The Hands of the Emperor
Oct. 26th, 2021 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI read this book because several people said I would find it interesting! Which I did, I finished it a week or so ago and am still having arguments with it in my head, so here are a lot of words. (In brief: I liked so much about this book, but ultimately it made me furious.)
The Hands of the Emperor is set in a brilliantly elaborate fantasy universe that is some years on from an enormous catastrophe that is never quite fully described. Whatever it was, it involved the collapse and occasional actual disappearance (?) of various countries and lots of famine, misery, pestilence, etc. Our hero and main character, Cliopher Mdang, lived through the disaster and has spent the years since trying to rebuild the infrastructure of the world he lives in. Which sounds a bit ambitious, but he’s actually well-placed for it – he’s the right- hand man and cabinet secretary-type for the emperor, who is an absolute-ruler who does most of the magic for this whole fantasy world to keep it going. Being the emperor in this universe involves being subject to a vast array of strict ritual and taboos, including limits on what he can touch, eat, who he can talk to, etc., which have the net effect of keeping him a virtual prisoner of ceremony. He’s the highest of the highest echelon of aristocracy but leads a more constrained life than anyone else.
Cliopher, on the other hand, grew up in a solidly middle-class family on an island archipelago a long way away from the emperor’s capital. The island he’s from is very much a small-town scenario where everyone knows everyone and their business, and if that weren’t enough Cliopher has 58 first cousins so is literally related to nearly everyone in town. (I love this! So real.) The family are part of a distinct islander culture which seems to be a fantasy-analogue to Polynesian culture, which is thought of as primitive and barbarian in the capital and in the emperor’s court; Cliopher is the first from the islands to be admitted to the imperial service and has had to tolerate all kinds of nonsense from people who think of him as some kind of brown rustic. (I love this too, unsurprisingly. In particular, there’s a bit where he finally snaps and insists that people pronounce his name correctly, having put up with the mispronunciation all the years of his career so far. I did this when I was about 25 also! So real, again.)
On this basis, therefore, there are a few principal threads in this book. Firstly, there’s Cliopher’s slow understanding that the emperor he serves is a human being and needs a life and existence of his own before he goes mad. This is definitely the best bit of the book – it’s slow and measured, it makes internal sense, and Cliopher’s real affection and friendship for this man he’s unable to touch or even come close to is just, yes, lovely. It’s the other thread that... argh, ok, Cliopher is a right-hand man for the emperor, right. This seems to involve being the head of the imperial civil service, which, also ok. I like bureaucrats! A 900-page book about fantasy bureaucracy sounds right up my alley!
The thing is... the author tells us Cliopher is a civil servant, and Cliopher also tells us this a lot, and so does everyone else in the book, but I am here from the original imperial civil service to tell you that this is not, in fact, correct. In the not-very-many years since the catastrophe, Cliopher has formulated and implemented a number of policies for the benefit of the population, including, marvellously, universal basic income; also a large-scale transport system and a reform of the justice system? But, crucially, Cliopher makes these policies, as well as implementing them. Which is great if that’s what you want to write your book about! I too often feel like democracy is overrated! But making big policy like that is what a legislature and executive do; civil servants just implement. If you do both, you’re moving towards…. not good things? We’re supposed to all be in favour and you know, I am in favour of universal basic income! But the book doesn’t seem to acknowledge that Cliopher can exercise this extraordinary degree of power unaccountable to any other body? Absolute power corrupts, and maybe it doesn’t in fiction, but... it does, though.
But ok, I grant you that fantasy worlds can’t be cranky democracies. Cool. In my years as a civil servant, I have made maybe four significant tweaks to the the UK health and safety regime and once I did a set of accessibility regulations. The idea that one person (who by the way doesn’t seem to have much of a staff? Not the nine hundred people who work for my department alone, anyway) could make and implement this kind of world-changing policy and do it more or less alone is more than my suspension of disbelief can stand. And apparently… he does this without making mistakes? I once almost cost the UK government £22,000. Cliopher has apparently never even broken a stapler in pursuit of the public good. This bothers me, and all of this is all the more frustrating because I agree with the author! Life in public service is deeply, profoundly fulfilling and valuable! I would choose to do nothing else with my life! But this, my friends, is not what it looks like.
Again, fine, let’s acknowledge that asskygiants says, Cliopher is to ordinary real-life public servants is what King Arthur is to any real king. But then that still leaves the bit about this book that I found the most difficult. The last thread is Cliopher’s inner conflict, between the home life he left behind, the life of family and home and history and tradition, and the work he does, which is incredibly valuable and personally fulfilling but takes him a long way from his home and puts him among people who call him a barbarian. It really hurts him, both that the people he allegedly works with think of his culture as primitive, and that his family don’t really understand the job he does and why it’s so important to him. And you know, this is great as a storyline, I love it, we’ve been all there. Who among us hasn’t gone home to their brown family and felt their interior life turn on an axis? Your dadi doesn’t understand your job, or in some cases why you even have one. You can’t quite talk to her; the language is going. Your white colleagues and friends do their best, but they don’t quite get your home life. You are not quite one thing, or another. You are more than one person.
And you know... that’s not bad. It doesn’t have to be. We contain multitudes! Being an immigrant is an integral part of the human experience! etc. But that is not how this book sees it, and this is definitely a lot more about me than the book (I think?) but omg, I hated it, I hated it so much, I’ve rarely hated a book about diaspora or immigrants more. Cliopher resolves this conflict by being as gosh-darned perfect at being a diaspora emigrant as he is at being a bureaucrat. As the backstory slowly reveals, he’s actually incredibly well-versed in his home culture, better than his friends and family who stayed at home. He knows all the traditional dances and the traditional ways. Not for him the slow loss over time and distance, no! Not for him any kind of vulnerability. No mistakes. In his case, it’s just that his friends at work and his friends and relatives don’t know about his immaculate understanding of islander culture, and everything comes out right once everyone is informed. In short, be perfect: be perfect in all your lives, be the perfect representative of your people, and be perfectly assimilated too, and you, too, can have a narratively satisfying happy ending. I feel like I'm caricaturing it but I don't think I am! Cliopher's colleagues and his friends and family are all very impressed with all his achievements, and presumably we the readers are meant to be too.
And all of that said, it's not a flaw in a book to not be about what I think it should be about! But it turns out I don’t like stories about people without failures or flaws, and nine hundred pages is a lot of pages about a main character without failures or flaws. So there you are.
The Hands of the Emperor is set in a brilliantly elaborate fantasy universe that is some years on from an enormous catastrophe that is never quite fully described. Whatever it was, it involved the collapse and occasional actual disappearance (?) of various countries and lots of famine, misery, pestilence, etc. Our hero and main character, Cliopher Mdang, lived through the disaster and has spent the years since trying to rebuild the infrastructure of the world he lives in. Which sounds a bit ambitious, but he’s actually well-placed for it – he’s the right- hand man and cabinet secretary-type for the emperor, who is an absolute-ruler who does most of the magic for this whole fantasy world to keep it going. Being the emperor in this universe involves being subject to a vast array of strict ritual and taboos, including limits on what he can touch, eat, who he can talk to, etc., which have the net effect of keeping him a virtual prisoner of ceremony. He’s the highest of the highest echelon of aristocracy but leads a more constrained life than anyone else.
Cliopher, on the other hand, grew up in a solidly middle-class family on an island archipelago a long way away from the emperor’s capital. The island he’s from is very much a small-town scenario where everyone knows everyone and their business, and if that weren’t enough Cliopher has 58 first cousins so is literally related to nearly everyone in town. (I love this! So real.) The family are part of a distinct islander culture which seems to be a fantasy-analogue to Polynesian culture, which is thought of as primitive and barbarian in the capital and in the emperor’s court; Cliopher is the first from the islands to be admitted to the imperial service and has had to tolerate all kinds of nonsense from people who think of him as some kind of brown rustic. (I love this too, unsurprisingly. In particular, there’s a bit where he finally snaps and insists that people pronounce his name correctly, having put up with the mispronunciation all the years of his career so far. I did this when I was about 25 also! So real, again.)
On this basis, therefore, there are a few principal threads in this book. Firstly, there’s Cliopher’s slow understanding that the emperor he serves is a human being and needs a life and existence of his own before he goes mad. This is definitely the best bit of the book – it’s slow and measured, it makes internal sense, and Cliopher’s real affection and friendship for this man he’s unable to touch or even come close to is just, yes, lovely. It’s the other thread that... argh, ok, Cliopher is a right-hand man for the emperor, right. This seems to involve being the head of the imperial civil service, which, also ok. I like bureaucrats! A 900-page book about fantasy bureaucracy sounds right up my alley!
The thing is... the author tells us Cliopher is a civil servant, and Cliopher also tells us this a lot, and so does everyone else in the book, but I am here from the original imperial civil service to tell you that this is not, in fact, correct. In the not-very-many years since the catastrophe, Cliopher has formulated and implemented a number of policies for the benefit of the population, including, marvellously, universal basic income; also a large-scale transport system and a reform of the justice system? But, crucially, Cliopher makes these policies, as well as implementing them. Which is great if that’s what you want to write your book about! I too often feel like democracy is overrated! But making big policy like that is what a legislature and executive do; civil servants just implement. If you do both, you’re moving towards…. not good things? We’re supposed to all be in favour and you know, I am in favour of universal basic income! But the book doesn’t seem to acknowledge that Cliopher can exercise this extraordinary degree of power unaccountable to any other body? Absolute power corrupts, and maybe it doesn’t in fiction, but... it does, though.
But ok, I grant you that fantasy worlds can’t be cranky democracies. Cool. In my years as a civil servant, I have made maybe four significant tweaks to the the UK health and safety regime and once I did a set of accessibility regulations. The idea that one person (who by the way doesn’t seem to have much of a staff? Not the nine hundred people who work for my department alone, anyway) could make and implement this kind of world-changing policy and do it more or less alone is more than my suspension of disbelief can stand. And apparently… he does this without making mistakes? I once almost cost the UK government £22,000. Cliopher has apparently never even broken a stapler in pursuit of the public good. This bothers me, and all of this is all the more frustrating because I agree with the author! Life in public service is deeply, profoundly fulfilling and valuable! I would choose to do nothing else with my life! But this, my friends, is not what it looks like.
Again, fine, let’s acknowledge that as
skygiants says, Cliopher is to ordinary real-life public servants is what King Arthur is to any real king. But then that still leaves the bit about this book that I found the most difficult. The last thread is Cliopher’s inner conflict, between the home life he left behind, the life of family and home and history and tradition, and the work he does, which is incredibly valuable and personally fulfilling but takes him a long way from his home and puts him among people who call him a barbarian. It really hurts him, both that the people he allegedly works with think of his culture as primitive, and that his family don’t really understand the job he does and why it’s so important to him. And you know, this is great as a storyline, I love it, we’ve been all there. Who among us hasn’t gone home to their brown family and felt their interior life turn on an axis? Your dadi doesn’t understand your job, or in some cases why you even have one. You can’t quite talk to her; the language is going. Your white colleagues and friends do their best, but they don’t quite get your home life. You are not quite one thing, or another. You are more than one person. And you know... that’s not bad. It doesn’t have to be. We contain multitudes! Being an immigrant is an integral part of the human experience! etc. But that is not how this book sees it, and this is definitely a lot more about me than the book (I think?) but omg, I hated it, I hated it so much, I’ve rarely hated a book about diaspora or immigrants more. Cliopher resolves this conflict by being as gosh-darned perfect at being a diaspora emigrant as he is at being a bureaucrat. As the backstory slowly reveals, he’s actually incredibly well-versed in his home culture, better than his friends and family who stayed at home. He knows all the traditional dances and the traditional ways. Not for him the slow loss over time and distance, no! Not for him any kind of vulnerability. No mistakes. In his case, it’s just that his friends at work and his friends and relatives don’t know about his immaculate understanding of islander culture, and everything comes out right once everyone is informed. In short, be perfect: be perfect in all your lives, be the perfect representative of your people, and be perfectly assimilated too, and you, too, can have a narratively satisfying happy ending. I feel like I'm caricaturing it but I don't think I am! Cliopher's colleagues and his friends and family are all very impressed with all his achievements, and presumably we the readers are meant to be too.
And all of that said, it's not a flaw in a book to not be about what I think it should be about! But it turns out I don’t like stories about people without failures or flaws, and nine hundred pages is a lot of pages about a main character without failures or flaws. So there you are.