Lucas Blogs About Armistice

Literal peacocking.

So, what's this book's deal?

Well, part one of it's deal is that it's the sequel to Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly. You may remember that I reviewed that book last year and that I enjoyed it. It takes place in a fictional country called Gedda with more than a few parallels to Europe in the 1920s, and centers around the lives of spies and criminals as they try to survive a coup by a fascist, authoritarian party.

Thank you for filling me in, I had forgotten.

You mean you still haven't read it? I'm not angry, but I am disappointed.

You're not my dad!

Good point. Anyway, like I said, this is the next entry in the series, so we might end up revealing a few SPOILERS about Amberlough, consider this your warning.

Does it pick up where the last book left off?

Yes and no. There hasn't been a huge shift in the status quo, but it is several months later. Aristide Makricosta, former stripper and emcee at the Bee cabaret, has secreted himself away to Porachis, a kingdom across the sea which is a bit like South Asia, but doesn't appear to ever have been colonized. Here he's found work as a director in the new film industry.

What about his lover, Cyril DePaul?

Well, last we saw, Cyril had been shot and left for dead, but his sister, Lillian DePaul, is the Press Secretary for the Geddan Embassy in Porachis. However, she was recently recruited by Cyril's old boss, who's using her son (currently at a boarding school back in Gedda) as leverage to get her to spy on Grigori Memmediv (you may recall him as Cyril's treacherous secretary from the previous novel) who may have ties to gunrunners who happen to be working in the Porachin film industry. Also, she's been invited to the premiere of movie about her great-grandmother, directed by Ari.

Hmm, sounds like someone wanted two of her characters to cross paths.  And Cordelia Lehane?

She's been back in Gedda, at least until the beginning of this book. See, she's been part of a resistance group out to disrupt the operations of the One State Party, mostly through bombings. They call themselves the Catwalk and largely have stage-based code names and a hard-to-track cell structure. In any case, the Ospies are hot on her tail so she smuggles herself to Porachis and is trying to get herself a job as a dancer or choreographer in —

Let me guess, the film industry.

I didn't count on your astuteness.

I don't get that reference.

You didn't count on my astuteness. Anyhoo, I think you can see that these three characters are all on the road to conflict in some form or another. Ari just wants to get away from it all, probably a smart choice since the Chuli minority (of which he is a member) are being rounded up into camps back in Gedda. Meanwhile, Cordelia really wants to find some way to get herself back into Gedda to resume activity as quickly as possible. Lillian wants to get her son back and is willing to side with anyone who can make that happen.

We're revisiting the same themes from the last book, then?

Yeah, a little. Last time around the cover asked, "What will you sacrifice for love?" this time it's "Who will you betray for revolution?" There's a definite shift away from survival towards resistance as the end goal, even though, as noted, most of the story takes place outside of Gedda. And let me just say, I wish that the publisher had commissioned a map of Porachis and the surrounding countries for this volume. Like, it's not necessary, but it seems silly for them to have a map of Gedda in the front of the book when most of the action is on another continent.

That seems like a minor complaint.

Oh, it is. And, on the whole, I'd say that this book does a good job of retaining the first book's strengths while growing the world and introducing new characters. I've done a bit of a disservice to the new characters, like Ari's patron, Pulan, who is both a glamorous movie magnate and a gun runner, her secretary Daoud, who is Ari's new paramour (and the only new Porachin character who seems likely to put in a subsequent appearance in the series), and Jinadh, Pulan's cousin, a minor aristocrat, gossip columnist, and the father of Lillian's son. Like the main cast, the secondary characters are well drawn and behave in believable ways. Finding themselves drawn into the problems of Geddan diplomats, radicals, and expatriates with varying amounts of enthusiasm and distrust. Giving the characters such well-defined motivations also helps keep the stakes high.

Sounds like you enjoyed this one.

Well, Donnelly has proven herself as an effective writer, particularly of stories with tense, knotty plots. Oh, and speaking of plots, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this book didn't suffer from middle-book-syndrome.

Are you sure there are only three books?

No, but even if there are only three books in the series, sometimes second entries in a series won't have a proper ending. So far, both the books in the Amberlough Dossier have told complete stories which leave enough wiggle room to continue the series and tell a longer story. There is one major cliffhanger at the end of this book, but even with that, the main characters have each gone on a journey that puts them in a different spot than they were at the beginning. Donnelly never seems to be spinning wheels, the plot is always moving forward and at least one of the stories feels complete by the end of the book. So yeah, I think that's a neat trick for the second book in a series to pull off.

Sounds like a recommendation to me.

It is. You'd probably want to read the first book first.

I will at some point, I've been busy.

Doing what? You're a rhetorical device.

Wouldn't you like to know?

Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly, Tor Books trade paperback edition, May 2018, 400 pages, pairs well questionable hangover cures and the brief equatorial twilight

Links:

Here's Lara Elena Donnelly's website, if you're into that kinda thing.

Here's a thing Donnelly wrote about the intersection of politics and narrative, umm, there might be SPOILERS in the broadest sense (I mean, she does sort of talk about each of the books in the series structurally, but you know how spoilerphobes are). Anyway, it's interesting to find out that she actually began the first book before right-wing populist movements like the Trump campaign or the Brexit vote, and learn about how those real world factors affected the reception of what she describes as "cult queer niche not-quite-fantasy."