Field of Dishonor

Continuing on with David Weber's Honorverse novels, I find myself at Field of Dishonor, which is set on Manticore a few scant weeks after the events of The Short Victorious War.

Haven is still in chaos after the revolutionary coup, while the aftereffects of the Battle of Hancock Station continue to make themselves felt on Manticore. Honor Harrington finds herself feted by the government and the navy as the hero of the hour; Pavel Young, on the other hand, finds himself up on capital charges and facing a court-martial, while his father, the Earl of North Hollow, starts wielding his considerable political power to get his son acquitted. After eventually managing to get his son off with a cashiering — and, not entirely incidentally, collapsing the ruling coalition government in the process — North Hollow promptly succumbs to years of dissipation, making Pavel the new Earl.

Weary of the publicity generated by her role in the trial, Honor reluctantly allows herself to be persuaded that she should take an official trip to Grayson to check on the establishment of her new steading, something that would, not coincidentally, take her out of the public eye for several weeks. The absence of his chief accuser does little to soothe the Earl of North Hollow's savage resentment and he sets about wreaking his revenge on all those he believes have harmed him, starting with Honor's boyfriend and his own former executive officer, Paul Tankersley.

Unlike its predecessors, Field of Dishonor features no naval warfare but instead relies on court scenes, a night-time commando raid and a couple of early morning duels to add piquancy to the political machinations of the Manticoran House of Lords. And that's not to say that the political machinations aren't enjoyable in themselves. Weber's portrait of the Duke of Cromarty, the Manticoran Prime Minister, as a man who wants to do the right thing by Honor and by his political convictions, but who finds his hands bound by his need to gather political allies and to form a new coalition to replace the old one destroyed by Dmitry North Hollow, is really rather good, striking just the right balance between noble decency and realpolitik. And the fact that Cromarty knows that he is having to strike a balance and knows that everyone else knows that he's doing this, gives him a humanity that might otherwise be lacking.

Pavel North Hollow, on the other hand, is a thoroughly one dimensional villain. But this, it seems, is intentional. North Hollow is almost completely solipsistic, believing that the people around him are nothing but props to serve his own desires. He has almost no imagination — he consistantly and completely misunderstands the motivations of the people around him because he can't seem to imagine that they might be driven by anything other than the desires that motivate him — and doesn't seem to have any interests beyond achieving enough power over people to be able to bully and harm them. All of which matters because North Hollow ultimately finds himself undone by his inability to empathise and by his terrible predictability.

If I have any criticisms of the book, it is that the whole notion of duelling seems at odds with a technically and morally advanced society. But this is probably unfair given that the point of the Honorverse novels is, by and large, to allow the values and concepts of an ideally version of Great Britain to be placed in the context of a space opera, and so, because duelling was accepting in Britain at the time, it seems churlish to complain about it being allowed on Manticore in the 40th century, although, as I say, it would be nice to think that humanity had managed to mature slightly in the 2,000 years in between...

Bach goes all electric

Very much in the spirit of Wendy Carlos, an extremely switched-on version of Bach's two part invention in B-flat major played on the Tesla coil:

Wonderfully dangerous stuff.