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I'm about 3/4 done with Evil for Evil, the second book in the Engineer Trilogy. It's a very compelling read, with excellent characters and a fascinating story, but it's so bleak, it's getting to be difficult to read.
It reminds me a little bit of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in that it is a character study in the dark side of humanity - whenever people are in desperate, hopeless situations, they can only count on the small joys, amidst the overwhelming darkness of life and human nature.
It's a good read, but it has such an undertone of hopelessness and futility, it's tough to go on sometimes.
I'm recommending it, provisionally, and wondering if anyone else has finished the series, and what you think about it.
Please note any possible spoilers, thanks.
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I have a copy of Devices and Desires sitting on my book shelf. I was about half way done when I stopped. Reading it is a hard slog, not very enjoyable.
See I don't want to read about people only counting on the small joys in a bleak life, If I want to be miserable I'll just go back to work. (Not that I only want to read books about abnormally happy people, but they publish x books and I only read y so as long as x>y I'll just stop if I don't like something.)
[edit: I one day hope to learn to spell like a real person.]
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Woah. K.J.Parker is MY non de plume! It's my first two initials and my grandmother's maiden name, and I've been using it for ages! She has my name!
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Curiously, I'm also 3/4th through Evil for Evil (so there's nothing in here that should spoil you, but there might potentially be things that would spoil other people). I'm very much enjoying it, but I can also see why a lot of people wouldn't. I'm struggling to think of friends to recommend it to. One review I read called it a "literary abattoir," which I think is pretty accurate.
I don't think I'll have all my thoughts in order until I get to the end of the series, but I'm dying to babble about it anyway. Some things I've noted along the way:
Especially in Devices and Desires, Parker likes to have one character thinking about a piece of information they're absolutely sure is true, then switching immediately to another viewpoint that proves the previous viewpoint character was dead wrong. I find it amusing, but I'm wondering how other people take the technique.
Two scenes I found interesting in Evil for Evil: when Ziani thinks that Daurenja is like an evil spirit in a story, but takes his bargain knowing full well how the story always ends, and when Miel compares Framian and his daughter to the wizard with a beautiful daughter in stories, tells himself it will be nothing like that in reality, but goes back anyway and ends up falling in love (for the book's definition of love, anyway). I'm not quite sure how to articulate my thoughts on this, but it seems like Parker is trying to make a point about how we (fail to) use narrative and fiction to guide our lives. The whole series being as bleak as it is seems to make a wider point about fiction being a useless moral guidepost. It's curious that almost all the books we see characters reading are allegories.
Daurenja in general is interesting. Every other character considers him a "freak" and a "monster," in some cases before interacting with him at all, but on an "objective" level it can be argued that nothing he's done is worse than what several other characters have done. Miel comes close to making that comparison when he remembers that Ziani killed two guards to escape (which Ziani is mainly shown as being baffled but accepting of), remembers his own murder of two guards to escape (which he feels guilty about but justifies), and then considers Daurenja's murder of four guards to help him escape--but he ends the comparison by still being horrified of Daurenja's murder without any real consideration of why. Is Daurenja a literary scapegoat, there to make other characters look "good" by comparison, or is he there to show just how good all the other characters are at not looking in (metaphorical) mirrors?
There's a bit about how Daurenja is monstrous because he thinks people are like machines in the sense of being easily fixable. This reads to me like something of a critique of how many authors treat there characters--"oh, they're traumatized, I'll introduce a love interest, now everything's good again!" It's also interesting in contrast to Ziani, who also thinks of people as machines but never shows any interest in fixing them once broken.
The fact that traitor to the Mezentines is named Mezentius, and that his treachery is revealed almost as soon as he's introduced, also seems like a critique on other authors, in this case of those that try to build tension by artificially concealing relatively simple bits of information. Except Parker is also guilty of this: there's the whole matter of who Ariessa is getting letters from.
Psellus's relationship with Ziani is in some ways the least destructive "love" we see. I'll be interested to see what damage it does (or doesn't) end up wreaking in the last book.
A lot of the stuff about the Mezentines' war with the Eremians reads to me as a pretty aggressive critique of the current war with Iraq, but that could just be my biases seeping in.
Whoops. That was more babbling than I intended....
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I finished Evil for Evil last night, and was overall satisfied. Lots of bad stuff, but some good resolution on a few fronts, plus some interesting new elements which make me want to read the final book.
Luthe: I am with you on giving up on books - if I don't enjoy reading something, I move on to the next book in my ever-growing pile as well. For some reason, these books make me want to keep reading though. They're bleak, but I feel that there is a message of hope within them.
I think the reminder is that we don't have to treat people like machines, and that we each make choices every day which rule our destinies, and which we could change if we spent a little more time deciding how we want to live, instead of how we feel we ought to live.
They're certainly though-provoking, and the characters are fascinating, even if just as a study in how not to live, although they're much more complex than that.
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ambyr: I would go so far as to say that Daurenja is the perfect foil. He is so open and so perfectly suited to every task, that he becomes the point of comparison for everything he comes up against.
It's a bit absurd in a way, but somehow Parker manages to make him a real character, even though he's clearly a literary device on so many levels, even to the point of being used to outline Ziani's plans to him, just to make sure we're keeping up.
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quote:even to the point of being used to outline Ziani's plans to him, just to make sure we're keeping up.
Which is curious, isn't it--both that and Ziani's big reveal to Miel at the end of Devices and Desires--since Ziani spends so much time obsessively running through his plans inside his own head? Parker could easily outline things to the reader then, but instead Ziani's thoughts are always in the abstract; it's only when the plans are shared with or by others that the cogs and gears get translated into people. I guess it emphasizes how badly Ziani needs to dehumanize his tools in order to execute his design.
In other discussion forums, I've seen a lot of posters take the descriptions of Daurenja as a "monster" at face value, and assume that by default his actions must be worse than the other characters. I can't help but think they're missing the point.
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Indeed. Furthering his foil role, I'd say that people see their own worst flaws writ large in Daurenja, since he's so completely amoral, and doesn't bother to hide his horrid behavior from anyone.
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As to what they're about, for people who haven't read them yet. . .they're about what happens when good people do evil things and evil people do good things--or perhaps more accurately, when human people do human things. They're about the things that humans create and how our creations end up shaping us. They're about the lies people tell to themselves to avoid having to make choices, and the ways those lies become truth.
Or, alternatively, they're about a sociopathic engineer who just wants to go home to his family for dinner, even if it means getting a few hundred thousand people slaughtered along the way.
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