A little bit back I reviewed Shards of Honor, the start of the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold – which was a Swords & Laser book club pick. Well, that’s not exactly correct – it’s half of a Sword & Laser book club pick – it was instead selected as Cordelia’s Honor – a book that combines it with the novel Barrayar, which follows up right after it (and was originally intended to be the same book) – but got a few more passes for a later publication after the Bujold decided to split the two parts up, and which were later recombined. So, now it’s time for the rest of the story.
Barrayar focuses much on Cordelia Vorkosigan (nee-Naismith) attempting to adapt to Barrayaran society as part of her new marriage to her husband, Aral Vorkosigan (as seen in the previous novel). This is further complicated by first Aral being selected as the Regent in advance of the current emperor’s death, an assassination attempt on Aral leading to Cordelia having to have the child she’s pregnant with – young Miles – being put in an artificial womb due to the effects of the poison gas she’s been dosed with, and finally the planet descending into something of a civil war.
As with Shards of Honor, the focus here remains on Cordelia, as she takes in Barrayaran society as an outsider, contending with the ways she views the planet as charming and both technologically and culturally backward. This feels a little better than the comparisons between Beta Colony and Barrayar in Shards of Honor, as while in the first book we spent very little time on Beta Colony, here we learn much more about it in comparison with Barrayar, in multiple respects. Here it’s made clear that Aral is bisexual, and that’s something of a secret people try to use to drive a wedge into Cordelia & Aral’s marriage – but on Beta Colony being LGBT is normal, so Cordelia finds no problem with that.
This even fixes some of the very real problems with the depictions of psychology and psychotherapy in Shards of Honor. There psychology on Beta Colony was described as being used to mind-wipe and re-program people (particularly Cordelia) who are believed as being psychologically damaged, in an attempt to remove her feelings for Aral and her revised opinion of Barrayaran society. Here that’s been retconned to show Barrayaran society as doing something similar to Sgt. Bothari – which Cordelia considers barbaric, and her mentioning that on Beta Colony Bothari could have gotten the help he needed for his schizophrenia.
Cordelia’s perspective and internal voice as well does feel a bit like Mean Girls meets Game of Thrones – someone with a scientific background in wildlife biology or anthropology going into a new culture to stay, and approaching this new society she’s a part of with an analytical approach, with more than a few opportunities to get snarky.
One of my favorite parts of the novel comes when Cordelia and her bodyguard, Dru, going to get a sword cane for Aral’s aide, with the shopping process feeling half like John Wick going in for a tasting in the second film, but with more of a degree of snarky banter because in this instance it’s a woman, and she’s having to plow through a wall of institutional misogyny.
I’ll admit, as with Shards of Honor, because I’d read a different novel about Miles before this, albeit one where Aral was not a character, I had a little less tension than Bujold had intended when it was originally written since I knew Miles was going to make it. Still, I really liked the book, and I’m definitely going to make my way through the rest of the Vorkosigan series eventually.
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