![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
holy crap, again with the books with pages.
So I basically called in sick today so I could lie around and read Paladin of Souls in a single quick burst, and for the first time in years I regret my departure from the List, because I'm sure someone's already done the critical essay comparing Ista to Cordelia, and I missed it and am not quite motivated enough to go try to hunt it down in the archives.
Allowing for the differences in their milieus, Cordelia (for these purposes, the Cordelia of Shards of Honor and Barrayar) and Ista are strikingly similar characters: Cordelia a quiet theist in a largely godless world, Ista certainly unable to deny the agency of the gods, even as she curses them. Both of them powered by a ferocious rage in extremity. Both of them inclined to spit their curses in moments of frustration--there's a fine congruity between "Barrayarans," and "Bastard." Both doubting themselves, both crying that this wasn't in the job description, but both coming through with the necessary competence to accomplish their ends. Both with deeply regrettable romantic relationships behind them, both looking ahead to better. Both, to state the obvious, past their youth.
But there are also striking, systematic differences. Though when we meet them they are only seven years apart in age (Cordelia is thirty-three, Ista forty) they are in sharply different stages of life. Cordelia is in the midst of her life's work, still looking forward to a spouse and children in her future, though perhaps beginning to wonder if she's left it too late. Ista's surviving child, at the beginning of Paladin of Souls, when we properly make her acquaintance, is grown and married and a mother herself, well-launched in her life's work, while Ista finds herself left aside, a widow and grandmother and theoretically through with all the interesting parts of her life. Cordelia's grand adventure comes to her in the natural course; she is a surveyor and then a soldier and then a Vor lord's wife, and always squarely in the way of harm. Ista's is a reawakening, a second chance unlooked for--when she asks the God what he can offer her, he says Work, and that is the offer she cannot refuse.
Allowing for the differences in their milieus, Cordelia (for these purposes, the Cordelia of Shards of Honor and Barrayar) and Ista are strikingly similar characters: Cordelia a quiet theist in a largely godless world, Ista certainly unable to deny the agency of the gods, even as she curses them. Both of them powered by a ferocious rage in extremity. Both of them inclined to spit their curses in moments of frustration--there's a fine congruity between "Barrayarans," and "Bastard." Both doubting themselves, both crying that this wasn't in the job description, but both coming through with the necessary competence to accomplish their ends. Both with deeply regrettable romantic relationships behind them, both looking ahead to better. Both, to state the obvious, past their youth.
But there are also striking, systematic differences. Though when we meet them they are only seven years apart in age (Cordelia is thirty-three, Ista forty) they are in sharply different stages of life. Cordelia is in the midst of her life's work, still looking forward to a spouse and children in her future, though perhaps beginning to wonder if she's left it too late. Ista's surviving child, at the beginning of Paladin of Souls, when we properly make her acquaintance, is grown and married and a mother herself, well-launched in her life's work, while Ista finds herself left aside, a widow and grandmother and theoretically through with all the interesting parts of her life. Cordelia's grand adventure comes to her in the natural course; she is a surveyor and then a soldier and then a Vor lord's wife, and always squarely in the way of harm. Ista's is a reawakening, a second chance unlooked for--when she asks the God what he can offer her, he says Work, and that is the offer she cannot refuse.