An unexpectedly lovely Sunday...

After a busy morning of domesticity and emergency shopping I met the usual gang — I say that, but I've missed the last few get togethers — for lunch at The Rusty Bike. Everyone but MS and I had lamb, with us two refusiniks opting for pork and risotto respectively. After a extremely enjoyable lunch, I had to dash off to meet E at the Quay for afternoon of climbing.

I got there every so slightly early and spent the first little while doing circuits and working my way through the subset of boulder problems I can actually do. All of which made me look much better than I actually am — I'm always a bit reluctant to send something that others are obviously working, because I don't want to undermine their sense of achievement — and I ended up giving beta to a bunch of guys were struggling with a problem with a deceptively simple start and an extremely tricky crux.

Fully warmed up, we then did some leading. It was an interesting experience belaying A, who's a fair amount heavier than I'm used to; I'm the same way as all my regular partners so it's not usually an issue. After some non-eventful routes, we decided to take a few practice falls to see what it felt like. Everything was fine, although when it was my turn, it too me a long time to psyche myself up to letting go — which makes me think that G is right and the best way to get a feel for falling is not to do it deliberately, when you've time to think about the possible consequences, but to push yourself hard enough that you come off naturally.

All in all, it's been a really, really nice day not least because it's been a total gift: I was supposed to be elsewhere today and if I had been, I'd've missed it completely...

The Goblin Emperor

Finally correcting a serious oversight form last year, I've now read Katherine Addison's truly superb The Goblin Emperor. Set a fantastical world of a elves and goblins and airships and magic it follows Maia, the ignored and overlooked youngest son of the Emperor Verenechibel IV and his goblin fourth wife, as he finds himself unexpected elevated to his father's throne. Having grown up in exile under the guardianship of an abusive relative, Maia finds himself struggling to overcome his background and his isolation from the centre of power in order to become a good ruler.

We first meet Maia at Edomonee, a shabby estate a long way from the court of his father, where he has been held in exile following the death of his mother a decade before and where he is subject to the authority his cousin Setheris Nelar, a man whose bitterness and anger have driven him to the routine physical and emotional abuse of his charge. But all this changes abruptly with the arrival of a courier who greets Maia using the imperial title and informs him that Verenechibel and his three older half-brothers have been killed in an airship crash. Acting on advice from Setheris, who for all his faults is at least political astute, Maia returns to the capital posthaste to court aboard the courier's airship in order to assume the throne before any organised attempts to oppose him.

The airship journey to the capital, for only the second time in his life, marks something of a spiritual transition for Maia. Invited by the airship crew to view the sunrise from the bridge, he suddenly realises that dynamics of his relationship with Setheris have altered forever and that he can safely leave his former guardian to stew in the cabin while he and the courier join the pilot now that any physical attack on his person would now result in a death sentence for treason.

The passage also marks a shift in Maia's language away from the informal modes of Edomonee, where he uses thee and thou forms of address — as does Setheris, despite the ostensible differences in their social positions, presumably as a constant reinforcement of his dominant position — and familiar, intimate direct modes of speech that make heavy use of the first person singular. Required to deal with people who are unknown to him and expect him to behave as an emperor, Maia's speech changes to use the formal you mode — I love Addison with a passion for being one of the few people to get the T-V distinction right in English — with the second person plural replacing the first person singular, and a general shift to indirect language. This shift is used later on to differentiate between Maia and Emperor Edrehasivar VII, especially when he wishes to connect with younger nephews and nieces in way that indicates his sincere friendship with them.

Reaching the imperial court, a place he has only visited once before for his mother's funeral, Maia realises that he knows no one he can rely on but instead of turning to Setheris for advice, he asks the imperial courier, Csevet Aisava, for his assistance. Fortunately Csevet is extremely accomplished and political astute — it is later revealed that role of courier provides a way for young men to get a solid education and to place a first foot on the rungs of the great political ladder — and is able to suggest a series of strategies that allow Maia to out-manoeuvre the Lord Chancellor's attempts to force him to adhere to his late father's agenda. Almost immediately Maia makes a series of unconventional choices, choosing to attend the funerals of the crew who died in the crash that killed his father; asking his personal guard to attend his coronation vigil; and taking the name Edrehasivar as his regnal name in defiance of the convention of his immediate antecedents' use of name starting with the prefix Vere- in order to indicate his desire for reform.

Names, as Addison notes in an appendix written as a traveller's guide to the Elflands, are complex things that include required honorifics and gendered suffixes that alter both the given name and the family name. Thus Setheris Nelar's wife is Hesero Nelaran, whom Maia initially addresses as Osmerrem Nelaran only to shift to calling her Cousin Hesero. Technically Hesero is not his cousin, only the husband of someone who is three or so relations away from the emperor, but cousin as a mode of address is used to acknowledge a closer family relationship than the standard term; indeed when Maia first meets his nephew and heir Idra Drazhar, he finds — despite differences of opinion with his half-sister — that he likes the boy and chooses to call him cousin to acknowledge a closer relationship.

As might be expected given Maia's status as a half-goblin, his and his mother's clear lack of favour with the former emperor, and his reforming instincts, the new emperor finds himself opposed by various factions within the court, some of whom question his very legitimacy to rule. His immediate relatives present a particular problem, from his father's last wife who attempts to avoid demotion to role of dowager empress, to his unmarried sister Vedero who has, informally at least, been offered in marriage to a powerful eastern lord with an unsavoury reputation. There is the problem of Maia's own marriage to be arranged, his Lord Chancellor, the constant squabbling of Corazhas — effectively his cabinet — and, thanks to Setheris' neglectful and patchy attitude to education, his own ignorance.

Thus it quickly becomes apparent that the Elflands are beset by problems of race and gender, with something like class concerns apparent later on in the book. Maia's half-goblin ancestry — his mother was the daughter of the ruling Aver and her marriage was intended to improve political ties between elves and goblins — is obvious from his appearance — where elves are classically pale and blond, Maia is of hair and skin although his features are more delicate than those of pure goblin ancestry — and he has obviously suffered a great deal of casual racist name-calling at the hands of his guardian.

Women, too, don't seem to have much in the way of status, being treated as chattels of their menfolk to be traded away in marriage or banished distant estates or convents. This leads to some great injustices, such as a Vedero being promised to Eshevis Tethimar despite her wishes to the contrary — wishes which she does not express even when pushed, so completely has she internalised her own oppression — or Stano Bazhevin, the fiancee of one of Maia's dead brothers, who is in the invidious position of having signed her betrothal oath but not having completed and consecrated her marriage, leaving her neither a widow nor an unmarried woman and muddying her family status, making her neither Drazharan to be disposed of by the Imperial Family nor Bazhevin as the responsibility of her father.

But that's not to say that things aren't changing for women in the Elflands. Vedero and her group of friends, including the woman who becomes Maia's betrothed, are pushing against the limits imposed on them by society, carving out intellectual soirees and working to improve their education. When asked what she would do if she were free to pursue her own desires rather than the strictures of society, Vedero says that she would like to study the stars. And when Maia comes up with a clever way to help her do just that, even if it comes at a political cost, it is an indication both of his own inner goodness and his genuine desire to push through the reforms he believes are needed to improve society for everyone.

The decision to allow his sister to follow her heart's desire is particularly poignent and important to Maia because he feels the constraints on his own freedom most acutely. Having grown up an isolated child, his sudden elevation has turned him into an isolated adult, with his status making anything like a normal friendship impossible. He tries to become friends with his Nohecharei — his four elite bodyguards, a wizard and a soldier, who guardian him round the clock — only for one of them to remind him that it is impossible for them to be his friends, given their respective roles. Maia's relationship with Csevet Aisava, whom he makes his secretary, also edges towards friendship despite the apparent impossibility of such a thing. And when one of the Corazhas offers, on his own initiative, to help his emperor rectify the faults in his education, Maia starts to realise that there are actually people around him who might be able to enter into some form of friendship with him and that he need not be completely alone all the time.

The last part of the book revolves around an expected visit from Maru Sevraseched, the Great Avar of Barizhan and Maia's goblin grandfather. Where the elves are reserved and political, the goblins are open and direct. The Great Avar, huge and vigorous despite his age, insists on buying his grandson a horse — the cut and thrust of horse trading clearly means more to the goblin ruler than politics — and, in teaching the emperor to ride, he provides Maia with something else that he desperately needs but which he has been unable to obtain for himself thus far: time to himself, away from the endless rituals and audiences that otherwise fill his days. During the Great Avar's visit, the central mystery of the book is resolved in a highly satisfactory fashion: dramatic but not overly so; realistic and plausible but ultimately disturbing when Maia realises the true motives of those behind it.

The Goblin Emperor is, if it is not clear by now, an absolutely wonderful novel. It has a beautifully realised central character, one with an abusive and damaged past that he has to overcome to become the person he wants and needs to be. The writing and world building are superb — the detailed attention given to the names and to the precise use of language are an indication of the depth of thought involved — and the whole thing ends on a delightfully uplifting note as the title of the final section, Edrehasiva the Bridge Builder, makes clear.

Required reading.