Of kindness and rereading
Mar. 19th, 2026 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAmazon has just e-mailed to tell me that the next volume of Chaz Brenchley's Outremer will be out next month: I won't be buying it from Amazon, but hooray, here it is on the publisher's website! Grounds for rejoicing, but also a reminder that I still haven't posted about his Of the Emperor's Kindness, although I bought my copy when it was published in the autumn, and read it as a Christmas treat. Actually, reread it, because Chaz was kind enough to send me a copy when it was first completed "just for fun..."
Which surely renders superfluous the traditional disclosure: Chaz is a friend, and I am a fan. This isn't going to be a balanced review, because I loved this book. In fact, here's what I wrote to the author at the time:
Rereading, of course, is a different experience, because you know the story and are looking out for how it's done: and that's a joy, too.
But something else was different about this reread: I don't think it's spoilerish to say (see the publiher's plot information) that this is a story of what happens when a large country invades, tries to absorb, its smaller neighbour. Malance, bereft of her country, must depend on the kindness of the world's other great power. How had I managed to read it without thinking constantly of Russia and Ukraine? And - well, to go further would be a spoiler, but this delightful fantasy is certainly talking about some very current real-world issues... So I checked back. When had I written that initial response? Ah: it was in the spring of 2021. That unmissable contemporary relevance was pure prescience, issues that were in the world but not yet all over the headlines. New proverb: You can never read the same book twice.
Which surely renders superfluous the traditional disclosure: Chaz is a friend, and I am a fan. This isn't going to be a balanced review, because I loved this book. In fact, here's what I wrote to the author at the time:
... For values of "fun", obviously, which include grief, mourning and exile - still writing about exile, then?
But seriously, I enjoyed this twist on the fantasy / comedy of manners; I loved the way that the place of magic is occupied by mind-boggling amounts of money, and the impossibly competent staff that money can buy. Hooray for an aristocratic fantasy in which a character actually notices and thinks about those staff and what it is like having them around, even though they are, to an almost magical degree, practically perfect in every respect...
The one shadow on all this pleasure is that this is a book by Chaz, and therefore there will be betrayal, so I was braced for that, and wondering when it would come - only to realise at the final reveal that it has already happened, happened way back at the beginning of the story, which I might have realised if I had remembered to look for the crime story, for the whodunnit at the heart of the book by Chaz - which I didn't because I was so dazzled by everything else.
Rereading, of course, is a different experience, because you know the story and are looking out for how it's done: and that's a joy, too.
But something else was different about this reread: I don't think it's spoilerish to say (see the publiher's plot information) that this is a story of what happens when a large country invades, tries to absorb, its smaller neighbour. Malance, bereft of her country, must depend on the kindness of the world's other great power. How had I managed to read it without thinking constantly of Russia and Ukraine? And - well, to go further would be a spoiler, but this delightful fantasy is certainly talking about some very current real-world issues... So I checked back. When had I written that initial response? Ah: it was in the spring of 2021. That unmissable contemporary relevance was pure prescience, issues that were in the world but not yet all over the headlines. New proverb: You can never read the same book twice.
