Kushner, Ellen: Swordspoint

So, naturally, after reading Swordcrossed, I reread Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, which I hadn’t liked very much when I read it back in the day because the swordsman’s boyfriend was so annoying.

I did like it better this time around, partly because the annoying boyfriend (Alec) actually takes up much less page space than he did in my memory. And I found him, and Richard’s relationship with him, less annoying because I saw better what their deal was.

However, I still found it kind of a weird shaggy book. There’s the Alec/Richard thread, and then there’s power-hungry nobles being manipulative, the upshot of which, as far as I could tell, is that being power-hungry is bad and exercising power over other people is bad, the end. Though we get points-of-view from various other characters involved in the manipulations (hence less Alec than I remembered), the resolution of it nevertheless felt incomplete. I think it would be, belatedly, an example of a work that did not cohere for me. But it was useful rereading it.

Finally, I need to note that back in the day, everyone always quoted the book’s second paragraph, and it is so telling that they never quoted the next:

Let the fairy tale begin on a winter’s morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff. And it therefore follows that evil lurks behind each broken window, scheming malice and enchantment; while behind the latched shutters the good are sleeping their just sleeps at this early hour in Riverside. Soon they will arise to go about their business; and one, maybe, will be as lovely as the day, armed, as are the good, for a predestined triumph…

But there is no one behind the broken windows; only eddies of snow drift across bare floorboards. The owners of the coats of arms have long since abandoned all claims to the houses they crest, and moved up to the Hill, where they can look down on all the city. No king rules them any more, for good or ill. From the Hill, Riverside is a tiny splotch between two riverbanks, an unsavory quarter in a prosperous city. The people who live there now like to think of themselves as evil, but they’re really no worse than anyone else. And already this morning more than one drop of blood has been shed.

(I’ve never read either of the sequels; on looking at them and reading some of the short fiction set in the same world, I’ve decided that I’m not going to read The Fall of the Kings, because I don’t actually want a heavily mythic story of magic in this setting. I do plan to eventually read The Privilege of the Sword, however.)