Blood & Iron
Elizabeth Bear

The first and second acts are lovely; the third falls apart a bit, as if disintegrating into fibres. This is probably a direct result of the way the first and second build up, giving you all this backstory about the Dragon Princes — my favorite scene, I think, is the one where Elaine is telling the Merlin about all the previous Dragon Princes, because it’s so much history, so tightly compacted. Because it seems as if the first and second acts are focused around Keith, as the Dragon Prince, and to a lesser extent, Carel, as his Merlin — Keith more so because he’s the one shedding blood — and then the third act becomes about Seeker, in the obvious moment where she gives up her soul and we switch to a first person narrative.

That switch is the most controversial part of the book, for me. It always seemed to have more to do with the technical difficulties of referring to a character without a Name than with the nature of that transformation. For me, the pronoun "I" has always seemed inherently selfish, inherently aware of the relationship of the world to the individual, a distinct divide. "I" comes from the same place as naming and claiming, and it seems that the loss of a Name and soul is the loss of not just fear and pain, but the loss of "I". I’m relating this less to Freudian theory than to structuralism in linguistics, the system of signs and signifiers. (“It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality,” Emile Benveniste.) Personal pronouns solidify the identity of the ego, which should be absent without a Name or soul. I feel third person, being the signifier (narrator) and sign ("she") without the input of the signified (Seeker), would be an ideal form of indicating the loss of a soul. For instance, I think it would have been brilliant the other way around — if it was first person up to the shift, and then switching to third once she gave away her soul.

Back to my original point, however — once we go into first person, the third act is almost exclusively about Seeker. We get only brief glimpses of Keith and Carel, and even the invading human Mages are treated as a faceless mass. The thing is, I haven’t read Whiskey & Water yet, so it could be that the Switch is really the beginning of the second act, which will extend into W&W. However, the ending seems too finished for that, but finished too fast and too glibly. It felt too easy, too deus-ex-machina — Matthew’s blood will bring the bridge down, the battle will be over! Seeker just needs to undergo enough pain in Mist’s belly to convince her that she really means it! I think those two were the main ones that stretched my credibility — not that they worked, but that they were all that was needed.

Loved the impossible family trees, particularly the ones around Seeker. Loved Whiskey, of course, though he got sort of whiny with a soul. Loved the four Names bequeathed to Seeker. Anything with Names, in fact.

Oh, and waking Arthur — they woke him up. They woke Arthur up. That’s like the apocalypse, man, waking Arthur means the end of the world is here. And then he doesn’t do anything, really. He rides with the host, but he doesn’t do anything. Gah. I think that was what killed me the most… so much kewl stuff, so much build-up, but there was just too much and not all of it got the emphasis it deserved.