22 March, 2004
Jhereg, Steven Brust (239 pp, MMPB, 1983)
There I was, having finished a long-ass book about Lewis & Clark and wondering what I should read next. It came to me out of the blue: I wanted to read some Steven Brust. So, I dug out the first Vlad Taltos novel and went to town.
Jhereg is the first book in Brust's ongoing series about Vladimir Taltos, a human assassin living in the Dragaeran Empire (the same setting as the Paarfi novels). It starts with Vlad getting an offer he can't refuse from a high-ranking member of the Jhereg (i.e. the purveyors of organized crime in the Empire). The offer is a very lucrative job, to assassinate another high-ranking member of the organization, who has absconded with a significant fraction of the Jhereg treasury. The first order of business is to locate the target, which Vlad does with ease. That's when the trouble starts. For various reasons, Vlad can't kill the target in his present location, and he must somehow be induced to leave that place. The target knows this, and is naturally reluctant to depart.
This is an early Brust novel, and as such it lacks the complexity of his more recent books; there's no experimentation with style or viewpoint or anything fancy like that. (Well, not much at any rate.) Nevertheless, it's a good fantasy caper novel (Vlad's final plan for assassinating Mellar is a doozy) with snappy first-person smartass narration, good characters, and of course, a snarky animal sidekick.
Spoilers for Jhereg and other Dragaera novels (highlight to read):
This is the first time I've read this book (or any of the older
Vlad books) since Orca came out. And, well, it's now
obvious that he had the Sethra thing in mind from the beginning.
The description of the events leading up to Adron's Disaster (from
Morollan and Aliera, related by Vlad) in this book differ significantly
from Paarfi's version Five Hundred
Years After. Now, that's no reflection on Brust, since
neither Vlad nor Paarfi has ever posed as a reliable narrator, but it
does make me wonder what the "truth" is. I'm inclined towards the
Morollan/Aliera version, FWIW. It also strikes me as very post-modern
to be discussing whether one version of a fictional event in a fictional
world is closer to the truth than another.
Jhereg, it should be noted, contains one of my favorite quotes ever:
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
Of course, it was too short, and I've already started Yendi. I sense a full-blown Vlad reread coming on...