Reviews with content warning for Blood - Devices and Desires

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Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker

2 reviews

chalkletters's review against another edition

tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

As a January treat, I decided to relax my rules around trying to keep this blog from being overwhelmed by fantasy fiction reviews and allow myself a reread. I distinctly remember finishing Devices and Desires for the first time, in my bedroom on Diana Street, and racing to the bookshop on Wellfield Road to see if they had the next instalment. As so often happens, reading at 35 is a vastly different experience from reading at 22, but no less enjoyable.

K J Parker’s plot is complicated, intricate and gripping. In just the first book of three, there are several plot events that completely overturn the reader’s expectations, and yet make perfect sense in context. There’s a lot of betrayal going on, some surprising, some not, which keeps the level of excitement and intrigue very high. Many of the characters in Devices and Desires manage to be both fiendishly clever and overwhelmingly stupid. Clever in that they are great tactical thinkers, able to plot several moves ahead and achieve their aims. Stupid in that the men all fall irrevocably in love to the extent that it dictates all of their decisions.

The women, unfortunately, get very little agency. It hardly seems to matter whether they love the men in return — for the most part, the men don’t ask. In fact, for all their professed devotion, they rarely hold a conversation with the women in their lives and certainly don’t ask, or even privately consider, what Veatriz or Ariessa or Mortisa actually want. It doesn’t help that only one character in the book appears to have siblings. Everyone else is detached from a wider family influence and seems only to have their (deceased) predecessors, one friend and one love interest. Somehow, though, the characters are able to escape feeling like chess pieces. Duke Valens and Miel Ducas, in particular, have solid backstories and conflicted motivations; they’re warm, not lifeless or cold-blooded.

K J Parker’s prose is very technical; a touch too much so, at times. It makes sense for the characters — and for the series title (The Engineer Trilogy) — but it isn’t the most riveting reading. Fortunately, he strikes the balance pretty well and the technical details never slow down the reading for too long. Instead of an elaborate magic system, Devices and Desires is built on, as the series titles suggests, engineering, which arguably makes it more science fiction than fantasy, despite the presence of bows, arrows and castles. K J Parker certainly seems like the opposite of someone like Robin Hobb — but maybe that’s more to do with male vs female perspective than science vs magic.

I enjoyed rereading Devices and Desires — so much so that I’m thinking about moving on immediately to Evil for Evil.

Content Warnings

wardenred's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Basically, it's a love story, which is why tens of thousands die, cities are torched, nations overthrown, and everybody betrays everybody else at least once.

If I had to choose only two adjectives to describe this book, I'd go for "dense" and "compelling." The political fantasy part was great, although I'm not 100% sure if the fantasy label applies here; it's the kind of fantasy where the author didn't want to set the story in any actual real-world historical period/country and came up with his own early industrial setting with zero magic or dragons or whatever else you might expect from the genre. I admit I skimmed some particularly long-winded sections on the intricacies of engineering or hunting.

The story is well-crafted, with all the right tension points and plenty of cases when each of the many prominent characters wields their own subset of information and is unaware of all the forces scheming against them, effectively placing the reader on the edge of their seat. The one part that felt off to me occurred near the end. Without going into any real spoilers, I believe there should have been a better way to reveal the final chord of the big intrigue without the schemer sitting down with the victim and laying it all out in plain words.

Like every good political story, the characters are where this book really shines: their goals, their motivations, the conflicts where their interests intersect. I strongly relate to the way Valdes thinks about the world, and Miel is exactly the kind of noble person whose high moral ground is both his strength and his undoing that I love to root for, even when they're headed to be doomed. What really struck me, though, how this book is so full of complex, fully realized male characters—Valdes, Miel, Orsea, Vaatzes, and others—and there's not a single woman in sight to stand on the same level. The only truly prominent female character is Veatriz, and she has very little agency and her entire role in the plot is to reveal things about the men who surround her, or be a catalyst for their actions and changes. One can argue that it's "period-specific" and "historically accurate," but by making it low fantasy and not historical fiction, I feel like an author loses that excuse. Besides, this setting isn't exactly 100% a man's, man's world. There are, for example, all those nameless "women in red" smuggling letters beyond borders and making the entire plot possible. They're supposed to have a lot of agency, a lot of money, and probably quite a lot of adventure... somewhere off-screen. Unfortunately, they're collectively used merely as a faceless plot device.

Regardless, this was a pretty engrossing read, and I expect to pick up the rest of the trilogy later.

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