2013 read #128: Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey.

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
701 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 30 to October 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Some vague-ish spoilers ahead.

The first three hundred pages, I think, are the most interesting part of this book. Carey attempts to meld two distinct genres, game-of-thrones style fantasy and S&M porn, with mixed but generally encouraging results. Main characters die unexpectedly, which is always an intriguing sign. But around the three hundred page mark, the story abandons most of the bondage-courtesan spy angle and slips into something more comfortable, an unremarkable pseudo-medieval paladin and barbarian sword-swinger, with countless daring escapes and cunningly overheard conversations, bold journeys and innumerable sword battles against impossible odds, with a couple Ray Harryhausen god sequences thrown in, because why not. After the sex-spy motif dried up, I realized there wasn't much of substance left. Game-of-thrones fantasies (I use the term generically, though Carey does name-check that particular book here) work best when the contenders are realized, interesting characters with their own points of view and motivations. None of Carey's characters achieve that level of distinction, leaving all the maneuvering and double-crossing rather meaningless, lost in a tangle of interchangeable Francophone surnames and blandly masculine cardboard cutouts, positioned on a one-dimensional axis between Noble and Devious, as if George R. R. Martin were reduced to his D-list character backlog, scraping together a random Baratheon bastard here, a generic Florent cousin there. So, basically A Feast for Crows. OHHHHHHH SNAP I went there.

The characters outside the angel-begotten lineages of Terre D'Ange are worse in some ways, largely variations on stale ethnic stereotypes: violent, mead-swilling, poetry-loving German warriors; tattooed and Mother Earth-y Britons; boisterous and cunning Roma horse-dealers and gamblers; kindly, generous, persecuted Jews. Worst of all, after two particularly momentous main character deaths, everyone seemingly obtains indestructible plot armor, and every single plan and gambit the narrator embarks upon meets with ridiculous amounts of success. After that page three hundred watershed, Kushiel's Dart doesn't even try anymore; it settles into a travelogue of increasingly improbable peregrinations, touching on every corner of Carey's pseudo-medieval Europe, cramming in more events with less and less detail as if squeezed by a publication deadline or a hard page limit. Toward the end I was half-joking to myself, "Well, she's visited every named location now except not-Italy and not-Syria, those must be held in reserve for the sequels." And sure enough, the last chapter or two sets up the gang's next mystery in a back-stabby cliche of pseudo-Renaissance Italy.

I moderately enjoyed this book, and found myself sucked in whenever I happened to settle in to read it, but it failed to hold my interest whenever it wasn't physically in my hand. And oh my lord, the typos. At first I thought the embarrassing wealth of incorrect homophones was a stylistic choice, but when we read about the "souls" of someone's feet, you start to wonder if some copy editor wasn't paid enough.