started re-reading with the first Cordelia novel instead of the two earlier stories that are in the same setting but have none of the characters. :)

[zeeth_kyrah]

Next up is Memory, which I don't particularly recall.

Ironic, that..

[rowyn]

It is! My recollection of most of the books has been pretty poor -- even Mirror Dance had a number of surprises for me that I didn't remember, and I remembered more of it than most.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I liked Mirror Dance, and I might rank it a bit higher than a 5, but not a lot higher. The bits with Miles having to do detective work on his own memories to figure out who he is (and how many people he is) made up for the torture porn, and Mark's "black gang" metaphor works for me way better than I thought it would.

I do remember Memory. Very, very fondly. So fondly that, frankly, having read the books after it (except for the most recent), I really, really feel like Memory should have been the series finale and she should have started another wormhole-nexus series introducing all new characters. For one thing, Auditor Miles is just way, way less interesting than either Lieutenant Miles or Admiral Miles. Remember how the first book-length story's title is a pun on Disney's version of The Sorceror's Apprentice? None of the books since, well, maybe since the end of Borders of Infinity, has that same madcap pacing that I so enjoyed, nor Miles' previously nearly endless reserves of charm and enthusiasm. Yes, it's realistic that (especially after the disaster that happens to him at the beginning of Mirror Dance) Miles grows up and grows old. But realistic isn't, in this case, good story-telling.

[rowyn]

IIRC -- I haven't re-read the others yet, so I don't know if this will still hold true -- I actually preferred the later and less madcap books. A Civil Campaign was my favorite. But there's certainly a lot of charm in the crazy forward momentum of The Warrior's Apprentice, and I can see how other people would enjoy it more.

I liked the "black gang", and the way Mark gets to save himself (and in a very real sense, Miles). The torture-porn was pretty bad. I found an interesting contrast between the extreme horrors of what Mark endures in Mirror Dance versus what happened to Cazaril (viewed in flashbacks) in The Curse of Chalion. Caz's experience have this chillingly normal quality to them -- he gets worse than most, but it's still within the realm of punishments that get meted out to recalcitrant slaves. And the effects of the trauma feel likewise believable. Mirror Dance is so over-the-top that I can't even frame a reference for it, by contrast. It's very different.

But it's not just the torture-porn that I found painful -- almost all of the sequences with Mark as viewpoint character (and that's, what, 2/3rds of the book?) were just not fun for me. His brief command of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries was excruciating, and even on Barryar where nothing bad is about to happen to him, it's painful. I don't mean "badly written" or "implausible" -- it's just his misery, distrust, and self-loathing do not make for a pleasant read to me. This is, admittedly, shallow of me, but I'm pretty shallow and escapist with my reading in general. Miles's sections are a positive relief by contrast.

[alltoseek]

Re the Mirror Dance torture porn: When I embarked on a re-read of Vorko, I was planning to skip Mirror Dance precisely because of the awful horror of it. But I went ahead and re-read it anyway. Then I discovered that while the torture occupies about 90% of the mental space of the book, it's only like one paragraph (the worst of it) in the printed page. Maybe a couple pages total, if you count various references that are more-or-less off screen or merely hinted at.

It's true that Mark is pretty dismal as a pov character. But it's really remarkable that he turned out as well as he did. Unbelievable, if you know anything about childhood trauma (especially the long term type with all sorts of colorful variations); tho possibly his early childhood was halfway decent? Hard to imagine what kind of people would raise kids for slaughter, or what kind of upbringing they'd give the kid. Really weird. And things only got worse from there.

But really, the whole Mark plot arc makes even less sense than Barrayar's regression to medieval times. I mean, absolutely no fucking way. And the amount of time and money poured into the project - a pure vanity project with next to no hope of succeeding and no hope at all of benefiting Komarr in any way. Who would even come up with it? It makes no sense.

Plot is actually not at all one of Bujold's strong points. I was going to make a list of plot holes in Vorkoverse but I gave up when I realized the very first page of the very first book (Shards of Honor) contains a giant gaping one.

It's forward momentum that carries the series over them - don't ever give your adversaries readers a chance to think too much, that's the ticket *g*