Wednesday, September 12, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold




Paladin of Souls is the second novel in Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion series (also known as the World of the Five Gods), after The Curse of Chalion (which I reviewed here).  That said, the book works entirely as a stand-alone and doesn't require prior knowledge of this world for readers to enjoy - references are made to Curse, but they are always explained (and slightly spoil that book) and shouldn't confuse any new readers.  This book won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, unlike its predecessor, so I had high expectations when I began it as an audiobook.  And those high expectations were certainly met.

Paladin features a different protagonist than curse - the Lady Ista, former Royina (Queen) of all of Chalion, the country in which these novels take place.  Ista is a very different protagonist than the usual female fantasy protagonist - she's middle aged, widowed, and quite simply wants to find her own life without being told what to do, and would rather not go on any grand quest of any significance - having had a tragic experience (to say the least) with trying to fulfill a grand destiny in the past.  But the gods - in particular one god - have other plans for Ista, and the result is a story that's absolutely fantastic from beginning to end, and well recommended.


Note: As with most of Bujold's work, I read this as an audiobook.  It's not the same audiobook reader as Bujold's Penric or Vorkosigan series, but the reader is still very very good (and in fact, she's also the reader for The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan, so I was in fact listening to the same reader for two books in a row, despite them being written by different authors.)

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
3 Years after the curse on the House of Chalion was lifted, and her daughter Iselle rose to the throne of Chalion-Ibra, the Lady Ista is living a life of misery.  Still thought to have once been mad, she has spent the last three years taking care of her mother, the powerful Provincara, but now that she has passed away, Ista doesn't really have anything to do with her life....and is surrounded by sycophants who might mean well, but treat her as a weak woman to be coddled.

But when some chance encounters lead her to begin a "religious pilgrimage" - really just an excuse to get away from everyone - Ista finds herself once again having prophetic visions from the Gods...particularly of a man with a strange bloody wound in a strange border castle.  Ista knows these dreams are real messages from a God and wants nothing to do with them...with her last encounter with the gods resulting in the accidental deaths of her husband and his lover.

But when Ista and her companions find themselves captured by an enemy force strangely distant from the border and then rescued by an incredibly charismatic lord, Ista finds herself at the castle in her dreams on the Country's borders nonetheless.  And the God known as the Bastard isn't one who cares that Ista curses the names of the Gods....and the task he sets for her is one which will greatly affect and alter not just the strange family Ista finds in the castle, or all of Chalion-Ista, but Ista's own soul and path for the remainder of her life.....
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Paladin of Souls is fantastic because of its heroine, Ista, who as I mentioned above is utterly fantastic in her difference from the typical fantasy protagonist.  Ista has jumped at the call of destiny once before, to tragic results (although "jumped" is the wrong word to describe it, since she suffered quite a bit even while attempting it) and wants nothing to do with it henceforth.  She's witty but not actually trying to be, and is more bitter than anything else.  She's incredibly intelligent and stubborn and will bulldoze anyone attempting to stand in her way with her wits (though never with physicality), but really doesn't want to do this for any sort of larger cause.  And so when Gods once again start taking interest in her, she wants nothing to do with them and tries to curse them out and ignore them as much as possible...even if her own good heart won't quite let her do so.  It's a fascinating conflict in that its mostly internal, rather than external.

This is not to say the side characters in this book aren't great.  Ista winds up on her pilgrimage with a wonderful courier horsewoman named Liss, who is an often hilarious character in her own right as she displays eagerness to ride as fast as possible, to help Ista when she can, and total ignorance of what being a Lady is really supposed to be (not being one herself).  The dy Gura brothers return from the first book and are far more fleshed out into interesting companions, and the trio of characters Ista meets at the castle have a really interesting dynamic that Ista has to navigate.

And then there's the Bastard.  He's not the only god featured in this book, but he's by far the most active, and in his small scenes he's absolutely hilarious - as you might expect from a god called "The Bastard", he's irreverent, sarcastic, and lives for doing inappropriate things in order to get what he wants done, and he makes a perfect counterpart for Ista.  Whereas the gods in the prior book mostly "speak" through symbolism, the Bastard is far more willing to appropriate others to talk directly to our heroine, and their interplay is fantastic when it finally happens.

The plot of this book is rather swervy, sometimes in predictable and sometimes in not-predictable ways.  In terms of predictability, for example, two of the twists in this book the reader will guess rather quickly, but Ista figures out the first one reasonably quickly enough to not make this annoying (the second one near the end is so obvious it's kind of annoying Ista doesn't realize what's happening immediately).  But the overall plot swerves quite a bit, with a situation that might've taken up an entirety of another book - the situation between the family at the castle - being essentially figured out by midway, only for a new plot point to come up.  Yet the book is always fair about everything, with it all clearly being setup by its beginning.  I might complain that readers of Curse will have an idea about where the plot is going to end up at the end by 3/4 of the way through, but how the book gets there still surprised me even if I was right about the end destination, so it all works (and new readers who start here will probably not guess the ending as easily, as it relies upon an understanding of how the Gods work first explained in the earlier book).

In short, Paladin of Souls is an absolutely tremendous book I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.
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