Compromise and Conceit

I am in a holding pattern this week, because tomorrow the Delightful Miss E joins me from Japan, on Friday is my 35th birthday, yesterday I moved house, and on Saturday a friend of Miss E’s  is coming here on a holiday (from Japan). So in between all these things there is not much to do except tidy my new house and … ah … read. So I need trash, and as a consequence I am reading a fantasy trilogy.

This time around the trilogy is about a slum girl who becomes a novice magician in a very privileged guild. She is super powerful of course but everyone else hates her because they are rich and she is poor. So it’s kind of like Harry Potter meets Ursula le Guin meets Trotsky. Of course the poor girl has to prove herself, gets help from well-meaning rich people who, you know, care for the poor, and then she stumbles on a dark and evil magician who is super-powerful and going to kill everyone. All is not, of course, as it seems. In this instance there is some dispute as to who is good and who is evil (which is a nice degree of nuance for a fantasy trilogy).

There is again a hint of the Global War on Terror written in the books. The magic guild is in the nation of Kyralia, which lies at the heart of an alliance that includes a very harsh and clearly islamic-seeming nation with very harsh laws and slavery. I am thinking Saudi Arabia, except in a nasty twist we get to visit this kingdom’s version of Mecca and discover that the book contained therein holds no real power. Hint, hint, nudge nudge, wink wink. The alliance seems to be pretty pluralistic and accepting, as if in fact it were a modern secular state… but over its borders is evil and mysterious sachaka, which is exotic and oriental and once laid waste to by the mages. It doesn’t contain much civilisation by the sound of it, and what it does contain is unknown and dangerous. Sounds a lot like Afghanistan… and it sends regular assassins to Kyralia, terrorists even…

… There are also hints that the head of the magicians’ guild is, perhaps, a difficult man burdened with a hard task, who is forced to make unpleasant decisions for the sake of the greater good… almost like, um, George Bush.

I don’t believe people actually intend to write these ham-fisted allegories, I think they just come out the way they do under the pressure of the times. It is fun to read too much into them – wait until I get onto my review of Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing. Which will have to wait, because I am reading John Kooley’s book on the foundation of the Taliban next; and then I have discovered a clear rip-off novel, which is Flashman in Space, and which I also want to read.