Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey (1 star)

This was recommended by a friend a long time ago, and I decided not to read it at the time, but I recently saw it on the NPR top 100 sci-fi fantasy list along with many of my all-time favourites, which got me curious enough to give it a chance. I wish I hadn't, since it is basically GRRM romance fan fiction. The same people that put this on the NPR list probably made 50 Shades of Grey a #1 bestseller.

Carey has created a complex world that has some of the feel, but none of the actual talent, of GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire, and turned it into a romance novel with a twist: the main character and single POV is a woman, Phedre, apparently predisposed from birth to BDSM who trains as a high class prostitute. She works for a self-styled spymaster, Delaunay, who we're supposed to believe is a master of information sources, but is really just a pimp for two high-class prostitutes. Delaunay is obviously intended to be Varys, he's even called 'the spider' in case you missed it, but shows none of Varys' talents for extracting information. He isn't ruthless or devious enough to be a spymaster, use sources against each other, or apply blackmail liberally, and he appears to have little to no underworld contacts. In fact, his whole information gathering strategy seems to be pimping out his two prostitutes to his enemies and hoping they say something interesting.

And if you need more convincing that it's trying to be the Song of Ice and Fire, how about this:

Barquiel L'Envers rested his chin on one fist. "Will you teach me to play the game of thrones?".

OK, so maybe the plot is silly and the characters are unconvincing, how about the writing? Carey can certainly churn out the words, the novel is about 900 pages. And she wants to create a complex world. She really wants it to be complex, but she doesn't know how to create it without just dumping vast boring swathes of geography and history:

...Also to the south went Shemhazai, westerly to the mountainous borders of Aragonia, with whom our long peace still stands. Siovale is the name of this provice, and it is a prosperous one with a great tradition for learning, for Shemazai ever treasured knowledge. Inland to the north of Siovale is L'Agnace...

And just so you know all this boring background isn't pointless (it is), there's plenty of heavy-handed foreshadowing along the lines of "if I had only known that going to the Valerian House would have had such an important consequence".

Carey also felt the need to re-use Christianity as a religion in this kinda-Europe, with some bits re-named. I'm not sure why this annoyed me so much, perhaps just because it felt lazy because she missed the opportunity to build something new and interesting in favour of a shallow copy of Christian beliefs and rituals.

It came then to the One God that his persuasion held no sway over Elua, in whose veins ran the red wine of his mother Earth, through the womb she gave him and the tears of the Magdelene.

The real problem here is that Phedre's POV is boring and far from the centre of the action, and its the only POV. Most of the first half of the novel is like this: Phedre is told to go on an 'assignation' (one of many fancy words to dress up what is actually going on, if you read 'trick' for assignation and BJ for languisement it seems a lot less like a semi-religious occupation and a lot more like old-fashioned whoring), patron (john) drops some tidbit of information in fairly implausible manner since they know exactly why Phedre is there, Phedre gives information to Delaunay. Delaunay keeps Phedre in the dark about everything. Repeat. Through the whole novel Phedre is very passive, does little more interesting than pick a sexual partner every now and then, and happens to be in the right place at the right time to hear and pass on crucial information.

But I'm tired of writing, so I'll just dump a list of other miscellaneous things that annoyed me:

• "In the City's Great Temple...flowers and weeds alike are lovingly tended." This is ridiculous. I can't wait to see a temple overrun with 10ft high thistles and kudzu grass, it sounds beautiful.
• Everything about Melisande being more beautiful than all the other already highly praised beautiful people and her effect on Phedre: going weak at the knees, seeing red, complete submission, was entirely unconvincing.
• Delaunay enacted an elaborate plot to get Phedre to surprise Duc Barquiel L'Envers and use her body as bait to get L'Envers to meet with Delaunay. Because, you know, Delaunay knowing who killed his sister wasn't enough to get a 5 minute meeting without this elaborate setup.
• Phedre constantly talks up how smart she is but never shows any glimmer of smarts or cunning outside the bedroom "...made of me what I was, a courtesan equipped to match wits with the deadliest of courtiers."
• Not only does Phedre have an over-inflated opinion of her intelligence, she's also a bigot "It was a strange thing, to mark the presence of so many D'Angelines among foreigners, honed features shining like cut gems among unpolished stone." and "earthborn and bred, with none of the odd outcroppings of gift or beauty that marked even the lowest-born of D'Angeline peasantry".
• Phedre's Boys made me cringe every time they were mentioned. It's like the cast of HMS Pinafore picked a BDSM prostitute as their figurehead and waltzed around singing merry little songs in her name.
• No-one really important dies, ever. GRRM this is not.

Don't read it.

1 star.