Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold
This book was sold to me by a fellow customer at a bookstand, and it came so highly recommended that he insisted that I buy all four of the series, as I would not be disappointed.
I have to say, I was expecting a fantasy novel with an unusual twist, and I spent the first half of the book disappointed and wondering when it was going to get good. We have the usual tropes of fantasyland. We have a peasant girl, a mysterious foreigner, and some magical bad-guys. Dag, the mysterious foreigner, saves Fawn, the peasant girl’s life more than once, and in the process, she gets mixed up in his peoples’ magic.
I guess the high recommendation set me up for failure. I’d heard about Bujold, but never read any of her stuff. What I’d heard about her is that she’s the female author most often chosen as an exception to prove the “boys only” rule for a certain award. Because the person who recommended this book to me was also male, I expected a tense and action-packed fantasy epic full of swashbuckling derring-do that would appease even Frederick Forsythe and Tom Clancy fans.
And yet the pacing was slow, much, much slower than I had expected. I felt very little tension, beyond the rescue scenes. The setting is only okay. It’s basically like any McFantasyland: ordinary American-ish folk with a relatively stable government that has a culture culturally more progressive than 1950s America and yet which somehow remains staunchly pre-industrial. The nomadic Lakewalkers are the one novelty, and they were not quite weird enough to entice me, yet weird enough that I found their role in the “farmer” society not fleshed out. As a fantasy novel, it’s not that good.
Here’s what they don’t tell you on the cover: this is not a fantasy novel. This is a romance, first of all. Almost all of the tension and character-building revolves around the relationship between Fawn and Dag. This isn’t really a novel either, at least, it doesn’t read like a novel so much as volume one of a larger story. I haven’t read the other books yet, so I can’t tell if the plot will develop satisfactorily, but I can say that after finishing BEGUILEMENT, I don’t feel like I have completed a story, not really. I mean, the plot arc ends, but it is so slowly paced that it doesn’t feel like an amazing, “must read” novel, so much as the slow buildup to greater plots in later books.
Since I did buy all four books, I will probably read the second one. I know, it’s irrational, but jsut because I understand the fallacy of sunk costs doesn’t mean I’m immune to it. Also, I liked the book a lot better once I realized that it was not a fantasy and not a novel.
I recommend this for people who think they don’t like fantasy and for people who think they don’t like romance, and for people who think “oh, goody, four books” rather than “there are four of these? I hope they get better.”
