The Family Trade

[sawyl]

I've just read Charlie Stross' The Family Trade, which for some reason seems to have taken an age to cross the Atlantic. This delay seems grossly unfair, but there's always that thing about prophets not being known in their own country and all that, isn't there? Whatever. It's time to jot down a few rough thoughts.

Miriam Beckstein has her life together, working as a writer specialising biotech on a privately owned industry journal. But when she takes a money laundering story to her bosses, she and her researcher find themselves summarily dismissed on trumped up charges. After turning to her adoptive mother for support, Miriam learns more about her status as foundling and discovers that her birth mother left an inheritance: a locket containing an intricate pattern. Returning home, Miriam examines the locket in more detail and, without any notice, suddenly finds herself and her desk chair in the middle of a wood. After realising that she has been transported to another world, she uses the amulet to transfer back to her own world, where she starts to formula a plan to investigate the terra incognita in more detail. Enlisting the help of Paulette, her former researcher, she equips herself for survival in the wilderness and takes a two day walk on the wild side.

Sleeping off a meal to celebrate her safe return, Miriam is snatched from her bed. Waking in an interrogation cell, she finds herself summoned to attend on Duke Angbard Lofstrom, a feudal lord from the other side who pronounces himself her uncle. He informs her that she is the long lost member of a trading clan, every full member of which can walk between the two worlds, and that she is the heir to a great fortune. He also tells her to behave herself, to marry well and to watch for potential assassins.

Ordered by Angbard to present herself at court, Miriam quickly realises that the duke intends to use her as bait to shake out his own enemies. She quickly becomes fed up with this, and with the appalling status of women in the feudal society, and spends her time hopping between the King's court and New York, where she starts plotting her own intrigues against the static, monocultural world of the clans.

I very much enjoyed The Family Trade. I was impressed by the impeccable logic of the mirror worlds — the idea that buildings needed to be fortified on both sides of the divide in order to be secure, that all materials for transport had to be carried by a member of the clan and that the number of transitions per day were limited by the physical toll of switching worlds. I thought that the feudal world of the clan was wonderfully convincing, from it's economy to it's social structures. I particularly liked the parallels Stross draws between the clans and oil-rich gulf states, both of whom have a capitaled elite living on imported luxuries and reliant on a single source of income.

I also have a quibble, but one that I'm loth to mention because I suspect it might be peculiar to me. My problem is that I didn't find Miriam entirely convincing. I had no difficulties believing in her as a journalist and I liked her relentlessly logical approach to solving the mysteries of the two worlds. But I struggled with her absolute surefootedness. At no point, even when she isn't entirely sure what is going on, does she seem to suffer a moment's doubt. She also suffers from superwoman syndrome, seemingly possessing an arsenal of skills appropriate to every occasion — for instances, she knows about ambushes from a works outing to go paintballing and about surveillance thanks to a half-remembered course on journalistic safety. At times, I felt like I wasn't reading about a character quite so much as someone with a direct internal line to the contents of Wikipedia.

This may simply be my problem. I like characters who suffer from self-doubt; who struggle to do the right thing, even when it's the only course of action open to them; and who don't necessarily find things easy. So it might simply be a matter of taste. It may also be a question of jealousy: that, because I don't have my life particularly together, I favour characters with similar problems, prejudicing me against those who seem to know exactly what they want to do.

But all this is a minor cavil and not one that seriously detracted from my enjoyment of the book. In fact, I went out and bough The Hidden Family almost immediately after finishing, so I must liked it, mustn't I?

Comments

[drspleen.livejournal.com]

I actually found a copy of book 2 about a year ago at a newsagent for $6, and just last week on our honeymoon I found a copy of book 1 for a newsagent for $7!!! WOOHOO!

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Thanks to some canny horse trading, I got my copy of The Hidden Family for GBP 2.75 or around AUD 6! Go me!