2016 read #64: The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner.

The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
379 pages
Published 2006
Read from August 9 to August 24
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I'd really hoped for a better reading pace this month. It hasn't just been the Minecraft (though there's been plenty of that); it's been difficult to find any time to read whatsoever the last couple weeks, and what little free time I have has been spent planning hypothetical future hikes and vacations and travels (or just sitting with the laptop mired in the internet, like in the old days, before I got back into reading again). And to be frank, this book didn't do its utmost to keep me turning pages.

I love Kushner's Riverside setting, its increasingly lived-in esthetic and the author's sure hand at using the mores of a fantasy fiction society to offer commentary upon our own. The narrator and the more well-developed central characters were a delight, well worth spending time around. Setting and character go a long way toward a compelling story; one might even say that the intersection of setting and character is the meat of more literary fiction, served with various saucy styles of prose. But like many of the more literary authors I've encountered, Kushner seems to have some trouble (if trouble's the word) with crafting and sustaining momentum. Much of the book is a prolonged training montage, as our hero is taken from her life as a society soon-to-be-debutante, on the whim of her uncle the Mad Duke, and at first resentfully, then increasingly delightedly, learns the art of the sword. There is not a stitch wrong with any of that -- it was all thoroughly enjoyable, a light fantasy Bildungsroman with a seemingly straightforward queer/feminist angle. The book does become more complicated, its cast exposing the tension of accepted gender norms, the various ways women and men alike are confined and embittered in Riverside society, as the plot itself takes darker turns and leads to horrible places, and that shift to multiple perspectives and multiple facets of power and identity (and the lack thereof) is when it becomes most compelling. But for its first half, Privilege is something of a lark, a swashbuckling daydream -- enjoyable, but also easy to set aside for a day or a week at a time.

Plotting is by no means an essential tool -- not all jobs are for hammers. Nonetheless, the political maneuvering and backroom treachery in all of Kushner's Riverside books (or at least the ones I've read to date) tend to feel like afterthoughts. In Swordspoint, St. Vier and Alec were the clear focus, so it is understandable that the background politicking made less of an impression. Politics were more central to The Fall of  the Kings, which made the continued interchangeability and lack of dimension of its power players more of an issue. Privilege does a better job of making its secondary characters distinctive -- I managed to keep track of almost everyone, despite taking over two weeks to finish the book -- but the plotting itself lacks a certain polish, the various threads coming together with a rather inelegant thud, so to speak.