Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

I just finished the eARC of this at 4 AM and I loved it. Adored it. Wanted it to never end. More coherent thoughts after some sleep and reflection.

*****

A few days and a re-read later, my reactions are still overwhelmingly positive, though more nuanced and thought-out than my initial screams of joy. This book feels like coming home again, like meeting old friends and the pleasure in catching up and learning new things about them.

This book is also deeply subversive, and not just in the obvious ways. It's different than almost anything else on the market and if she hadn't already had a large and dedicated fanbase, I doubt that any publisher would have touched this with a ten-foot pole. Because this is a story about living, not about action show more or great things. Rather, it's a celebration of life and love, and that life emphatically does not stop after the end of youth or death.

Now on to the spoilers:
My mind had always shied a bit thinking about Cordelia post-Aral because I didn't want to imagine a life for her, with potentially another half-century to live, without him. But Lois addresses that and shows that one can always find new love, new life, and new happiness no matter the age.

The revelation that Cordelia-and-Aral had been for twenty years Cordelia-and-Aral-AND-OLIVER was not nearly a surprise as it should have been thanks to the Internet spoiling that for me months ago. But in the book, that revelation was handled subtly and deftly so that my mind just made sense of this new configuration of their marriage.

I remembered first meeting Jole in The Vor Game and later wondering why he was never mentioned again, given how close and loyal he was to Aral and his supposed intelligence. And I remember coming across him again as pallbearer at Aral's funeral during the Cryoburn Aftermaths (which I read through tears) and remembering him as Aral's disappeared assistant and wondering what had happened in the intervening years. Now I know.

It was lovely to have Cordelia as a central character again, and especially as a POV character. She is my favorite character and while I love her son, I did miss her inner voice. I had not realized just how much I missed it until this book. She had become this larger-than-life character, a wise matriarch because for upteenth number of books, I had seen her through Miles's eyes. This was a reminder that even our heroes are still human, no matter how tall the pedestal we raise them on. Miles got that lesson with Cordelia's usual manner.

This book was also a reminder that nothing exists in a vacuum, particularly life. The little things that Lois sprinkled through the book were wonderful, from Oliver's past encounter with a certain Captain Thorne, to Miles naming one of his daughters Taura (and did my heart spasm a bit when I read that). Everything--everyone is connected and our past shapes our future as our future shapes our past.

When I first heard what this book was about, I was scared that many fans would hate it because of the revelation of the secret third in the Vorkosigan's marriage. I'm therefore heartened that most of the reactions I'm seeing so far are overwhelmingly positive.

I really want to do another series re-read now, particularly of Shards of Honor and The Vor Game. I want to revisit Sergyar before it was Sergyar, and remind myself about the Hegan Hub War, which was such a large part of the backstory of this book. show less

A few years after Aral's death, Cordelia starts to feel herself again -- as does Oliver Jole, former aide to Aral and the man who inherited his Admiralship and duties on Sergyar, and who knew them both well.

I found this book awfully... fannish, for lack of a better word. Bujold (whom I sense may be getting tired of this series, the poor dear, though the rest of us still can't stop eating it up) finds a character in the margins of the existing books, writes him essentially from scratch in this book as a Original Character, deftly incorporates a strange, previously-unhinted-at, and sexually-boundary-pushing plot device through squinting at the edges of the existing canon and weaving the retcon thoroughly in, and then sets us loose on what show more is in effect a slow-growing love story, with the plot primarily serving the purpose of feeding fans more time with the characters. Though this is not my favorite style of fic and this book may become one of my least favorites in the series for that reason, it's quite fascinating to watch the unfolding of an author ficcing her own universe in classic style....

I love how the characters are aging with me, and how Bujold's vocabulary here goes no-holds-barred -- I was surprised by new words much more than usual in this work. And although I appreciate the frenetic early Miles, there is something about the many observations on age in this book that resonate with me, and I expect will resonate more and more as I continue down my life's journey.

I'm also sensing a theme of April-December romance now, having been bothered by it in The Sharing Knife and surprised but accepting in Falling Free and Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. I am getting the impression that age differences in romance may one of those recurring authorial themes -- albeit an authorial pet theme that Bujold has handled with a relatively light hand compared to some fellows -- and it makes me curious to learn more about her personal story.

I'd recommend this book for fans, but not further. For me, there was not a ton to fall in love with here, and for those who do fall in love, this book feels quite different from the rest of this series to me (though, and this is hard for me to judge, perhaps it is more in line with some of the fantasy that Bujold has been recently producing). 3 stars.

---
On reread: This book grew on me immensely. It's a meditation on selfhood and self-actualization and life after loss. I'll double down on the fannish remark, though. Using Cordelia to explore these themes gives this book weight and backstory that would be hard to achieve with an entirely new character. And although it's a struggle for first-time readers who expect something very different from what this book delivers, even that is core to the fannish ethos of this novel. 4.5 stars. show less

Summary: Aral Vorkosigan played such an important role in the Barrayaran Imperium that even several years after his death, the repercussions are still being felt. On a more personal level, his widow, Cordelia Vorkosigan, vicereine of Sergyar, is slowly accommodating herself to life without him. She's managing governance of the planet just fine on her own - apart from some squabbles over her plans to relocate the planet's capital - and is contemplating a change to her personal life. She has some genetic samples - frozen gametes from herself and Aral from shortly after Miles was born - and with genetic and uterine replicator technology being what they are, she's considering giving Miles and Mark some much-younger sisters. Also in the show more picture is Oliver Jole, Aral's former aide - and lover - now the Admiral of the Sergyaran Fleet. When Cordelia makes him an astonishing offer regarding those genetic samples, he must make some very tough decisions regarding what he wants his future to look like... and he and Cordelia must puzzle out how the pieces of their relationship fit together around the gap that Aral - the man they both loved - has left behind.

Review: This book was so good. Capslock good. I loved just about every second of it, although it was pretty much written specifically to cater to what originally got me hooked on the Vorkosigan Saga in the first place (namely, Cordelia, who is awesome and I still want to be her when I grow up or at least have her be my best friend so we can sit on the porch and drink a beer and be snarky and awesome together.) I can, however, see how this book might not be to everyone's taste, particularly those people who like the Miles-centric Vorkosigan books more. I did spend the first part of the book a little wrong-footed, trying to pay attention to every detail in case it became important in a Miles-style mystery or political plot later on, before realizing that this book was more of a character study, and the plot, such as it was, was mostly internal to the characters. And again, I was fine with that (a whole book of Cordelia being Cordelia and therefore awesome? Yes please!) but I can see how the lack of an externally motivated plot could be disappointing to other readers.

The Vorkosigan Saga as a whole spends a lot of time exploring the ramifications of technology - specifically reproductive and genetic technology - on various aspects of life. A lot of the previous books have looked at the political and social effects of technology such as uterine replicators, cloning, genetic engineering, etc. But this book, while those same issues are still at the forefront, looks a lot more at how technology affects people on a much more personal level - not regarding death, exactly, but grief, and recovery, and moving on, and love, and interpersonal relationships. I said this book was a character study, but it's not just a study of Cordelia, or even Cordelia and Oliver... it's a character study of Aral, too. Even though he's dead, he's not gone, and we learn more about him by looking at the size and the shape of the hole that his death has left, not just in the Barrayaran Imperium, but in the lives of those who knew him and loved him best.

Perhaps the biggest revelation was about Aral's bisexuality and how that played out in his and Cordelia's marriage. (Revelation is the wrong word; it's a reminder, really, since we've known Aral was bisexual since Shards of Honor, but I tended to forget about it during the Miles-focused books. This is maybe part of the point of the book - that our parents have inner lives that we, as children, even as adult children, are not privy to, and can't really understand.) Specifically, we find out that in the past 10 books or so, Aral and Cordelia have been in what is functionally a three-way marriage with Oliver that was largely an open secret. This blew my mind, yet was somehow also still consistent with what I had known about their characters, although it did make me go back and see whether there was any hint of it in Miles's novels. I'm never entirely sure how much an author has planned from the beginning of the series (particularly in a multi-decade series such as this), and how much is ret-conning. However, judging from what I've read in interviews, and by the publication order of the early Vorkosigan series, I suspect that Bujold does a fair bit of ret-conning, and she's remarkably good at it - it's always seamless; whether or not she'd intended this triad marriage all along, I found it totally plausible that it was occurring "behind the scenes". More specifically, Jole does show up as Aral's aide in The Vor Game... and then not again until he's acting as one of Aral's pallbearers in Cryoburn, representing the planet Sergyar. At the time, I was too busy being emotionally wrecked by Gregor's actions during Aral's funeral to give any thought to the name of some random other dude, but rereading "Aftermaths" with the knowledge of who Jole was, and who Aral was to him, was just heartbreaking. Again, I don't know if Bujold already had this book in mind, or if she just latched onto the name and wove this backstory into the gap, but either way, it was devastatingly effective.

I realize that all this rambling isn't exactly reviewing the book. So, short version: it's great. It's got Bujold's great sense of humor and compelling characters and a sensible worldview and a wonderful love story and a very cool idea for see-through canoes (which actually exist and now I really want one) and some interesting technically-sci-fi-but-not-that-implausible issues to think about (on that note, while the cover art initially left me cold, after reading the book I absolutely love it). The audiobook is narrated by Grover Gardner, who, when I first listened to Shards of Honor, I thought it was weird to have a man narrate a book from a woman's POV, but at this point, I couldn't imagine anyone else doing nearly such a good job with Bujold's words. In short, I loved the whole thing, and I'm so glad for every chance I get to live in the Vorkosigans' universe for a few hours. 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Not at all a stand-alone. Basically, if you loved Shards of Honor and you love Cordelia and Aral and got excited every time they popped up in one of Miles's books, even for just a scene, then this book is for you. If you love Miles and are looking for space battles or a mystery then... maybe not so much. But if you're anything like me, even a Vorkosigan book that's not your personal favorite flavor of Vorkosigan book is still usually pretty darn good. show less

Everyone loves books about Cordelia and Aral, right? And despite Aral being dead, this is a book all about Cordelia and Aral. Most particularly, their relationship with Oliver Jole.

I spent a fair chunk of the book wondering if I'd just forgotten a giant chunk of Cordelia and Aral's history. But I don't think I had - while Jole has been on the fringes of other stories, I don't think I just forgot his relationship with Aral and Cordelia, I think telling that story is the point of this book. It doesn't feel ret-conned, but it does feel a bit fan-fic-cy, and a part of me shares Miles's 'why are you just telling me this _now_?'

It is very Babies Are The Happy Ending. It's interesting thinking about it with the genders reversed, if Cordelia show more was male, and had seduced a woman 20 years her junior, and persuaded her to pass up a major promotion to stay home and have babies and be happy. But Bujold addresses these complicated stories with interest and nuance.

It is also very 'love stories about old people'. If you don't want to think about people older than 50 falling in love and enjoying it in a variety of ways, this is not the book for you. But the older I get, the more pleased I am there are stories about old people who are still people!

I guess I have seen too many interesting and non-canonical relationships to feel as intrigued and titillated by the three-way relationship as I might as a younger reader. But it is an interesting take on it. Thinking about poor Oliver navigating Aral's death with no acknowledgement of what he meant to him. Watching Oliver and Cordelia renegotiate their own relationship, with the missing lynchpin of Aral. Watching Miles react to the revelations about his parents' lives.

It is very nostalgic of the rest of the series, with lots of nods to events in previous books. I might have preferred _slightly_ fewer nods to previous events and more events in this one!

It is all very Cozy. I was expecting some Cetegandan Plot, or some Great Scheme to be thwarted, but actually, the Mild Peril is mild, and comes from frustrated drunk young men and local wildlife. It is not the high space opera of early books, it is family and hog roasts and fireworks. That is nice.

And there are some really lovely bits. The crystal hulled boats, and the wildlife of an entire unexplored world dancing under the surface of a shimmering lake.

And the time with Cordelia and her grandson, Alex, exploring how he feels about the Academy and being the Next Count Vorkosigan, is beautiful. And I laughed out loud at 'And here's Admiral Jole too. I suppose you'd have to practice drawing both men and women.' Bujold's family scenes are full of warmth and exquisitely drawn.

Oh loves, take delight in one another
While you can, take delight show less

I've seen several reviews from die-hard Vorkosigan fans crying foul that Lois McMaster Bujold is ret-conning the relationship between Aral and Cordelia and betraying the series' integrity. As a casual reader of the series, I don't have such serious loyalty to Vorkosigan canon. I found this book to be a charming, beautiful reflection on grief, aging, love and parenting. The plot is heavy on relationships and light on swashbuckling action, but it is still filled with trademark Bujold humor and wisdom. And what a pleasure to read about a sexual relationship between two adults of a mature age that isn't played for laughs.

Yes, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen provides a different perspective on the relationship between Aral and Cordelia show more that began in Shards of Honor and that may make some readers uncomfortable. But watching Cordelia find happiness again (not to mention having a glimpse of Miles Vorkosigan's bewilderment at being father of six) is a very satisfying experience. show less

Sometimes there's that one brilliant author who can break all the damn rules and get away with it.

Yeah. I'm talking about Lois Bujold.

I tried putting this novel into a mould to judge it by any other type of story and I just can't do it. Sure, I could just reduce it by saying it's a love story, but that's like saying the events of Aral and Cordelia's courtship is just an SF love story, and it's so much richer and deep and full of nostalgia than that. It's saying that Miles and Ekaterina was just some fly-by-night romance, and to say that is to talk complete shit.

No, this happens to have the trappings of all the immense story and love and history of this universe, but it is also something so much grander than just that.

It's about love. show more It's about finding happiness. It's about starting again.

It's also about laughing at the fact that burning marshmallows being flung at stupid men by their women is actually a valid socializing tool. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

I was deeply charmed and brought to near tears five or six times while reading this. It's probably just my vast investment in the universe, or perhaps it's the little sparks of memory and reminiscence and the signs of life from all those wonderful, wonderful, wonderful characters I've grown up with. Yeah, Miles is here, too, but he plays another supporting role again, to great and sneaky effect.

What this novel does not have is intrigue beyond a very personal (for Naismith and Jole) nature. There is no grand plot beyond what Cordelia had in mind. And yet, I was charmed more than I could believe.

Was this a feel-good book? Did it break all conventions and refuse to force any kind of strained conflict? Yes, yes it did. It was natural and featured choices ranging between good and equally good and forced us to follow along and find out what we truly wanted, too.

If you are a parent, you'll get an absolute ton of significance from this novel. If you aren't, but you've followed this series this far, then I'm sure you have enough empathy to fake it. :)

I loved this novel. I was back with my family. I was back with all my loved ones. I feel loved. :) show less

A rather low-key final(?) entry in the Vorkosigan series, circling around to the beginning with Cordelia, on Sergyar. Readers looking for military action or major political maneuvering will be disappointed; the joys here are less adreneline-fueled but no less delightful for that.

Three years after Aral's death, Cordelia, still Vicereine of Sergyar, is laying plans for the rest of her life. Their long-term associate Admiral Jole is, too. They may be middle-aged, but their lives are far from over. New beginnings abound and old secrets are revealed, as we see what the still-new colony planet is growing into. Miles is not the only one who will have to adjust his vision of the past, in possibly unsettling ways.

Some people will hate this book. show more I loved it. show less