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A review by isabellarobinson7
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
4.0
Rating: 4 stars
Ugh. I finished this book way over a month ago and I haven't even attempted to start compiling this review. I don't even have a copy of this book any more; it was returned to the library. I ought to start writing this. Ok, here we go. (Editing Isabella: Now it's a month and a half and I've yet to finish the review. By the time you're reading this it's probably next year... Well, now it's boxing day and am just finishing up. That's almost two months since I finished this book.)
First of all, let's start with the title. I mean, of all the numbers you could have chosen, you choose my least favourite: sixteen. Bleh. Horrible number (don't ask me to explain myself, because I can't). Now for the rest of the title, I don't know about you, but "walled city" immediately made me think of Thebes. (I've done a little googling to double check that Thebes was indeed a city surrounded by walls and the most conclusive evidence I could find is the "seven-gated wall of Thebes" so yeah, we're going to say its a walled city.) Don't know why, because Jerusalem would have been the most obvious choice, but I don't even try to explain my thought processes at this point so we're just going to go with it.
Here's further evidence of my said wacko thought process: whenever there’s a walled city, no matter what time period it is set in, I am always thinking why don’t they just grab some machine guns and just start mowing the enemy down? I know, and this is coming from someone who lives in a country where all semi automatics are illegal, but it just makes me wonder. Reasons why I wonder this is still pending psych evaluation.
Now that we have the title established, let's jump into what Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is actually about. Plot- and premise-wise, this is probably the most simple book I have read this year. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just knows what it’s about and doesn’t really stray from that. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is about exactly what the title indicates it will be: the sixteenth (and most unconventional) way of defending a walled city. For all intents and purposes, The Lord of the Rings is the same way: it's about Frodo getting the Ring into Mount Doom (plus side plots, but Tolkien's behemoth is over four times the size of Sixteen Ways, so we'll give JRRT a pass for that) and that in no way knocks LOTR down a few pegs in quality. If anything, it adds to it. Again, I feel Sixteen Ways's simple premise lends to its charm.
In short, it’s a fantasy without the fantasy. No fantastical creatures (although...? We will get to my little investigation later). No magic system. No nothing. It’s kind of not even fantasy at all. Like, it might be more historical fiction, but then it’s not based on anything historical. It’s like if I wanted to write a story about and king called, ah, Brent who ruled over a land called Hentropia (Ok...? I'm just rolling with it) and he loved bananas so much that he caused an international banana shortage. This then led the the levels of potassium dropping so low across the human race that doctors had to go in search of another source, and the issues that come with that. It’s all plausible, as in it’s not a fantastical idea, (nor a fantastic one at that) but it is not based on actual history. So would you call the grand epic tale of King Brent and his bananas historical fiction?No, you would probably call it fever-dream fiction. Mostly likely your answer would be no. Similar logic applies to Sixteen Ways. But if you run through all the publishing genres (mystery, thriller, science fiction, literary fiction etc.) then yeah, fantasy is probably the best fit.
Actually, now that I think about it, this book simply couldn't fit into any other genre. Sixteen Ways was a novel flooded with a good ole' fantasy staple: Capitalised English Words. Crikey, was there a lot! The last time I read a book with this many was The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington (and I kept a record of them all in my review) but that book was 736 pages - almost exactly twice the length of Sixteen Ways! Every fantasy novel has their fair share, but Sixteen Ways had their portion and came back for thirds. Here's my list:
Absolution, Academy, Admiralty, Armpit, Ascension, Authority, Bay, Bedroom, Blue, Bollocks, Box, Cape, Chamberlain, City, Corps, Council, Creator, Curtain, Death, Devil, Division, Dogs, Empire, Engineers, Fleet, Foundation, Gardens, Green, Guards, Guildhall, Hospitals, House, Imperial, Lanes, League, Means, Miners, Mint, Necklace, Needle, Palace, Parks, Paymaster, Pontoon, Portico, Prefect, Purple, Quay, Restoration, Resurgence, Sawdust, Sea, Seal, Shambles, Supply, Teeth, Temple, Themes, Town, Trebuchet, Trophy, Victory, Wall, Watch/Watchman, Ways, Works.
And again, like The Shadow of What Was Lost, there were too many multiple word capitalisations to include ("Old Flower Market" for instance) so that's just the single word ones. There's nothing wrong with any of this, it just is rather obvious when you read as much SFF as me and are always dealing with made-up languages and names. Same thing with cussing, as this book used English curse words too. I am so used to fake swearing in my books (think "blood and ashes!" "Stormfather!" "Patak!") that when a regular old f-bomb comes around it actually takes me by surprise, and not in a prudish way.
It should be illegal for authors to write two or more characters whose names begin with the same letter. And it goes without saying that ending with the same letter is out of the question too. So flaming K.J. Parker comes along with Longinus and Lysimachus. Nuh uh. Do not approve. You see, when I consume books just with my eyeballs (ie without the audiobook), people's names fly over my head. I just remember the first letter and the last letter, and those extra ones in the middle are just for decoration. There's a character in this book called Aichma, and in my head her name was more or less a vaguely English sounding noise with an "a" sound at each end. Her name could have been substituted for any word starting and ending with A and it is likely I would not bothered. "Aichma" could be swapped out with aqua, arena, Algeria, arabica... achromatopsia and I probably wouldn't even bat an eye. But fortunately, there is only one A-----a name, as opposed to two L------us names! No! Mr. Parker, NO! Do you know how confused I was when- oop, nope, that was going to be a spoiler. Safe to say there was a section of this book where I was super confused that L------us #1 was doing this thing because I thought he was L------us #2 and #2 was tied up with something else.
Blue people investigation
Now, yes, we need to get to the process and results (or lack thereof) of my crazed little research frenzy. It came about while I was writing the notes that would eventually end up becoming the "fantasy without the fantasy" paragraph in this review. After making the first few bullet points outlining what thoughts I had on the non-fantastical fantasy nature of this book, I came across a passage that talked about “blueskins” which confused me, and perhaps negated all that I just wrote. And thus my investigation began. I think I'll just include my research here verbatim, because why should I try and rationalise what my brain has already spewed out as what can only be described as pure insanity?
In short, it’s a fantasy without the fantasy. Except in this book I think some of the people are blue? Like, there is this guy who comes in at just over half way and talks about the “blueskins” so I don’t know if that is just slang, or there are actual blue people, as in Avatar blue people. Not The Last Airbender, (although, isn't there blue on that guy's head? Idk, never watched it.) I mean James Egomaniac Cameron's Avatar. (That is his middle name. 1000% certain of that.)
See now I’m even more confused because of this paragraph:
So does that mean she is the colour of milk tea? To me it reads as though she was just a mix of two different skin shades, one light and one dark, which, when combined, look similar to the mixture of a tea and milk. Like, you get Earl Grey tea leaves, add boiling water, and then pour in some milk. This, if you do a quick search, turns out to be this peachy-tan colour: caucasian skin. (Now, I might have gone too far in my googling, but there also seems to be a type of tea that is blue, called "butterfly pea flower tea". It's this deep blue colour that is hard to believe occurs naturally. But again, my research has gotten needlessly obscure and so this almost certainly means absolutely nothing.)
And then! Then there’s this:
So what? Orhan, who is narrating this passage, is a subpar "milkface" living amongst the socially superior “blueskins”. So if we interpret the milkfaces as having European, caucasian-adjacent colouring, then what kind of complexion can we imagine would result from putting mud on this coloured skin? Exactly. It seems pretty straight forward from this passage that the so called "blue"skins are just people with a super deep brown skin tone, similar to those of people from Eastern African nations, i.e. Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe. But if this is the case, if they are just people with dark brown skin, why call them blueskins in the first place?!?!
THEN there’s their way of speaking described as “blue-blood diction”. Does it mean like how deoxygenated blood in our veins looks blue through the skin, but the liquid is actually red on the inside? None of our blood is actually blue, we all bleed red regardless of whether the rupture causing the external bleeding is in an artery or vein, but I suppose from the outside veins could make it look like half of the blood in our body is another colour. So is that what “blue-blood diction” is actually referring to? Or does that mean literal blue blood like Vulcans have green blood? (As in the aliens from Star Trek Vulcans: Spock, Tuvok etc. Not the Roman counterpart of Hephaestus.) Vulcans actually bleed a green liquid, as Wikipedia explains: "A Vulcan's on-screen blood is green due to copper-based hemocyanin." Look up a picture of Spock bleeding, and you'll see the green obviously-some-other-liquid-and-not-actually-blood blood (don't ask why they still have red-blooded skin tones, it's 1966, come on). So does Sixteen Ways use the term blue blood in the same way that Star Trek uses green blood? Who knows. Not me. Evidently.
Speaking of the possible blue people, whilst I was fishing around on the inter web looking for an answer about this, I got spoiled for the ending. Seems to be a run of that lately (I just got spoiled for the Doctor Who finale). So when I came to the ending, I wasn't that surprised. That being said, the ending was the weakest part of the whole book, so I didn't really feel like I missed out on that much knowing what happened beforehand.
So that's my review. And then some. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a good book, whether it has blue people in it or not... even though that little niggly unsolved mystery is gonna bug me till kingdom come.
Ugh. I finished this book way over a month ago and I haven't even attempted to start compiling this review. I don't even have a copy of this book any more; it was returned to the library. I ought to start writing this. Ok, here we go. (Editing Isabella: Now it's a month and a half and I've yet to finish the review. By the time you're reading this it's probably next year... Well, now it's boxing day and am just finishing up. That's almost two months since I finished this book.)
First of all, let's start with the title. I mean, of all the numbers you could have chosen, you choose my least favourite: sixteen. Bleh. Horrible number (don't ask me to explain myself, because I can't). Now for the rest of the title, I don't know about you, but "walled city" immediately made me think of Thebes. (I've done a little googling to double check that Thebes was indeed a city surrounded by walls and the most conclusive evidence I could find is the "seven-gated wall of Thebes" so yeah, we're going to say its a walled city.) Don't know why, because Jerusalem would have been the most obvious choice, but I don't even try to explain my thought processes at this point so we're just going to go with it.
Here's further evidence of my said wacko thought process: whenever there’s a walled city, no matter what time period it is set in, I am always thinking why don’t they just grab some machine guns and just start mowing the enemy down? I know, and this is coming from someone who lives in a country where all semi automatics are illegal, but it just makes me wonder. Reasons why I wonder this is still pending psych evaluation.
Now that we have the title established, let's jump into what Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is actually about. Plot- and premise-wise, this is probably the most simple book I have read this year. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just knows what it’s about and doesn’t really stray from that. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is about exactly what the title indicates it will be: the sixteenth (and most unconventional) way of defending a walled city. For all intents and purposes, The Lord of the Rings is the same way: it's about Frodo getting the Ring into Mount Doom (plus side plots, but Tolkien's behemoth is over four times the size of Sixteen Ways, so we'll give JRRT a pass for that) and that in no way knocks LOTR down a few pegs in quality. If anything, it adds to it. Again, I feel Sixteen Ways's simple premise lends to its charm.
In short, it’s a fantasy without the fantasy. No fantastical creatures (although...? We will get to my little investigation later). No magic system. No nothing. It’s kind of not even fantasy at all. Like, it might be more historical fiction, but then it’s not based on anything historical. It’s like if I wanted to write a story about and king called, ah, Brent who ruled over a land called Hentropia (Ok...? I'm just rolling with it) and he loved bananas so much that he caused an international banana shortage. This then led the the levels of potassium dropping so low across the human race that doctors had to go in search of another source, and the issues that come with that. It’s all plausible, as in it’s not a fantastical idea, (nor a fantastic one at that) but it is not based on actual history. So would you call the grand epic tale of King Brent and his bananas historical fiction?
Actually, now that I think about it, this book simply couldn't fit into any other genre. Sixteen Ways was a novel flooded with a good ole' fantasy staple: Capitalised English Words. Crikey, was there a lot! The last time I read a book with this many was The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington (and I kept a record of them all in my review) but that book was 736 pages - almost exactly twice the length of Sixteen Ways! Every fantasy novel has their fair share, but Sixteen Ways had their portion and came back for thirds. Here's my list:
Absolution, Academy, Admiralty, Armpit, Ascension, Authority, Bay, Bedroom, Blue, Bollocks, Box, Cape, Chamberlain, City, Corps, Council, Creator, Curtain, Death, Devil, Division, Dogs, Empire, Engineers, Fleet, Foundation, Gardens, Green, Guards, Guildhall, Hospitals, House, Imperial, Lanes, League, Means, Miners, Mint, Necklace, Needle, Palace, Parks, Paymaster, Pontoon, Portico, Prefect, Purple, Quay, Restoration, Resurgence, Sawdust, Sea, Seal, Shambles, Supply, Teeth, Temple, Themes, Town, Trebuchet, Trophy, Victory, Wall, Watch/Watchman, Ways, Works.
And again, like The Shadow of What Was Lost, there were too many multiple word capitalisations to include ("Old Flower Market" for instance) so that's just the single word ones. There's nothing wrong with any of this, it just is rather obvious when you read as much SFF as me and are always dealing with made-up languages and names. Same thing with cussing, as this book used English curse words too. I am so used to fake swearing in my books (think "blood and ashes!" "Stormfather!" "Patak!") that when a regular old f-bomb comes around it actually takes me by surprise, and not in a prudish way.
It should be illegal for authors to write two or more characters whose names begin with the same letter. And it goes without saying that ending with the same letter is out of the question too. So flaming K.J. Parker comes along with Longinus and Lysimachus. Nuh uh. Do not approve. You see, when I consume books just with my eyeballs (ie without the audiobook), people's names fly over my head. I just remember the first letter and the last letter, and those extra ones in the middle are just for decoration. There's a character in this book called Aichma, and in my head her name was more or less a vaguely English sounding noise with an "a" sound at each end. Her name could have been substituted for any word starting and ending with A and it is likely I would not bothered. "Aichma" could be swapped out with aqua, arena, Algeria, arabica... achromatopsia and I probably wouldn't even bat an eye. But fortunately, there is only one A-----a name, as opposed to two L------us names! No! Mr. Parker, NO! Do you know how confused I was when- oop, nope, that was going to be a spoiler. Safe to say there was a section of this book where I was super confused that L------us #1 was doing this thing because I thought he was L------us #2 and #2 was tied up with something else.
Blue people investigation
Now, yes, we need to get to the process and results (or lack thereof) of my crazed little research frenzy. It came about while I was writing the notes that would eventually end up becoming the "fantasy without the fantasy" paragraph in this review. After making the first few bullet points outlining what thoughts I had on the non-fantastical fantasy nature of this book, I came across a passage that talked about “blueskins” which confused me, and perhaps negated all that I just wrote. And thus my investigation began. I think I'll just include my research here verbatim, because why should I try and rationalise what my brain has already spewed out as what can only be described as pure insanity?
In short, it’s a fantasy without the fantasy. Except in this book I think some of the people are blue? Like, there is this guy who comes in at just over half way and talks about the “blueskins” so I don’t know if that is just slang, or there are actual blue people, as in Avatar blue people. Not The Last Airbender, (although, isn't there blue on that guy's head? Idk, never watched it.) I mean James Egomaniac Cameron's Avatar. (That is his middle name. 1000% certain of that.)
See now I’m even more confused because of this paragraph:
“Anyway; Aichma looks like a diluted version of her mother. There are savages out east who mix their tea with milk; a bit like that. Adulterated is the word I'm groping for. But her mother was a sweet, gentle soul, kind to everybody, never a harsh word. with a sort of serenity about her. Aichma takes after her father.”
So does that mean she is the colour of milk tea? To me it reads as though she was just a mix of two different skin shades, one light and one dark, which, when combined, look similar to the mixture of a tea and milk. Like, you get Earl Grey tea leaves, add boiling water, and then pour in some milk. This, if you do a quick search, turns out to be this peachy-tan colour: caucasian skin. (Now, I might have gone too far in my googling, but there also seems to be a type of tea that is blue, called "butterfly pea flower tea". It's this deep blue colour that is hard to believe occurs naturally. But again, my research has gotten needlessly obscure and so this almost certainly means absolutely nothing.)
And then! Then there’s this:
“I looked at my hands; they were caked with mud, practically black. For some reason, that made me laugh out loud- if you can't beat them, and all that.”
So what? Orhan, who is narrating this passage, is a subpar "milkface" living amongst the socially superior “blueskins”. So if we interpret the milkfaces as having European, caucasian-adjacent colouring, then what kind of complexion can we imagine would result from putting mud on this coloured skin? Exactly. It seems pretty straight forward from this passage that the so called "blue"skins are just people with a super deep brown skin tone, similar to those of people from Eastern African nations, i.e. Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe. But if this is the case, if they are just people with dark brown skin, why call them blueskins in the first place?!?!
THEN there’s their way of speaking described as “blue-blood diction”. Does it mean like how deoxygenated blood in our veins looks blue through the skin, but the liquid is actually red on the inside? None of our blood is actually blue, we all bleed red regardless of whether the rupture causing the external bleeding is in an artery or vein, but I suppose from the outside veins could make it look like half of the blood in our body is another colour. So is that what “blue-blood diction” is actually referring to? Or does that mean literal blue blood like Vulcans have green blood? (As in the aliens from Star Trek Vulcans: Spock, Tuvok etc. Not the Roman counterpart of Hephaestus.) Vulcans actually bleed a green liquid, as Wikipedia explains: "A Vulcan's on-screen blood is green due to copper-based hemocyanin." Look up a picture of Spock bleeding, and you'll see the green obviously-some-other-liquid-and-not-actually-blood blood (don't ask why they still have red-blooded skin tones, it's 1966, come on). So does Sixteen Ways use the term blue blood in the same way that Star Trek uses green blood? Who knows. Not me. Evidently.
Speaking of the possible blue people, whilst I was fishing around on the inter web looking for an answer about this, I got spoiled for the ending. Seems to be a run of that lately (I just got spoiled for the Doctor Who finale). So when I came to the ending, I wasn't that surprised. That being said, the ending was the weakest part of the whole book, so I didn't really feel like I missed out on that much knowing what happened beforehand.
So that's my review. And then some. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a good book, whether it has blue people in it or not... even though that little niggly unsolved mystery is gonna bug me till kingdom come.