Blenheim: Battle for Europe

by on June 30, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Charles Spenser is certainly correct in his assertion that the Battle of Blenheim is one of the more important battles of history that is not well remembered today. This is more surprising in the English-speaking world since it was an English commander in charge, and English troops played an important part in the battle.

I’m not so sure how much I can go for his subtitle, “How Two Men Stopped The French Conquest Of Europe“, however. It’s not just a tag put on by the publisher, as it is certainly an idea present in his book, but it’s not that well supported. The immediate consequences of a (likely) French victory in the War of Spanish Succession are obvious enough, but after some good analysis of  internal French troubles one wonders just how well they could have done. Finally, I felt through the entire book that the story of the second man, Prince Eugène of Savoy, was not very well served by the narrative.

In fact, Blenheim suffers most from being too close to typical English accounts of the battle, instead being much more about the story of Marlborough than anything else. There are good reasons for this, but I was hoping that the book would move its center of gravity a little further away from the instinctual ‘how great our man is’ mode.

Thankfully, the book is at the same time much more than that, and very handy for the casual history reader. Spenser does spend quite a bit of time laying the groundwork, presenting the career of Louis XIV as whole, as well as William of Orange’s resistance to his territorial aims in the Low Countries, and an account of the War of the League of Augsburg. So the background is very good, and takes up a fair chunk of the book.

The War of Spanish Succession itself is centered around Marlborough’s campaigning, and isn’t an account of the war as a whole; coverage after Blenheim drops off dramatically. That said, as with much else with the book, what is there is well done, and the Marlborough’s move from the Low Countries to the Danube is handled very well.

As a casual history book, centered around Marlborough, it’s very good, and other viewpoints from contemporary diaries are included to good effect, and I recommend it, but on that basis only. Prince Eugène’s story is given, but not in as much detail. As a history of the War of Spanish Succession it fails from not giving proper attention to the rest of the war, and as a history of the Battle of Blenheim, it spends too much time on the rest.

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Prince of Dogs

by on June 19, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The second book of Crown of Stars definitely suffers from a fracturing of the plot, with eight different viewpoint characters, most of which get turns from the get-go. Only one of these is a completely new character, and Anna’s story serves as something of the spine of the book, covering the plight of a pair of orphans after the taking of Gent. Unfortunately, even though her arc moves from a unstable equilibrium to a new, much better one at the end, it still feels partly unresolved, keeping Price of Dogs from having the same ‘tied off’ feeling that King’s Dragon did (that isn’t necessarily bad in book two of seven, but it feels like it was supposed to feel more complete at this point).

Between snippets of continuing threads, and much of the more developed portions centering around politics and the royal court, the book lacks the energy needed to really sweep you along, even though there’s plenty here, and some more of the worldbuilding becomes evident. Then ending suddenly, and surprisingly, picks up in tempo and sends you through the last hundred pages in a rush. Mostly though, Eliott does a great job in juggling all the different pieces of her story, keeping them moving along, and threading elements of each part into the others, so that you never feel that you really should be reading two or three different books.

The worst problem Prince of Dogs has is that the two main characters of the series, Alain and Liath, continue to be among the least dynamic of the cast. Liath’s arc continues with some important steps—as long as she can stay away from Hugh—and it’s shown that her helplessness is being imposed on her. Alain… mostly spends the book trying to grow into his new role, and having the predictable problems, as well as less expected ones. But, it doesn’t really feel like his story does much, except perhaps help weave much of the rest of the book together.

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King’s Dragon

by on June 3, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Ages ago, I started reading Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars series, but lost track of just which book I had gotten up to, and so kept putting the rest of the series off. I’ve just started rereading the books to remind myself of what happened.

The general setup of the world is based on actual early medieval history, say around AD 900. The kingdoms of Wendar and Varre (where the bulk of the series takes place) obviously occupy what would be Germany, the Eika (savage non-humans with tough metallic-looking skin, and bony claws on the back of their hands) take the place of vikings, the church is powerful in society, there’s remnants of the Dariyan (Roman) Empire all over, etc.

But, in the details, there’s a lot of worldbuilding going on. The Church of Unities worships a duality Lord and Lady, which promotes more of a ‘separate but equal’ look at the gender divide (generally, women run the household, and therefore serve as all the biscops (sic), but there are warrior women and administrative men as well). There is magic (but of course!), which the church is of two minds about (well, that attitude is historical). A nice conceit is a somewhat more formalized royal retinue, with messengers being ‘Eagles’, infantry ‘Lions’ (with a reference to chess pawns being called lions as well), and heavy cavalry called ‘Dragons’.

As with anything this large, there is a large cast of characters, but for the first half of the book, there are two viewpoint characters in alternating chapters, who both follow the typical epic fantasy ‘zero-to-hero’ arc. Alain quickly ends up at the lowest rung in a lord’s household, and steadily moves up. I found Liath the more engaging character, because of her more studious background, but she suffers abuse that is hard to take. Her arc is also less developed here; it moves forward, but it’s hard to see where it will go.

The plot proper gets going in the second half of the book, and the scope and number of viewpoint characters expands rapidly, dealing with both a major rebellion and and the Eika besieging a major city at the same time. One of the new characters is a secondary character from the first half, but the others are new (though mentioned before), including the Dragon of the title and cover. In general, the two plots are well handled in tandem, though one takes up much more time than the other. Ironically, Alain’s ‘screen time’ goes down even though he’s in the dominant plot, as it also features two new viewpoint characters.

In the end, both storylines hit either an end, or a good stopping point, giving the book a good sense of closure. Alain’s arc also feels finished, as he rides off away from the promise of further action, even though it’s obvious that his life is not destined to be so simple….

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Wars of Empire

by on May 26, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Douglas Porch’s book on imperialism and warfare is meant as an introductory book on the subject, but I don’t think it serves that job very well. Organized around general subjects of how European vs non-European wars worked in the 18th and 19th Centuries is skips around too much for an unfamiliar reader to really get a good grasp of the events talked about.

Now, not a lot of background is really needed, as long as the reader has some sense of the course of events already, the book will be very easy to follow. It does go into the why of those events quite well, and the book is an excellent ‘next step’ once some general background is known. Wars of Empire is a long thought-essay (though a short book) on how Europe came to control so much over those two centuries. He goes into such things as why so many indigenous peoples completely failed to resist Western Imperialism, despite having access to many of the same tools (especially in the 18th Century, while firearms were still relatively simple to operate and maintain). He points out how Imperial expansion was often politically unpopular, and often came only by the actions of commanders posted far away from home (it is a pity he didn’t step outside his time frame to point out how the Japanese Army in Manchuria operated the same way). There’s some important things talked about here, but not necessarily enough context. I’d also like to see a detailed study of some part of all this to demonstrate that events actually work the way he says, instead of just drawing general conclusions from general trends.

Also, I have the Endeavour Press Kindle edition of the book, and it has suffered a bit. It’s much cleaner than a lot of OCR translations I’ve seen, but there’s still a few flubs (and about two cases where I could not figure out what the original word was), and a high number of dropped periods (which is not something I’ve seen before). What makes this especially surprising is that the original book was released in 2000, so I would have supposed electronic files would still exist, instead of needing to scan.

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Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

by on May 14, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Over the years, and the course of well over a dozen novels, there’s been a number of different… ‘periods’ or groups in the Vorkosigan Saga. There’s the Cordelia books, the Admiral Naismith books, the Lord Auditor Vorkosigan books… as well as a number of little offbranches.

The series started with Cordelia, who has always been a favorite character of mine, so this return to her was overdue and welcome. From the other end of a fairly crowded timeline that is approaching 50 years, this is a mix of the familiar and the new. The past haunts this novel more directly than usual in this series. Surprisingly, the book that has the biggest impact is not earlier Cordelia books, but The Vor Game, from a view that Miles never had of the action.

I might suggest this is a less apt point to enter the series than usual as there is a fair amount of the past here. However, the real main part of the past present here is not in any of the other books anyway. So maybe you might as well get the new-old and old-old here with the same amount of weight. And that leads into the obvious problems here, with a relationship with a long history that there’s no signs of previously. It shocked me, and I was grumpy about it for a bit, but that passed; I have a feeling that for Bujold this is part of her own re-questioning of assumptions.

My actual disappointment stems from the fact that the book is a bit directionless. Bujold likes alternating between the viewpoints of the principles in a romance, and Jole has a real decision to make here. At the end, a firm decision is made, and the story comes to a natural close. But there was never any real tension here. It is too obvious where this is going, despite the other branch of the decision having its own obvious upsides, not even the inertia of that path carries through here. Cordelia’s side doesn’t even have that much tension; Cordelia has made her decisions and nothing really touches that bedrock. This feels like a transition, and I hope we see some interesting books emerge on the other side.

But in the end, don’t let any of this scare you off. This isn’t a great book, and doesn’t feature any of the action or tightly-wound plots that I like, and I associate Bujold with. But Bujold’s real strength as an author is the ability to do that and have wonderful characters and meditations on the human condition, and this is well worth reading just on that end.

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