Hallowed Hunt (no spoilers)

[jeriendhal]

Finished this a couple of days ago. Overall it's an interested read. If Cazaril from Curse of Chalion was supposed to be Lois' take on a romantic older man minus Aral Vorkosigan's occasional berserker tendencies, then Ingrey is Aral with the berserker tendencies intact and the reputation to match.

The good things about this novel are many. As always LMB has a marvelous ear for dialog, and for memorable secondary characters. It's set in a very different part of the Chalionverse, a land that is obviously still in transistion from the days of barbarian glory to something more civilizaed (even if the civilization was imposed from the outside). There's a real feeling of traditions lost, and new ones being tried on and not fitting all that comfortably just yet. I also liked the ending, even if it is rather bleaker than usual for Lois, though hope is certainly there too.

That said, I still couldn't shake the feeling the Lois was pulling the plot out of her ass. Characters tend to pop in straight from left field, while others are left behind. The machinations of the Hallowed King's court on the eve of his anticipated death didn't feel particularly believable and for that matter neither did the love affair between Ingreay and Ijada. Though I'll give her points for providing the villian with a unique motivation. Suffice it to say he's not out to take over the world, though his own goal is just as egotistical, and in violation of the traditional compact between between a good leader and his men.

So in summary, it's not Lois' best novel, at least in the Chalion universe, but at least it's heads above the last Vorkosigan novel.

Comments

[pmrabble.livejournal.com]

I kept seeing Ingrey as a young Piotr, not that there's a whole lotta difference between Aral and Piotr's reputations at like ages....

Re: Hallowed Hunt (no spoilers)

[ndrosen.livejournal.com]

I agree with your final summary, and most of the rest of what you say, but I found the machinations at court believable, insofar as we saw them. We didn't see everything (the story is not told from Sealmaster Hetwar's point of view), and I don't know how fully Lois has developed and made notes on the conspiring. Maybe she could tell us just what was going on, and maybe not. In the real world, it can be hard to make sense of political maneuvering and conspiring, if you just see a small part of what's going on, even if everything they do makes perfect sense to the participants, from their various perspectives. Likewise, in the real world, characters can pop in from left field, and others get left behind.

Also, I did find the love affair believable, or at least largely so. I believed Ingrey's falling in love with Ijada; I'm not entirely sure what she saw in him, but then, I'm not a woman, to borrow a line from LMB's Komarr. Still, Ijada's feelings aren't entirely incomprehensible. Aside from hormones, here's this man who's willing to put his life on the line -- to desert his position and give up all he has -- to try to save her life, and then there's the bond betweeen them as a result of SPOILER. So it isn't farfetched for her to come to love him.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Actually in retrospect, I think Ingrey is a young Bothari, complete with childhood trauma and a reputation for being bloody dangerous. He's just got the intellect to keep his "Wolf" side under better control.