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Entry tags:
well, I haven't done that in a while.
Stayed up until after two this morning, reading An Exchange of Hostages for the third time. I'm pretty sure I stayed up all night reading it the first time, too, but that was a lot more commonplace when I was fifteen than it is now. For whatever reason I don't remember loving this book this madly the last time I read it--possibly I missed all the (okay, really really formal and emphatically nonsexual but still) BOYKISSING.
Uh, you noticed 'not a nice man' in the cut tag, right? That's the author's formulation there - the series is formally titled Under Jurisdiction or some such, but she refers to it as The Life and Hard Times of Andrej Koscuisko, Who Is Not a Nice Man (and who, to judge by the art, is portrayed by David McCallum - I knew there was another reason people kept comparing Susan Matthews to Lois Bujold...)
Andrej is a very, very gifted and massively well-educated surgeon, who also happens to be a Prince's heir. Unfortunately for Andrej, what this means, in his particular culture (which is subordinated to Jurisdiction, whose executive branch I've yet to identify - no idea whether this is an empire of some sort or a vast headless bureaucracy or what), is that there is essentially one person to whom he is legally and morally subject: his father. And his father wants Andrej, upon completion of his medical training, to perform military service, to serve as a Ship's Surgeon in the Jurisdiction Fleet. All well and good, except that the primary role of Ship's Surgeons, in this degenerate age, is the practice of state- (and, relevant to Andrej, Church- and paternally-)sanctioned torture upon prisoners, at levels ranging from 'assisted inquiry' to 'command termination.' Andrej himself, having spent eight long years learning to heal, and learning the empathy necessary to be effective, finds the whole concept completely reprehensible, but, unwilling to commit spiritual or legal treason by refusing his father's will, reports to Fleet Orientation Station Medical, which is where we meet him in An Exchange of Hostages, about to embark upon six months' training in how to hurt and kill people most effectively.
Uh. Did I mention the squee? No, come back, really. There's squee. Uh, and torture. But not, for the most part, simultaneously.
So for the length of his training, Andrej is assigned a body slave, a bond-involuntary. A bond-involuntary is one who has been convicted under Jurisdiction and whose otherwise presumably capital sentence has been commuted to thirty years' servitude with a brain-implanted governor which will punish the bond-involuntary for any misbehavior. Students are permitted to make virtually any use they please of their assigned bond-involuntaries and Andrej's man, Joslire, has had a notably difficult time with his last two Students. Andrej himself, coming from a patriarchal and aristocratic culture, is accustomed to being served--but is not accustomed to slaves. All his earliest interactions with Joslire are kind and intensely respectful of Joslire's legally nonexistent human dignity and this is so far from what Joslire expects of his Student that, well, that I am reduced to silent flailing in the lunchroom. Hopefully my coworkers thought it was a seizure of some sort.
And then, of course, Andrej actually gets to the practical exercises, and at the fourth level--the first at which the Student is expected to commit serious damage upon his prisoner--discovers that he likes hurting people. Doesn't just like it. Likes it like that. Which is when things get really interesting. He now has every reason in the world to give in to what literally everyone he has contact with is telling him is right and just get his torturing groove on and have a good time--except that he, Andrej, is still convinced that what he's doing is unforgivably wrong. And yet if he runs away to the monastery--the only option for escape of which he seems to be aware--he will lose all chance to practice medicine or otherwise do anything to mitigate his crimes; and he will not be able to escape the knowledge of what he is. Some of the time.
Having just yesterday read John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer (link via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala), on how Orson Scott Card sets up Ender Wiggin as a murderer and genocide who yet is presented as innocent of the crimes he commits, I was particularly interested, on this reread, in the way Matthews presents this sympathetic sadist. Andrej is at all times--well, less so when he's doing it, or he wouldn't do it--acutely conscious of how very, very wrong it is to do what he does and to derive the pleasure he derives from it. The text never undermines Andrej's certainty on that point; the other points of view are Joslire's--who has no love of the practice of torture--and Andrej's tutor--who is too conscious of how frequently Students fail the course to think there's not something deeply wrong about what they're being made to do--and a fellow student of Andrej's, who is fairly clearly set as Who Not To Like, and who likes torture just fine. But Andrej, though he drinks and doesn't sleep and once in a while maybe has to be cradled in Joslire's arms while he passes out on the floor, doesn't actually collapse into the epic depths of self-hatred that would make him intolerable to read. He knows he's doing wrong, but he can't embrace any of the alternatives to doing it, so he just... gets on with things. Minimizes the damage. Takes care of the people he is permitted to take care of. And, once in a while, feels happy.
...and I love him for it.
So, uh, yeah, I took the advice of the 18.4% of you who said 'torture!' and, though it's probably not what you had in mind, the 34.2% of you who suggested reading about an "undertall" hero (Andrej is described by a prisoner under the influence of interrogation drugs as 'yon undertall beauty' - everybody in the story is taller than he is...) and, upon reflection, the 34.2%'s who voted 'religion!' and 'science!' And, as I said, I may have to stop regarding Andrej as quite so iron-clad unslashable after this, because. Boykissing. And. Stuff.
Uh, you noticed 'not a nice man' in the cut tag, right? That's the author's formulation there - the series is formally titled Under Jurisdiction or some such, but she refers to it as The Life and Hard Times of Andrej Koscuisko, Who Is Not a Nice Man (and who, to judge by the art, is portrayed by David McCallum - I knew there was another reason people kept comparing Susan Matthews to Lois Bujold...)
Andrej is a very, very gifted and massively well-educated surgeon, who also happens to be a Prince's heir. Unfortunately for Andrej, what this means, in his particular culture (which is subordinated to Jurisdiction, whose executive branch I've yet to identify - no idea whether this is an empire of some sort or a vast headless bureaucracy or what), is that there is essentially one person to whom he is legally and morally subject: his father. And his father wants Andrej, upon completion of his medical training, to perform military service, to serve as a Ship's Surgeon in the Jurisdiction Fleet. All well and good, except that the primary role of Ship's Surgeons, in this degenerate age, is the practice of state- (and, relevant to Andrej, Church- and paternally-)sanctioned torture upon prisoners, at levels ranging from 'assisted inquiry' to 'command termination.' Andrej himself, having spent eight long years learning to heal, and learning the empathy necessary to be effective, finds the whole concept completely reprehensible, but, unwilling to commit spiritual or legal treason by refusing his father's will, reports to Fleet Orientation Station Medical, which is where we meet him in An Exchange of Hostages, about to embark upon six months' training in how to hurt and kill people most effectively.
Uh. Did I mention the squee? No, come back, really. There's squee. Uh, and torture. But not, for the most part, simultaneously.
So for the length of his training, Andrej is assigned a body slave, a bond-involuntary. A bond-involuntary is one who has been convicted under Jurisdiction and whose otherwise presumably capital sentence has been commuted to thirty years' servitude with a brain-implanted governor which will punish the bond-involuntary for any misbehavior. Students are permitted to make virtually any use they please of their assigned bond-involuntaries and Andrej's man, Joslire, has had a notably difficult time with his last two Students. Andrej himself, coming from a patriarchal and aristocratic culture, is accustomed to being served--but is not accustomed to slaves. All his earliest interactions with Joslire are kind and intensely respectful of Joslire's legally nonexistent human dignity and this is so far from what Joslire expects of his Student that, well, that I am reduced to silent flailing in the lunchroom. Hopefully my coworkers thought it was a seizure of some sort.
And then, of course, Andrej actually gets to the practical exercises, and at the fourth level--the first at which the Student is expected to commit serious damage upon his prisoner--discovers that he likes hurting people. Doesn't just like it. Likes it like that. Which is when things get really interesting. He now has every reason in the world to give in to what literally everyone he has contact with is telling him is right and just get his torturing groove on and have a good time--except that he, Andrej, is still convinced that what he's doing is unforgivably wrong. And yet if he runs away to the monastery--the only option for escape of which he seems to be aware--he will lose all chance to practice medicine or otherwise do anything to mitigate his crimes; and he will not be able to escape the knowledge of what he is. Some of the time.
Having just yesterday read John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer (link via
matociquala), on how Orson Scott Card sets up Ender Wiggin as a murderer and genocide who yet is presented as innocent of the crimes he commits, I was particularly interested, on this reread, in the way Matthews presents this sympathetic sadist. Andrej is at all times--well, less so when he's doing it, or he wouldn't do it--acutely conscious of how very, very wrong it is to do what he does and to derive the pleasure he derives from it. The text never undermines Andrej's certainty on that point; the other points of view are Joslire's--who has no love of the practice of torture--and Andrej's tutor--who is too conscious of how frequently Students fail the course to think there's not something deeply wrong about what they're being made to do--and a fellow student of Andrej's, who is fairly clearly set as Who Not To Like, and who likes torture just fine. But Andrej, though he drinks and doesn't sleep and once in a while maybe has to be cradled in Joslire's arms while he passes out on the floor, doesn't actually collapse into the epic depths of self-hatred that would make him intolerable to read. He knows he's doing wrong, but he can't embrace any of the alternatives to doing it, so he just... gets on with things. Minimizes the damage. Takes care of the people he is permitted to take care of. And, once in a while, feels happy. ...and I love him for it.
So, uh, yeah, I took the advice of the 18.4% of you who said 'torture!' and, though it's probably not what you had in mind, the 34.2% of you who suggested reading about an "undertall" hero (Andrej is described by a prisoner under the influence of interrogation drugs as 'yon undertall beauty' - everybody in the story is taller than he is...) and, upon reflection, the 34.2%'s who voted 'religion!' and 'science!' And, as I said, I may have to stop regarding Andrej as quite so iron-clad unslashable after this, because. Boykissing. And. Stuff.