Whether there is anything worth the wholesale slaughter of a rebellion of the diminishment and snuffing out of a succession of brilliant, principled men and women of, at last, the execution of the woman Baru loves – and of course Baru Cormorant, with her accountant’s heart, creates the machine which insists on all of these atrocities, and cannot step out of them. Whether she is in fact destroyed whether there is anything at all worth what she has done. The question for the reader is whether it was worthwhile: whether by becoming straightened Baru has any chance of remaining orthos. A personal and a global sedition.Īs a literary device it’s gorgeous, and I admire Dickinson immensely for the efficacy of the terrible position he’s put his protagonist in: she sacrifices the personal over and over again for the global, and in doing so, because of the nature of that personal – which is linked explicitly to the queer society she was born into and which the Masquerade has subsumed! - and that global, she destroys herself as an effective agent of the global goal she wants to achieve. If she reveals her desire to fuck women – her own words, a crudity I was not expecting from propriety-focused Imperial Accountant Baru Cormorant, but a crudity which was striking in its brutal evocation of the depth and truth of her desire – if Baru reveals this, the Masquerade will maim her, torture her, like as not kill her.īaru has really only two secrets: that she wants to fuck women and that she wants to transform the Masquerade beyond recognition. Baru is of course not straight her queerness is not only symbolic of the world she wants to (re)create, where non-straight relationships are not only permissible but natural, but also the instrument of her entrapment within the Masquerade. It is also about the seductive machinery of empire.įrom the beginning this is a book about complicity it is a book about committing great and profound injustices for the sake of some future possibility of justice and it asks clearly whether a person who can commit such injustices can retain any claim of being righteous, correct, ethical. The following is full of every possible spoiler. Affected enough to write 2500 words of review. There’s been a lot of talk about this book recently: both praise and critique.

The traitor baru cormorant series