Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
Apr. 23rd, 2026 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gogollescentIn March the single book I finished was Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, by K. J. Parker, one of many popular and successful fantasy authors working today that I had never heard of until G mentioned him. I like 1) low- or no-magic pre-modern historical fantasy 2) snarky narrators if I find them genuinely funny, so I was immediately curious about the premise: Orhan, a Colonel of Engineers from the fantasy underclass of "milkfaces"--a significant minority of light-skinned people (mostly war slaves or poor freedmen) in the Robur Empire, which is just mumblemumble handwaved Byzantium except with a very dark-skinned, racially homogenous elite, resented as "blueskins" in their turn--finds himself the highest surviving authority in the capital after a well-planned ambush wipes out the Imperial garrison, and has to lead the defense of the city during a protracted siege as they wait for rescue by the navy.
I originally thought this would be a shallowish but entertaining page-turner with some grace notes, and it mostly is, but it's both a bit more ambitious and a bit more failed a project than that description quite captures. The majority experience is popcorn.gif as Orhan races the clock on solving a cascade of technological, military, and social problems, with the horrors of the siege about evenly split between "what we're willing to do to the enemy" and "what we're willing to do to each other while trapped in here." Eventually it emerges that his opposite number, the leader of the conquering horde responsible for the brilliant double feint that left the capital vulnerable, is his childhood friend and only fellow survivor of the raid that destroyed their village and made them both Robur slaves. From there we get to the thematic meat that is the book's primary and most memorable preoccupation, but which is also pretty messy and limited in its development: namely the bleak tension between Orhan's protectiveness of the Empire and the dream--even the hypocritical, corrupt, inherently unequal dream--of human betterment through order and the rule of law, his belief that it is the only alternative to a state of perpetual war + annihilation of the weak by the strong, and his simultaneous awareness that it is no alternative at all.
His friend is a generically affable monster and not much more than a symbolic counterpart in this; a major weakness of the book is just how solipsistic and single-character a narrative it really is. On the other hand, that did also lend itself to a genuine intensity of trapped despair re: his basic moral calculus throughout, which is surprisingly committed-to by the unforgiving ending. On the third hand... it would be a more interesting book if I thought the author's feelings on this differed significantly from Orhan's, but I don't think they do, except that he's aware that you can't just leave it there: hence the book offers no more than a Lorax-like "unless...?", a challenge to the world implied in Orhan's very inability to see a way out.
The book also suffers massively from a certain kind of unselfaware authorial misogyny; I can't recommend it, even with reservations, because of an awful, almost entirely offscreen moment in which Orhan blackmails his enemy-ex-friend's wife into sex the better to get the personal information he needs to convince said friend that she's untrustworthy, thereby saving himself from her own reciprocal blackmail attempt but also protecting his friend, even at the cost of continuing the siege. It's not presented as sympathetic, per se--indeed raping and betraying her is implied to be the moral and spiritual rock bottom that nonliterally prefigures his meaningless death + inability to make sense of his own life--but in part because of the author's apparent identification with Orhan's self-pitying, self-loathing abhorrence for masculinity and masculine violence, it also reduces her to an entire object in the morality play of his life.
I was particularly frustrated by this because it coexists with an also rather manpainy but more complex subplot in which Orhan remembers his affair with a DIFFERENT friend's wife, who entered the marriage on a purely pragmatic/forced/material basis but who therefore blamed herself for her growing hatred of her husband & rapist, and which culminated in their conspiring together to murder said friend. (She dies in childbirth shortly thereafter; Orhan suspects that her surviving daughter is really his child.) Despite existing solely in flashback, the dead woman is probably the most fully drawn character in the book after Orhan, just from the force of her exhaustion and resentment on the page. So I was unpleasantly surprised that this came back to back with an almost James Bond-like deployment of a disposable woman for pure shock value and tonal effect.
It made me think of a very different book, All the Horses of Iceland, which I couldn't stand for many reasons, among them the total opposite approach to sexual violence--namely, to present it as hunky-dory and not actually rape, because in the past women knew their place and were always serenely philosophical about being sold off to random Norsemen, a form of empowerment in its own right. Feels bad that historical fantasy still constantly bounces between these two poles of squeamishness--rape either so unspeakable, TM Grimdark, it has to be surreally written out of existence in any would-be literary pastiche (even when it's the plot! as in any story about an unlikely fool-hero being rewarded with concubines!), or else so abhorrent that narrative discomfort with it entirely effaces the humanity of the victim.
Two last observational notes, unrelated to the above:
1) I give this like... 60% of a pass on the usual worldbuilding risks of Turning The Antiblack Tables as persecution fantasy, mostly because the Robur are SUCH sexy, sexy Romans (arrogant and wrongheaded, also perversely admirable in their discipline and self-belief, also full of crazy and often homicidal Morporkian spirit); that, and Orhan and his old buddy so quickly end up as the powerbrokers in the situation that it more just has the predictable problem of 21st century white guilt eating away at the bounds of the fiction, including the essential mild lameness of backprojecting fixed racial categories to a thoroughly premodern empire. At the same time, I feel like that double vision/shadow of the present day face of Empire and its mythos vs its apocalyptic reality is part of what made the book stickier than I expected even in a very broadly sketched, simple, didactic way, so... shrug emoji.
2) I was also comparing this as I read to Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faerie, for the very different reason that... ... ...both are things that cleave really hard to their respective [gendered power fantasy] even when they want to maybe aesthetically complicate or subvert it a little, and the outward contrast between the fantasies in question made me think about the essential loneliness and sterility they have in common. In the feminine mode, you've got a protagonist who only ever reacts, as the environment rearranges itself to center around her passive singularness; in the masculine version, you have a protagonist who takes constant hypercompetent initiative against an environment that is utterly barren of other characters of equal complexity and intelligence. Both of these things are fundamentally unsatisfying to me, especially at novel length. Please write about several people! Give them their own souls! A simple request. Thank you.
I originally thought this would be a shallowish but entertaining page-turner with some grace notes, and it mostly is, but it's both a bit more ambitious and a bit more failed a project than that description quite captures. The majority experience is popcorn.gif as Orhan races the clock on solving a cascade of technological, military, and social problems, with the horrors of the siege about evenly split between "what we're willing to do to the enemy" and "what we're willing to do to each other while trapped in here." Eventually it emerges that his opposite number, the leader of the conquering horde responsible for the brilliant double feint that left the capital vulnerable, is his childhood friend and only fellow survivor of the raid that destroyed their village and made them both Robur slaves. From there we get to the thematic meat that is the book's primary and most memorable preoccupation, but which is also pretty messy and limited in its development: namely the bleak tension between Orhan's protectiveness of the Empire and the dream--even the hypocritical, corrupt, inherently unequal dream--of human betterment through order and the rule of law, his belief that it is the only alternative to a state of perpetual war + annihilation of the weak by the strong, and his simultaneous awareness that it is no alternative at all.
His friend is a generically affable monster and not much more than a symbolic counterpart in this; a major weakness of the book is just how solipsistic and single-character a narrative it really is. On the other hand, that did also lend itself to a genuine intensity of trapped despair re: his basic moral calculus throughout, which is surprisingly committed-to by the unforgiving ending. On the third hand... it would be a more interesting book if I thought the author's feelings on this differed significantly from Orhan's, but I don't think they do, except that he's aware that you can't just leave it there: hence the book offers no more than a Lorax-like "unless...?", a challenge to the world implied in Orhan's very inability to see a way out.
The book also suffers massively from a certain kind of unselfaware authorial misogyny; I can't recommend it, even with reservations, because of an awful, almost entirely offscreen moment in which Orhan blackmails his enemy-ex-friend's wife into sex the better to get the personal information he needs to convince said friend that she's untrustworthy, thereby saving himself from her own reciprocal blackmail attempt but also protecting his friend, even at the cost of continuing the siege. It's not presented as sympathetic, per se--indeed raping and betraying her is implied to be the moral and spiritual rock bottom that nonliterally prefigures his meaningless death + inability to make sense of his own life--but in part because of the author's apparent identification with Orhan's self-pitying, self-loathing abhorrence for masculinity and masculine violence, it also reduces her to an entire object in the morality play of his life.
I was particularly frustrated by this because it coexists with an also rather manpainy but more complex subplot in which Orhan remembers his affair with a DIFFERENT friend's wife, who entered the marriage on a purely pragmatic/forced/material basis but who therefore blamed herself for her growing hatred of her husband & rapist, and which culminated in their conspiring together to murder said friend. (She dies in childbirth shortly thereafter; Orhan suspects that her surviving daughter is really his child.) Despite existing solely in flashback, the dead woman is probably the most fully drawn character in the book after Orhan, just from the force of her exhaustion and resentment on the page. So I was unpleasantly surprised that this came back to back with an almost James Bond-like deployment of a disposable woman for pure shock value and tonal effect.
It made me think of a very different book, All the Horses of Iceland, which I couldn't stand for many reasons, among them the total opposite approach to sexual violence--namely, to present it as hunky-dory and not actually rape, because in the past women knew their place and were always serenely philosophical about being sold off to random Norsemen, a form of empowerment in its own right. Feels bad that historical fantasy still constantly bounces between these two poles of squeamishness--rape either so unspeakable, TM Grimdark, it has to be surreally written out of existence in any would-be literary pastiche (even when it's the plot! as in any story about an unlikely fool-hero being rewarded with concubines!), or else so abhorrent that narrative discomfort with it entirely effaces the humanity of the victim.
Two last observational notes, unrelated to the above:
1) I give this like... 60% of a pass on the usual worldbuilding risks of Turning The Antiblack Tables as persecution fantasy, mostly because the Robur are SUCH sexy, sexy Romans (arrogant and wrongheaded, also perversely admirable in their discipline and self-belief, also full of crazy and often homicidal Morporkian spirit); that, and Orhan and his old buddy so quickly end up as the powerbrokers in the situation that it more just has the predictable problem of 21st century white guilt eating away at the bounds of the fiction, including the essential mild lameness of backprojecting fixed racial categories to a thoroughly premodern empire. At the same time, I feel like that double vision/shadow of the present day face of Empire and its mythos vs its apocalyptic reality is part of what made the book stickier than I expected even in a very broadly sketched, simple, didactic way, so... shrug emoji.
2) I was also comparing this as I read to Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faerie, for the very different reason that... ... ...both are things that cleave really hard to their respective [gendered power fantasy] even when they want to maybe aesthetically complicate or subvert it a little, and the outward contrast between the fantasies in question made me think about the essential loneliness and sterility they have in common. In the feminine mode, you've got a protagonist who only ever reacts, as the environment rearranges itself to center around her passive singularness; in the masculine version, you have a protagonist who takes constant hypercompetent initiative against an environment that is utterly barren of other characters of equal complexity and intelligence. Both of these things are fundamentally unsatisfying to me, especially at novel length. Please write about several people! Give them their own souls! A simple request. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-24 05:06 am (UTC)The treatment of the rape of slaves in All the Horses of Iceland is such an, uh, example of how you can really get readers nodding along with basically anything if you narrate it in a reassuring way and establish your voice as one that would never be crude or cheap or dwell on anything too distressing so they needn't worry about that: (derogatory), obviously. Venn diagram with various children's lit here, honestly, even some stuff I like. Like, I think it is going for "rooted in cultural worldview" and yet it is all machine-tooled not to jar, unlike the Icelandic sagas it's mimicking.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-24 05:29 am (UTC)Also yeahhhhhhhhhhhhh to all of that, particularly about the false alibi of "it's the unreliable narrator/cultural worldview talking," when in fact the sagas are not at all concerned with constantly reassuring the audience that everything will turn out right and just-worldly in the end. It's just maddening.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-24 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-24 11:41 am (UTC)