[EN World Book Club] Swordspoint Discussion [May Selection]

[JoeBlank]

Getting a late start on the recent selection for the Book Club, but would love to hear from all who have read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, either for the Club or previously. Comments from all are welcome, the EN World Book Club has an open membership and would love to hear your opinions. Note that I am pinch-hitting for Michael Tree, who chose this selection.

I enjoyed the premise of the book, particularly the way things worked between the nobility and the swordsmen. For some reason I just was never completely drawn into the story, and that may be because I did not feel a connection with any of the characters. I just did not like most of them.

The possible exception is Richard, as his acceptance of the swordsman's way of life, and adherence to his own code of conduct, was interesting. But I couldn't grasp what he saw in Alec, and that bothered me. Sort of like when a friend is in a relationship you know is bad for them, but they just won't listen to reason.

• Did you like the book? Why or why not?
• Have you read anything else by Kushner? Will you? She has a few short stories and another novel, The Fall of the Kings, set in the same world.
• Did you connect with any of the characters, in the sense that you cared about what happened to them? This does not have to mean that you liked them, or would have them as a friend, of course. Villians can be some of the most interesting characters, after all.

The author has a nice little website that includes info about her other works:
http://www.sff.net/people/kushnerSherman/Kushner/world.html

If Michael Tree makes it by: Why did you choose Swordspoint? Did you hear about it from a friend, read review, or stumble across it on your own? Did it live to what you hoped it would be?

 

[Pielorinho]

Hope y'all don't mind my dropping by; I've read Swordspoint twice, but not in the past couple of years. I love the book, and like the sequel, The Fall of Kings, even more, and wish Ellen Kushner would spend less time running a radio program and more time writing.

I believe the strength of her work lies in her depiction of a sexy, sophisticated, seductive culture that is also decadent, amoral, and barbaric. Sure, none of the characters are heroic, but they're very clever; the vicious double-entendres are great fun to read, and the parallels between verbal and rapier duels delighted me.

Daniel

 

[takyris]

Read it and liked it. I found her creation of a new society fascinating, and the writing itself was always crisp and sensual at the same time. She makes amazingly good word choices to get the most out of her language.

I think that this novel might have suffered by being mislabeled -- Ellen is working on the Interstitial Arts group, which is a big fancy term that roughly means "we're kind of cross-genre" but which has suffered early on by being turned into a bludgeon or a net, used to either co-opt any fiction that the members like or beat down anything that the members don't like. Swordspoint was, I believe, listed as one of the reasons for founding the group -- a novel that takes place in another world, and has swords, but isn't exactly fantasy per se (although the followup novel comes much closer). If Borders put this novel in the Literary Fiction section, it would have been seen as a wonderful metaphorical tale in the study of gender politics. Stuck in the SF shelf, it's kind of unfairly labelled "fantasy without magic or monsters or anything but sword-fights, and also, there's some gay stuff" by many.

 

[JoeBlank]

Good point about the genre, takyris. It occurred to me while reading that there was no true fantasy element present.

What makes a work of fiction fantasy, as opposed to literary fiction?

 

[takyris]

That's the $64k question, that is.

I consider it fantasy, because it takes place in a non-Earth world that was too fully realized to just be a satiric mirror of our world. I don't think fantasy absolutely has to have magical elements in it, although it's bloody difficult not to -- in this case, though, I think she succeeded. It is fantasy, but it could have done just as well in the lit-fic section -- just like "The Handmaid's Tale" may be in SF or Lit, depending on which bookstore you go to, and just like the works of Christopher Moore are always in Literary Fiction, despite the vampires, Native American spirital figures, talking bats, and sea monsters.

(Edit: What I mean by "satiric mirror" is that sometimes you'll have somebody telling a story that takes place in the country of Paxia and talks about its dealings with the country of Warmongera. It's strongly implied that the countries in question represent real countries, and the writer is just changing the names to get more creative freedom.

It's possible that Ellen was writing about New York power politics or business, and I just never got that because it was outside my sphere, but it really looked like her intent was not to satirize anything, but to truly create another world. And since she truly created another world, that makes it fantasy -- the fantastical element in this situation is the other world.)

 

[Michael Tree]

I apologize for the late start. One thing after another has kept my reading to a minimum.

Joe, the answer to why I chose it is a bit of all three. I stumbled across it on my own, remembered hearing about Kushner from a friend, and then read a review. I was looking for a Katherine Kurtz book in the library, and saw Kushner's book next to it. A friend of mine once recommended her Thomas the Rhymer to me, so I was intrigued enough to look at some mini-reviews at Amazon, which intrigued me. I picked it for the book club because it was described as a swashbuckling faerie tale, and we hadn't read books of either description.

For what it's worth, it was in the literary fiction part of the library, not in the fantasy/sci fi section.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it wasn't what I had expected. It doesn't really fit into any genre, but it's not very swashbuckling, aside from perhaps the swordfighting and the barbed repartee, and it's definitely not a faerie tale.

What is it to me? First, it's a good story, with twists and turns which, unlike most fantasy books, I couldn't predict. I don't try to predict what's going to happen in books, but the majority just come to me. In Swordspoint, the writer skillfully pulled my expectations in one direction, and then did something completely differen, but without being jarring or 'clever'. For example, at the trial I was expecting that Alec might say that he had hired Richard. But as soon as Richard himself wondered that, I realized that wasn't going to happen, and had no idea how it was going to actually turn out. The sequence leading from the "curse of the Swordsman play" up to the duel with Applethorpe was similarly well concieved. The reader would normally expect a duel between St Vier and the aged Applethorpe was a foregone conclusion, but the 'curse' on St Vier injected enough uncertainty to make any result a possibility.

I wasn't expecting the sexuality, but I found it refreshing. All too often, IMO, when fiction has gay characters, being gay is their primary character trait and purpose. Here, they were interesting characters who happen to be gay, not 'gay characters' who are interesting. Don't get me wrong, it's good to have sexuality explored in fiction, but IMO it's healthy to have gay characters that aren't focused on exploring sexuality.

I connected with a few of the characters, but I don't really know if 'cared about' is the right way of describing it. I sympathized for Michael Godwin, and was concerned about him. I would even say I liked him, after he stopped being such a ponce. But Alec was the most fascinating. I was interested in learning more about him, and what he would do next. While he certainly wasn't very likeable, his spiral of self-destruction was very realistic, and held a morbid fascination for me. In modern times he would probably end up diagnosed with 'borderline personality disorder' and hospitalized as a danger to himself.

Finally, I was interested in St Vier, but couldn't really connect with him. I felt there was more than he showed, and the hints of his own fatalism were interesting, but there was something that blocked feeling more empathy for him. Perhaps was wrote him to feel as uncommunicative and disconnected as he would seem to other people in his life.