The Privilege of the Sword | ||||||||
Ellen Kushner | ||||||||
Bantam Spectra, 400 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Sherwood Smith
Ellen Kushner begins with sixteen-year-old Katherine Talbert, whose uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine, offers, out of nowhere, to cancel
all debts and even to help the family out of poverty, if Katherine consents to live with him in the city (and eventually in the
underworld area called Riverside, which serves as synecdoche for the city) for six months and train with the sword. Of course
she's going to take the offer -- despite the fact that young ladies do not have anything to do with swords. Here are a couple
of lines from the opening paragraph, and what swashbuckler among us can resist?
Katherine does indeed learn to handle a sword. But you absolutely cannot predict what is going to happen while she goes about
it. Meanwhile Katherine's first-person storyline interweaves with other points of view to make an increasingly edgy, absorbing,
sometimes funny, sometimes poignant whole that presents a spectacular tapestry of a finish. There just isn't a dropped stitch
anywhere: the characters are complex, subtle, and vivid, the humor a splash of light amid plenty of tense moments,
introspective ones, sad ones, and scenes with keen, even painful tenderness. As Katherine learns to master her
weapons (not just steel but wit) we learn more about the Mad Duke and his household -- and about some other denizens of the
city and in Riverside, people of high and low rank.
Two observations of things that particularly impressed me: one, the true-to-life 'secret' lives of school girls who are mostly
shut away from the world for their own good. These girls read and reread romantic novels in order to decode the
world -- novels chosen in hopes that the glorious landscape, passionate heroes (especially heroic villains) and noble
emotions found there will indeed prove to be what the girls encounter when at last given the chance to take their
place in the world. Their language is a private language, the characters in the romances so well known, so endlessly
discussed, they prance alongside the realtime story as dream shades. This so resonated with my own teen experience,
when encountering others who adored The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Lord of the Rings and
Georgette Heyer and Star Trek; what's more, this phenomenon resonates right back through literary
letters and fiction clear to Charlotte Lennox who, in the 1750s, gave us The Female Quixote about a
girl who raised herself on romance. As well as Jane Austen's far more fun iteration of the same plot in Northanger Abbey.
The second thing that impressed me was how, as the young people encountered the worst aspects of the world -- and indeed
did not always escape them -- they could observe, comprehend, and still retain their own integrity. How very refreshing -- and
how rare, unfortunately, in far too much fiction.
The edition I read is the new mass-market edition, which not only includes some minor corrections, but the reinstatement
of a crucial couple of lines inadvertently left out of the 2006 editions, which make one of the ending scenes just that
much more comprehensible and rewarding.
Sherwood Smith is a writer by vocation and reader by avocation. Her webpage is at www.sff.net/people/sherwood/. |
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