The Empress of the Last Days

Excellent fun! Now we see the story of Balthazar etc. indirectly, through the eyes of 21st Century academics! I can't say that all the dangling bits from the Shadow King were tied up, but we zoom out here enough not too care. The details bubble up in some scrambled order as our researchers puzzle them out. The modern day action is all believable enough and fits together well. Maybe the big message is that our struggles today, our political narratives, are similar enough to those 300 years ago.

This was quite different than the other books in this trilogy. Here (a la A. S. Byatt's Possession) a team of scholars find a set of documents that allow them to uncover the story Stevenson told in the first two volumes. It would stand on its own, but it's fun to watch the principal characters pursue false leads, etc. And here the theme about race & status (and, to a lesser extent, gender) is more pronounced, more overtly discussed, than in the earlier volumes. I really enjoyed this set of books, but because it is so heady, it's difficult to recommend to most of my reading friends. Oh, yeah, the other thing that impressed me about this last volume is that, as the first one took seriously religious views & language that are mostly lost, show more & the second got inside the clash of scientific & practical approaches to medicine, this one conveys clearly, insightfully, &, to some extent, sympathetically, contemporary academic politics, with its benefits & costs to intellectual life--a theme usually treated only in satires . . . and a theme, again, not calculated to appeal to the masses. show less