An attempt at using my degree...

So can I, like, start a meme? What's the worst book you ever read, that just had really bad writing? I don't mean it wasn't a page-turner, or even a bestseller, but that the writing just made you wince.

I just finished a two-book series called Cordelia's Honor, the first book of which is called Shards of Honor, and the second Barrayar. My husband had it sitting on his shelf and I noticed it had a woman on the front and she was actually dressed. Might be interesting, I thought. Since it was a science-fiction novel, I thought it must have lots of space battles, or lots to do with space, or with technology. Wrong. This book was mostly about reproduction. That confused me, because I had misread the author's name, Lois McMaster Bujold, to mean Louis. I thought, "Why's this man writing what seems to me to be a really weird romance novel?" Talk about feeling stupid.

Now, I don't have time to give a full synopsis of the series, but it will suffice to say that this is mostly a romance told with a military backdrop. Both the man and the woman come from different planets, with totally alien social structures.

Cordelia comes from Beta Colony, where all buildings are underground to shield people from the desert sun. This is an appropriate setting for Beta Colony's sterile society, which relies on comconsoles (Article 1 of the Constitution: No one shall be deprived of information), psychotherapy and drugs to solve any social "problems," and whiz-bang technology to control the birth rate. Nobody gets "married" on Beta Colony. If two people decide that they want a baby, they have to meet certain physical, emotional, and economic tests, take classes, pass boards, and purchase a "child permit." The child is then grown in a "uterine replicator" while the co-parents go their merry ways.

In contrast, Aral Vorkosigan is heir to his father's fortune, estates, and political problems. His planet is locked in a perpetual cycle of wars and political intrigue that makes 14th century Germany look tame. He has to tread the treacherous waters of the Barrayaran military, while holding his familial and political loyalties in tension--all of which blow up in his and Cordelia's faces, once they are together on Barrayar. Their son, Miles, is disabled because of a poison gas attack and, preserved in a liberated uterine replicator, becomes the football in a deadly game of power politics.

On the face of it, this should not be a bad book. After all, it didn't start out bad--Aral takes Cordelia as a hostage after foiling a mutiny, and they gradually fall in love while tramping through the bush and trying to stay alive. The trouble is that once they get back to society, there is some kind of attempt by the author to set up a culture clash which she doesn't quite bring off. Despite Cordelia's constant little observations about how "savage" Barrayaran culture is, her society is shown to have all the bad tendencies of any super-centralized, "Big Brother"-style civilization. So after they try to force her to give in to their drugs and "therapy" (because she must, of course, be some kind of spy after her experience with Aral), she runs away and uses all her military skills to make it to Barrayar, where she comes upon the unsuspecting Vorkosigan, who had left his marriage proposal lying inert in her lap and was now drinking himself to death. Then there is about two lines' worth of white space on the page and the narrative begins again...guess when...several weeks AFTER their wedding.

Huh??

Any romance reader worth her salt knows that after the big leadup and falling-in-love section of the book, the "climax"--as it were--of any romance is The Wedding, and of course, The Wedding Night...or at least, The Clinch (for this is where we seem to be going these days). This is the only real motivating force behind the genre. And the author just skips it.

There she lost my trust, as a reader. I think it was a boneheaded thing to do. She did not have to give it explicit, gratuitous detail...but seeing as how she'd used the genre thus far, and made us care about these characters and want to see them happy...she needed to at least sketch in the rest of the structure before she left it behind and switched over to another genre. Which she does, then, with bone-jarring force. End book one.

Book two starts with a full-blown political crisis. The emperor is dead and the heir is only five years old. Vorkosigan is the only qualified Regent to be had, and Cordelia, as his wife, finds herself in a curious position. She's a commoner, a "galactic," a feminist in a male-dominated world, and something of a close-order tactician. She doesn't care about clothes, courts, or counts, but she does care about Aral and her friends. So when political tensions on Barrayar explode into an attempted coup, she must first regain her old sense of herself (while fleeing through the mountains) in enough time to foil the bad 'uns plot, save her son, and cut off the head of the pretender. Whoops, that was a spoiler. Not that you were really going to read the book.

I could write a ten-page paper on all the flaws in this novel(s), but thankfully John C. Wright has summed it up for me:

"We can see a pattern in...realistic fiction: the scenery is mundane and unimaginative. The props and events are ordinary rather than extraordinary, and hence unimaginative. The events also must lack the one thing the human imagination always reads into events, that is, a moral purpose or providential meaning. The way a dull and unimaginative mind sees life, as a flux of events in which no pattern can be found, is the viewpoint of modernism. No extraordinary characters, no men of sterling virtue or villains of blackest vice, can exist in modernism, because there is nothing extraordinary in their world. It takes an act of imagination to picture the personality and behavior of a saint or a serial murderer."

http://johncwright.livejournal.com/57689.html#cutid1

Why does this criticism apply to Cordelia's Honor? In fairness, I must say that the author admits in an afterword that these books, while the first to be written, were the last to be sold and amount to a prequel to the main series, which concerns Miles and his exploits. And in all frankness, it is a triumph of conceit to sit back and, not having written a novel oneself, proceed to take apart somebody else's literary labor of love. But that is what English Majors do.

THE HERO

Aral Vorkosigan would have been a great hero if he hadn't been castrated in the first book. Feminist sensibilities might make for good press, but they make abysmally bad storytelling. It's not enough for Cordelia to just be herself. She has to be a scientist and a soldier before she can be Aral's love interest. When he proposes to her, she is so formidable that he acts like he's negotiating a treaty. She escapes from his ship out from under his nose when her loyal troops (all men) come to rescue their Commander, yet before she leaves, she single-handedly saves his hide from another bunch of would-be mutineers.

THE LADY

Cordelia bears no relation to her namesake of King Lear. She'd rather wear her old tan Survey fatigues than a dress, prefers watching a fight over a ball, and keeps a running internal dialogue on how backward Barrayar is and how she wonders if Beta Colony would have her back. Incomprehensibly, the author keeps putting vague religious references into her mouth without anchoring them in anything stemming from her culture, upbringing, or even her own personal beliefs (which we never find out). She's not exactly a crack fighter, but all the action-oriented plot points hinge on her ability to snatch victory from defeat. She becomes pregnant in the second book, and although she muses impartially on the various advantages and disadvantages of reproducing "in vivo" rather than "in vitro," she becomes fixated on her son only when it seems certain he will die.

THE BABY-IN-A-CAN

This is the weirdest plot point yet. I don't have a problem with science fiction writers thinking through the likely technological developments of the future, but they need to think through the probable moral and social consequences as well. Wright's criticism of modernism comes into play here as we see more and more tales cranked out, especially in the science fiction genre, in which technology that revolutionizes some aspect of life is dropped onto the stage like a sandbag, and left there with no moral consequences. Ms. Bujold does a good job of thinking through the political in-fighting that is the meat of the plot, so one wonders why her treatment of these (surely) much more personal and contemporary concerns is so clumsy, especially since they are so germane to the main characters and to the baby who will become the main character of a lengthy series.

In fairness, Ms. Bujold's overarching theme could be considered pro-life--the whole point of Miles' story arc is that he is "disabled" and yet goes on to lead a life of adventure and significance. So when he is in the uterine replicator, there is some dialogue on whether or not "opening up the stopcocks" may or may not be the best thing to do in his situation. However, the theme is still problematic because when Cordelia and Aral discuss it, they admit that both their worlds practice eugenics in some form, and while it's not clear whether they endorse these practices, they seem to be resigned to their necessity.

There is not only NOT clear moral direction here, but there is no attempt to even draw distinctions, i.e. contraception is OK, but not infantacide, for instance. This makes no sense--in our times, such statements are hardly ever made, not because they don't matter, but because people argue endlessly about them. Ms. Bujold picks these topics up as one would a snowglobe, shaking it and watching the snow fall for a moment, then walking away.

THE WEIRD SEXUAL STUFF

Another hallmark of modernism that I've found is its treatment of the physical body and the sexual nature of man as just another biological function that can and should be manipulated, with no especial moral complications. We have stories and novels now in which characters no longer have sex--they are merely rutting like two farm animals might, and the rutting process is described in indelicate and painful detail. Sexual abuse figures largely in Cordelia's Honor, and I am still trying to figure out why.

After eschewing the Wedding Night scene in the first novel, I thought maybe Ms. Bujold just didn't want to be caught focusing on sex. This notion was blown out of the water by the second novel's opening gambit, a military maneuver that results in Cordelia's being taken as a prisoner of war, and chained to the bed of some sadistic Vice-Admiral for what promises to be a long, drawn out rape scene. The room is described in vivid detail, as well as all the Vice-Admirals "plans" for her. During this, Cordelia lies stoically on the bed, refusing to acknowledge pain or fear. She is a soldier, after all--at least in this scene. She does have a miraculous escape, but my question is why. Why the detailed rape scene that ultimately has no more than a footnote's significance to the overall story, while the consummation of the love the two main characters have in their marriage is conspicuously left out? Why must there be a scene in which a 9 1/2 months pregnant woman is sexually degraded? The answer is because modernism allows for brutality, but not love. Love points to a higher plane of being.

CONCLUSION

Without making any direct attacks on Ms. Bujold--who I assume does not have the gift of faith, and who had the guts to write, and keep on writing...even when the first couple of books didn't pan out--I reject this style of writing categorically. I thought one of the great advantages of science fiction was that you could address topics that weren't compatible with "realistic" (modernist) literature. You could address spirituality, love, the conflict of the human heart...even controversial topics that are almost impossible to show on TV or in film without an uproar. Cordelia's Honor makes an attempt at this...but falls far too short of success, and shows the bad tendencies of the modernist influence and how it ultimately fails the story, the characters, and the reader. One hopes that Ms. Bujold was able to work out these issues and capture some transcendent themes that, sadly, were only dimly reflected in these first books.

***

On a personal note, I stopped trying to write fiction after college because I felt it was no longer worth it. Unless you were writing for a specific genre and followed all their rules (which I felt was too restrictive), the only model you had to go on if you aspired to write literature was this modernistic garbage: where characters' relationships were like car crashes, and the blood and guts were described with obsessive detail...while the whole point of storytelling--what makes this life matter--was missing.

Oh, I almost forgot...I tag Amy Caroline, mary poppins not, and laurathecrazymama!