I put off reading this book for a while because I thought the series hit a low point: overcomplicated, too much back story, and moving at a snail’s pace. I was worried that this book was going to be even more of a slog than the last one.
Man, I wish I could say I’d been worried for nothing.
Click the jump for a look at C.J. Cherryh’s Visitor, the last book in the Foreigner series I plan on reviewing.
I have so many problems with this book that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m going to try to be respectful, because this series has been near and dear to my heart for so long (seventeen books!) that it breaks my heart to write a bad review, especially when C.J. Cherryh is such a fantastic writer, better than I could ever hope to be in several lifetimes.
Still. Stuff needs to get said.
I finally realized my biggest complaint, even bigger than Bren pondering the political landscape for dozens of pages. Sure that’s tedious, but the bigger problem can be summed up in three words:
Too. Many. Humans.
This entire book was mainly about the problems of the humans on the space station that orbits the world. Another entire space station of humans was imported unexpectedly a trilogy ago and we’re still dealing with it: station captains fighting with ship captains and humans plotting and being ugly to each other and whole pages without an atevi in sight. Instead of learning more about these strange, graceful, extremely dangerous aliens that the series used to be about, we’re hearing about new administrators coming in and having to lock groups people in their rooms because they were stirring up bad feelings among other groups of people. Great.
Whole pages are taken up with how the father of one of the human children is being problematic because he can’t contact his job or find his papers and he’s been making illicit deals to make sure his son gets tutoring. Isn’t that fascinating?
But aside from all the humans, and almost no atevi (for most of the book our only contact with the aliens that made the book so fascinating in the first place amounts to them agreeing with something Bren just said) the story just crawls. It’s chapters and chapters of exposition, of Bren sitting down and pondering to himself as a way to summarize every plot point from the past five trilogies.
And then when there’s a little movement, just as we’re finally moving forward, about to meet this new scary race we’ve been hearing about, we get a flashback to Bren’s first days as paidhi, to his first tentative days of creating a working relationship with the atevi and FOR CRYING OUT LOUD can we please stop spinning in place and just get on with it?
Honestly, and I’m very serious about this, the ultra introspective navel gazing has to stop.
Also the double and triple explanations could take a hike too. If Bren has just sussed out an idea in his head for six pages, and then Jase walks in, do we really need another three pages of him explaining what he was just thinking about to Jase? No. No we do not. You know what would work? “Bren took a moment to explain his thoughts to Jase, who nodded and agreed.” Done.
You’ll need to get through two hundred pages before the exposition stops (mostly) and we stop hearing about someone’s Dad being snippy, or someone’s Mom being a real …piece of work.
(All kidding aside, humans and relationships are not bad things, and the plots and plans of some of these people make could be interesting, if they didn’t drag all forward motion out of the story. They’re fine, I just think they belong in a different book.)
***Fair warning, major spoiler below***
Once the new aliens, the kyo, visit the ship, things do move forward a bit. We learn a little more about them, get to know them a little better, and when Bren visits their ship he gets a hell of a bombshell dropped in his lap: we’ve heard for a couple books that the kyo are fighting a war with another race, one we haven’t seen yet. It’s a scary, out-of-control war, and Bren and the atevi are desperately trying to keep it away from the planet.
When Bren visits the kyo ship, he’s introduced to their prisoner, a member of this unknown race they’ve been at war with for so long.
It’s a human.
Okay, that was actually a surprise. The humans on the atevi planet, and the humans on the space station, all came from somewhere else a long time ago, and it’s actually a neat twist that the unknown race would be more humans, possibly ancestors of theirs. It explains why the kyo have been acting so weird for a while: they’d met more humans, but it wasn’t the same humans they were at war with, and they didn’t know what to do about it.
So yes, I did like that surprise. But I also laughed when I saw it. Because of course: more humans.
Even with this new information, and all that came from it, the story never really picked up. After that little surprise, the story meandered on for a few dozen pages, and never had a nice, satisfying resolution. It didn’t end so much as trail off.
I miss how the series used to feel.
We were finding out new things that surprised and delighted us. We had misunderstandings with the atevi that could be horrifically dangerous or really sweet (“I am not a salad!” is a lovely example that’d take way too long to explain.)
We travelled on private trains and stayed in castles on mountains, and we got to see the spider-ivy plants that grow out of control in space so that every private room on the ship has its own curtain of green.
We saw the atevi go from an almost feudal state to actually piloting space ships, and it was natural and made sense (we had a lot of books to do it in.)
We watched young Cajeiri go from a kind of annoying, sidekick sort of character to a really awesome young atevi who could hold his own as a main character in a new series.
We learned how you had to be very careful about being emotional around atevi, because they were always so focused and reserved (and because they carried a lot of weapons.) That’s why it was so fun when they smiled.
We saw the atevi servants, way back in the beginning of the series, so alien and quiet and emotionless, who in the end are so taken with Bren that they make him a special strange dish for dinner, and he had to ask them what it was. “Pizza…is this not in correct season, nand’ paidhi?”
And, of course, the night in the tent with Jago. We haven’t had a moment like that in over four trilogies.
I may read the next book in the series (it’s the last in the sixth trilogy, after all) but I won’t review it. I can only bag on something for so long before I just feel bad about it.
I still hope it surprises me. You never know. If it does, I promise to eat my hat, and come tell you about it.