Engaging the Enemy by Elizabeth Moon
I liked this book, and I liked it well enough to immediately go out and purchase the next in the series, but I think in many ways it’s the weakest of the novels. Or maybe I’m just over the excitement of Pirates! In Space! and am starting to notice Moon’s weaknesses as well as her strengths.
At the beginning of the novel, we have Stella and Ky somewhat at odds with one another. Ky has to flee from one system to another to avoid trouble. Stella, following Ky, gets upset when she steps directly into the trouble that Ky left for her. Stella is presented as the less mature of the two of them, whining that she’s left to do something she’s not comfortable with, that she hasn’t done before, even though Ky has done all that and more. As with Ky, Stella is also a larger-than-life character. So, for that matter, is Rafe, Stella’s friend and Ky’s friend/adversary/sexualinterest/antagonist/ally or whatever he is. All of them are young people, privileged, who have somehow managed to gain experience that their seniors respect.
Ky runs into Furman, an annoying captain from an earlier book. Furman claims to the local authorities that Ky is an imposter, not the Vatta heir she claims to be, but the daughter of the evil black sheep Vatta from book two. The plot in which this is resolved, involving a touchy local tree-worshipping society who value politeness above all else, and some genetic testing, was delightfully tense. It was like a soap-opera, in a good way. Is Ky really the adopted daughter of a Vatta rapist? Those of you terribly clever readers who are dismayed by how you so quickly guess the murderer on page fourteen may find it transparent, but I liked that tension.
What I didn’t like, however, was the Deus ex Machina by which the Furman problem got resolved. Both his duplicity and his lack of self-control were out of character, given what we knew of him from the earlier book. This is a world in which the contrast bar has been slid far to the right, so that the good guys are very very good, and the bad guys are very, very bad. For an action packed melodrama, it works, but I miss the subtlety of novels in which some perfectly good, honorable people just plain don’t like the protagonist. That happens in real life all the time. That person whom your lover broke your heart for is usually not a festering demon, as simple as that would make life. That person whose goal is to defeat you in the championship is also usually not a terrible person, as much as it might comfort you to think so.
I read a review of one of the earlier novels in which the reader complained that the characters were all cardboard, and I disagreed. No, they’re fine, perfectly complex enough for the style of novel. But as soon as the plot faltered, especially when it faltered because of this exaggerated melodramatic character development, I found myself agreeing with that. This is not a world of real people, it’s a world of heroes and villains. It’s about as nuanced as the old Star Trek show, where no one really questions that an entire planet should have a single culture, or how it must feel to live in a world where primogeniture has inexplicable tenacity over multi-system corporate structure, where nepotism is seen as natural and right so that no one questions why lack of experience doesn’t matter as long as one has the right surname.
That said, I did enjoy this novel enough to go out and buy the next one in the series. I like the action and adventure and tension and genuine risk. It’s fun to watch Kylara beat the crap out of bad guys with her gun or her ship, just as it was fun to watch Captain Kirk punch some rubbery alien’s jaw. Just don’t look too closely at what you’re eating.
