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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Anti Romantic,
By
This review is from: The Escapement (Engineer Trilogy) (Paperback)
I enjoyed reading this trilogy. The characters were interesting and for the most part believable. I found myself really caring about some of them (the Eremian and Vadani nobility all terribly British) , especially poor Orsea . The story was exciting, I had a tough time putting the books down more than once. The problem that keeps me from giving the trilogy 4 stars is its central theme. Parker seems to believe that falling in love is one of the worst , if not the worst catastrophe that can befall a man or woman. According to Parker , who clearly speaks through her characters, love is the cause of most of the evil in the world as well. Nations collapse , tens of thousands of innocent men , women and children are slaughtered , friends are cruelly betrayed , all because of love. Here are some quotes from some of the main characters: "Everything we do in this world , everything that matters , we do for love... everything bad , everything really bad that was ever done was done for love." (Ziani) or " this is what love is , it's the constant demands (give me money , give me food , give me happiness, keep me alive) and the incessant taking , taking and taking away until there's nothing left , but you keep on because there's no alternative; because you have no choice" (Psellus). The great events in this trilogy are all constructed to support this theme , love makes us into monsters without free will. That is too cynical and negative for my taste.There is also too much technical machinist's jargon . There might be some poetic beauty in this , but after a few pages of the terminology of calipers , lathes , mandrels etc.. , it starts to become annoying. Still , even if you disagree with the main theme , the trilogy is very much worth reading. This isn't a traditional fantasy , no dragons , wizards or magic. If you can deal with the cynicism, this is good reading.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Review for the Trilogy,
This review is from: The Escapement (Engineer Trilogy) (Paperback)
K.J. Parker's The Folding Knife is the story of an amoral man's life who, during his ruthless rise to power, ends up greatly benefiting his society. After hundreds of pages of us seeing his callous beneficence, he says:"'A hundred of my predecessors tried to make the world a better place...They tried so hard, we've had poverty, economic collapse, and so many wars I lose count. My approach is, I try and make money for myself in a way that benefits the Republic.'" (p. 192, The Folding Knife) The words sum up the entire novel, throw everything into a new perspective that illuminates every event of the text. The ideas have already been proven to us at that point, all that was left to do was to articulate what it was we'd just been shown. The Engineer trilogy is, in many ways, The Folding Knife structured in reverse. In The Folding Knife we see Basso as an uncaring man who does great things, and then we learn why that is so, the theme of the book revealed once the supporting evidence is irrefutable. In the Engineer trilogy, on the other hand, the theme is an announced mission, a thesis statement; Vaatzes believes that people are machines, and he will manipulate them like machines (thereby proving that they are no more than lone cogs in a greater structure) to get back to where he was before his exile. But theme does not work in reverse. Fiction is not science. You cannot show us what you mean to prove before you prove it, because in fiction the author is God; when the author can do literally anything that they can conceive, their evidence is worthless and fabricated, and it's almost impossible to view anything they show us as anything but manipulative when you know from the start that they're trying to manipulate you. And so it is in Devices and Desires. We are told that the characters are nothing but tools, and so we view them as nothing else. Everyone but Vaatzes appears subhuman, an automaton whose only unknown quality is just who is pushing them around. Scenes with Vaatzes become tensionless things, the reader just waiting for him to shove everyone around him over and stride of their cardboard corpses. In almost any other book, I would chalk such a structural mishap up as an interesting failure, perhaps add something else the author did to my amazon wishlist in the hope that they figured out the proper order later, and move on. It's not so easy to do that to the Engineer Trilogy, though, and the reason is that, exempting the untimely revelation of Vaatzes' worldview, the trilogy is excellent. The realization happens towards the end of the first book, and the realization is that, after hundreds of pages of Vaatzes calling events perfectly, manipulating everything just so, the engineer is not infallible. A certain character acts in a fashion that, at first, seems startlingly out of character - but wait, the role they were not cooperating with was never one that they'd designed, was not something laid down by either the character's own willpower or by authorial fiat; the rule broken was one of Vaatzes', and, if Vaatzes could be wrong about that, he could be wrong about anything, the various components of his machine suddenly given back their humanity and resurrected from the fleshy detritus they'd previously seemed to be. The realization invigorates everything that follows, making the question no longer how will Vaatzes accomplish his goals? but rather will Vaatzes accomplish his goals? with decent helpings of what are Vaatzes' goals? and should he accomplish them? on the side. The events of the trilogy can all be drawn back to Ziana Vaatzes and his flight from Mezentia, the Eternal Republic, a walled city of brilliant craftsmen that dominate the world without ever stepping foot beyond their own walls. To survive in the outside world, Vaatzes offers his skills to the Eremian people, who were recently shamed when they tried to attack Mezentia and were slaughtered by the Mezentine's artillery. Faced with the exposure of their industrial secrets, the Mezentine government hires mercenaries from the old country to punish the Eremians and anyone else who dares try and break their economic stranglehold on the world. Such an epic war could easily lead to your standard epic fantasy fair, complete with heroes leading brave armies, but the machinery that's so central to the story handily slaughters that, waves of heroes dying at the duel hands of will-sapping economy and body-destroying industrial creations: "He'd been there when the volley struck the seventh lancers. First, a low whistling, like a flock of starlings; next, a black cloud resolving itself into a skyfull of tiny needles, hanging in the air for a heartbeat before swooping, following a trajectory that made no sense, that broke all the known rules of flight; then pitching, growing bigger so horribly fast (like the savage wild animals that chase you in dreams), then dropping like hailstones all around him; and the shambles, the noise, the suddenness of it all. So many extraordinary images, like a vast painting crammed with incredible detail: a man nailed to the ground by a bolt that hit him in the groin, drove straight through his horse and into the ground, fixing them both so firmly they couldn't even squirm; two men riveted together by the same bolt; a man hit by three bolts simultaneously, each one punched clean through his armor, and still incredibly alive; a great swathe of men and horses stamped in to the ground like a careless footstep on a flowerbed full of young seedlings. Just enough time for him to catch fleeting glimpses of these unbelievable sights, and then the next volley fell, to minutes of angle to the left, flattening another section of the line. He couldn't even see where the bolts were coming from, they didn't seem to rise from the surface of the earth, they just materialized or condensed in mid-air, like snow." (p. 62-63, Devices and Desires) When it comes to industry, Parker is a master. It could be argued that she goes overboard in her descriptions of this or that technological process, and you probably will learn more than you ever wanted to know or are able to process about making pieces of ancient equipment that you didn't previously know the name of, but the sheer inhuman power of siege weapons and economies are horrifically rendered here. They are greater than any one man, turning conflict from glorious struggles to battles of attrition and protracted, mutual declines broken up by periods of horrible annihilation like the one quoted above. The characters of Parker's world, and the reader, can't relate to destruction on such a scale (though we modern readers have long since eclipsed it), and such artillery can't be comprehended on its own terms, instead viewed as animals and isolated images, as a force of nature not unleashed by one man but rather sent down from the sky to slaughter them all, amoral. The constructed machines are far from the only mechanical element of the series. Vaatzes's machine analogy can be used to illuminate almost every aspect of the series, but what makes it truly interesting is that, though everything is precisely motivated and running on perfectly aligned tracks, there are wheels within wheels within wheels, and you can never tell where the true beginning of anything was. In the end, it is love that motivates the various great and terrible leaders and men of the story. Their most human emotion deprived them of their free will, turned them away from their old paths, loyalties, and characters, and sent them off to change the world in ways that they never could have predicted. Their decisions, once made, cannot be retracted, and social constructions made for a purpose often soon turn unwieldy and threaten to crush their creator as surely as their creator's enemies. One of the most interesting characters is Duke Valens, the leader of Eremia's ancestral foes, the Vadani. Vaatzes is the arch manipulator in the novels, but Valens is the one conscious of being manipulated, not by Vaatzes but by himself and his circumstances. In the first chapter of the book, we see Valens as he really is: an awkward boy, bored by matters of state, intimidated by hunting and its larger cousin war, and wholly unsuited to be a duke. When we next meet him, however, his father has passed away and the mantle of leadership has come to him - and he has forced himself to fit it. Each of the three novels of the trilogy start with the same sentence: "'The way to a man's heart[...]is proverbially through his stomach, but if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye socket.'" (p. 1). Each time, a central character is learning to fence and presented with the same problem: they must stab through the center of a ring hanging from a string. For Valens, the answer is to cheat. As he admits later, Valens does everything by cheating, by sidestepping the original problem and sidestepping the limitations of the man that the problem was presented to. Valens the man is useless and incompetent, but Valens the duke is a master hunter and strategist, an excellent diplomat, tireless, intelligent, and dedicated to his people. The most elaborate, painstaking aspect of Valens-the-creation is his letters. He and Veatriz, wife to Duke Orsea of Eremia, have kept in communication with secret letters delivered by merchant couriers for years at the start of the story. In the letters, Valens communicates with quotations and elaborate phrases, and Veatriz falls in love with the man revealed there - a man with precious little in common with the boy that opened Devices and Desires. The Ducas, Miel, is the opposite of Valens. The Ducas are a proud, noble family so bound up in tradition that their every move is dictated. Miel knows this, is aware of his utter lack of... Read more ›
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well, it keeps you reading,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Escapement (Engineer Trilogy) (Paperback)
KJ Parker has a real knack for writing simple, forceful prose that makes reading it a compulsive need. I pored over the entire Engineer trilogy despite the fact that for much of it I was in "I dread to watch, yet I cannot look away" mode. Because what Parker really does in this series is create a stable of truly interesting, engaging, likable characters it's a pleasure to get to know and who you can really admire and root for -- and then, once you truly love them, Parker makes them suffer the torments of the damned. And then makes them inflict the torments of the damned on others. And then rehabilitates them a bit so you start to like them again. And then puts them through the wringer again. Lather, rinse, repeat for 1700 pages and you've got the rollercoaster Parker has dubbed The Engineer Trilogy.If that doesn't sound like your idea of a good time, for heaven's sake don't start reading. At the end of each book I swore to myself I couldn't take any more and I wouldn't buy the next one, but Parker's so dratted good at this work that I couldn't help myself. I had to keep going. But it was always more of the same: sympathetic characters suffer and are destroyed by terrible situations they inflict on each other, and KJ Parker records it all with impartiality and clarity that is almost cruel. And still I read on, fascinated. Now that I'm at the end of the Engineer Trilogy, I'm heaving a sigh of relief. I hope I will have the strength of will not to read any more of Parker's work, but I'm not sure I can hold out.
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