A review by sherwoodreads
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


About a third of the way into this book, it occurred to me that the genre I love best has in so many ways grown up.

At least, I can’t think of a major book coming out from genre publishers in the last few decades that is basically about two old people thinking about retirement, reflecting on their past lives, and finding romance as well as feeling their way toward their future lives.

I loved this book because it engages directly with the long shadow of past grief, and post-violence emotional fallout, in a believable way, and yet it is filled with hope. We have aging people interested in the world around them, still vital in spite of physical wear and tear, who are still engaging the world, wanting to make a difference, and above all still learning and still using their minds.

It is a leisurely book, as it concerns the aftermath of great events, and sometimes the cost of them as well as the triumphs. There is plenty going on in this book, but it’s all small scale. This arm of the galaxy appears to be entering a period of peace after a generation of external and internal conflict. So there is no war, as there is no violent emotional reaction.

I love the handling of Cordelia’s character. She’s always been a catalyst. From the very first book we have seen her come up against the formidable military culture of Barrayar as it endures violent reinvention while coming to terms with the rediscovery of the galaxy—to which she brings her Betan paradigm.

And though she is up against nothing profoundly distressing in this book, it’s close enough to the aftermath of Aral’s loss for us to feel her tenderness and recovery. She could so easily have been smug, but she isn’t. In Cordelia’s mind, she is an aging woman feeling her way toward her future, while dealing with both power and her reputation, both of which we have seen her earn.

While the reader discovers the surprise relationship, there are enough hearkenings to the past to remind us of Cordelia’s profound effect on Barrayar, as well as Barrayar’s effect on Cordelia. Neither has come this far without affecting the other.

I think the key to the entire series is provided in the elegiac short story (termed a postlude) at the end of Shards of Honor called “Aftermaths.”

That story has remained in my mind each time a new Vorkosiverse book has come out. That includes rereads. And so when I came to this new entry in the series, in so many ways it felt as if Bujold has gently guided her long-touring ship to final dock, along with the Prince Serg. Not full circle, or not quite. There is far too much unalterable change for that, bad and good, but that poignant story about the costs of war, and a war-like culture, is examined here with a light, tender, insightful, humorous, and yet profound touch.

There were so many wonderful small moments. The evolving biota of Sergyar threw me right back to the discoveries of this planet during Shards of Honor. Bujold carries the sfnal delight in discovery forward here, as the planet’s human population grows and settles.

I loved seeing old characters, and meeting new. And most of all, I loved seeing Miles in middle age. I’ve always thought Bujold did a terrific job with a disabled hero who never had the physical strength to be a hero, but who managed anyway on wits and nerves. And now we see the cost of that legacy in Miles. Not mentally—it was delightful to see him on the scent again, putting things together faster than his exasperated mother was prepared for—but physically.

Retconning and emotional evolution

Though I tried to stay away from spoilers until I was able to get and read the book, I saw enough hints here and there about its content, most often in commentary about retconning.

Some fans seem to feel that reconning—that is, revising an aspect of a fictional work retrospectively, typically by introducing a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events—is wrong.

I just don’t see that, unless I can’t believe either the event or how it rings changes through the entire series. Long writers working on a roman fleuve have to deal with what’s in print, and generally readers like deepening of the characters and complexity added to the work. Tolkien was lucky in that his work didn’t see print until he’d been able to go back and forth over it for a couple of decades. It can be a tough challenge to discover trapdoors in what a writer considered a floor, that open to an entire new level that makes absolute sense—several books after the fact.

This is not a new problem; Anthony Trollope, for example, in his autobiography gets into his regrets about early decisions in both the Palliser and the Barsetshire series, but what can one do when the books are already in print?

So, my reaction to the big discovery at the start of this book was, but of course.

I can see how Aral and Oliver would have had to keep their relationship secret from Barrayar, given the cultural climate, especially the unwritten but firmly understood taboos about senior officer and junior, but I can understand Cordelia’s Betan side being as impatient with this rule as she was with the privileges of birth rank. While making no secret of the fact that she considered the Barrayaran military culture half-mad, she did learn to understand military chain of command, and to use it when necessary.

But to her, from the very first book, everything about rank is all a fiction. Role playing. Therefore I cannot see her getting in a swivet about the difference in age and rank between Oliver and Aral, who in her Betan view are after all just two human beings.

As for her and Aral’s relationship, it was clear from the first book that she knew precisely what she was letting herself in for when she married Aral, who had been about as traumatized as could get and remained relatively sane (unlike Prince Serg, and Ges Verrutyer); when she finds Aral again at the end of Shards of Honor, he’s stinking drunk and suicidal. He has given up, and given in. It’s she who goes after him, and firmly calls the shots in cementing their relationship, and it is then that he is able to rally emotionally, physically, intellectually.

She retorts crisply to that smarmy Vor bastard in Barrayar that Aral ‘was bisexual, and now he is monogamous,’ which was true at the time, too.

The reader assumes without evidence that it stayed that way, despite all the evidence earlier that these two were capable of redefining the rules of their relationship. We don’t actually get to see the dynamics between the two of them as the relationship developed, as the main focus of the previous books has been Miles after Shards and Barrayar, but given those first two books, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see Aral’s conviction that he was staying true to his marriage vows (which by the way we never heard) by staying away from all women, which would exclude occasional interactions with guys.

Then when one of those looks like it’s becoming serious, bringing Cordelia up to speed—and because of her Betan view of recreational sex, and of the complexity of relationships, knowing that she’d back him up. I can imagine her being worried that Oliver’s pretty face hid another Ges (wasn’t he pretty, too?) but I can’t imagine her being scandalized, offended, or even betrayed at there being an Oliver. She was always too clear-eyed about Aral to even be surprised.

Further, I can imagine her being so relieved when it turns out that Oliver is basically a good man with a clean heart, because to a Betan this emotional relationship would reflect on Aral’s emotional healing process. He has not repeated the self-damaging pattern of falling for a Ges.

So though we have no hint of Aral’s relationship with Oliver during any of the other books, I can understand it having happened, and therefore the retcon works for me.

And I feel that it was a retcon; the minute I finished this book I went straight to Mirror Dance—which has to have been the most gut-wrenching of all the books for the Vorkosigans collectively—to see if there was any covert hint of Cordelia’s message to Jole after the heart attack, but if there was, I couldn’t find it, though I would have been thrilled to because I adore discovering new meanings in ambiguous passages in earlier books, and conversations that with new data take on completely new meanings.

But like I said above, if a roman fleuve is going to be an evolving story and not the same old same old endlessly repeated, then discoveries like this will happen. And need to be worked in retrospectively, if one doesn’t have the option of rewriting earlier text. I believed in the events as recollected in this book—and it was interesting to see Miles accepting them when he and Oliver had their real talk at last.

In retrospect, I think my favorite bit in the entire book was that last conversation between Oliver and Miles. In the latter’s maturity and rueful acceptance on so many levels—and at a distance, Gregor’s quiet insights—I see a healthy future for Barrayar. (Though there were some interesting minor key notes about the Cetagandans, especially the long-range plans of the haut; I wondered when I closed the book if the long-lived, and far-seeing, emperor has enough respect for Miles Vorkosigan to wait until he is long gone before pulling out the haut’s next set of plans . . .)