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A review by tasharobinson
The Baron of Magister Valley by Steven Brust
4.0
Can't help but think this stand-alone Dragaera novel, based on The Count of Monte Cristo, should have moved faster at the beginning, when it's glacially establishing who the protagonists are and what crimes were committed against them, and taken more time with the ending, where they get their revenge in a flurry of friction-free plots that whiz by with virtually no time to enjoy them. Part of reading any of Steven Brust's Dragaera romances, based on the style of Alexandre Dumas, is necessarily getting into the rhythms of the ridiculous authorial voice of Paarfi, the pompous yet self-effacing historian "writing" these books, who keeps pausing for self-important discourses on the work of a good historian, and circling around the thoroughly unimportant minutiae of his story while apologizing at length for not knowing other minutiae, and taking time off to slag a rival historian through huffy asides.
The dialogue is a lot more compact than in the early Khaavren books, when the characters could spend two pages at a stretch on "What time is it?" "How, you wish to know the time?" "I do, and the proof is that I asked." "And did you ask because you wish to know?" "And was it unclear that I wish to know?" "And do you then believe that I know the time?" and on and on until someone offers to actually answer the original question, and someone else inevitably says "It is an hour since I asked for anything else!" But there's still a flavor of that kind of arch formality to it. Mostly, though, the barrier to forward movement here is Paarfi, who is an acquired taste that some people won't acquire.
It's hard for me to judge this book on its own rather than as an artifact — another Paarfi book that gets some payoff for his endless vendetta, a Vlad series book with a payoff that really startled and pleased me because I'd forgotten who a particular character is and didn't see the reveal coming, yet another Count of Monte Cristo take. I feel like I spent more time focused on the style of this book than on the story — maybe a natural response to such a familiar story, where style is so foregrounded. I'm glad I read it, it frequently frustrated me, I'm glad I'm done with it.
The dialogue is a lot more compact than in the early Khaavren books, when the characters could spend two pages at a stretch on "What time is it?" "How, you wish to know the time?" "I do, and the proof is that I asked." "And did you ask because you wish to know?" "And was it unclear that I wish to know?" "And do you then believe that I know the time?" and on and on until someone offers to actually answer the original question, and someone else inevitably says "It is an hour since I asked for anything else!" But there's still a flavor of that kind of arch formality to it. Mostly, though, the barrier to forward movement here is Paarfi, who is an acquired taste that some people won't acquire.
It's hard for me to judge this book on its own rather than as an artifact — another Paarfi book that gets some payoff for his endless vendetta, a Vlad series book with a payoff that really startled and pleased me because I'd forgotten who a particular character is and didn't see the reveal coming, yet another Count of Monte Cristo take. I feel like I spent more time focused on the style of this book than on the story — maybe a natural response to such a familiar story, where style is so foregrounded. I'm glad I read it, it frequently frustrated me, I'm glad I'm done with it.