Provenance

Provenance

By Ann Leckie

A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned.

Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

I'd already read Ann Leckie's Ancillary  series, which I guess I'm supposed to call the Imperial Radch series, but that's both harder to remember and spell, and doesn't make as much sense as calling a set of books titled Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Mercy, and Ancillary Sword the Ancillary series.  Anyway, the point of that is that I already knew and was familiar with her gender neutral (or in some cases deliberately anti-gender) tics and appreciated her version of sci-fi, which does take a little to get used to.  It's a very politicized space, with different classes of humans and aliens (and all of that mattering, for reasons that sometimes get too esoteric for enjoyable reading).  So somehow I wound up picking this and Provenance (coming soon to a blog near you!) as my "duplicate titles" and I'm pleased I did.

I'd actually read the first chapter of Provenance before I read Provenance, which helped a lot, since Leckie doesn't really ever mention or define provenance.  But obviously she named her book Provenance, so the idea is important.  The other Provenance is a more typical use of the word, about the background and establishment of a creditable or traceableauthenticity for pieces of art  - specifically paintings, in that book.  In Provenance, there is, amusingly enough, a side discussion about the forging of cultural artifacts which involves the faking of provenance, but the book's also, broadly, about the provenance of people. Ingray, the main character, begins the book deeply conflicted about her place in the family, particularly as an adopted child. She feels herself to be, essentially, the faked artifact, superficially passing but never substantially correct.  She is....without provenance!  The theme also runs through the idea of what makes something important, culturally? Well, it's whatever importance we decide to attach to it.  Like that old question, if you have a boat and replace it one plank at a time, when (or if) does it ever become a new boat? Or perhaps more relevantly, in Pratchett's Fifth Elephant when the crime includes the refashioning of a priceless historical necessity (remade, Pratchett-style, naturally, in a vat for rubber condoms) and the concept that as long as the people really believe it's real, then it is indistinguishable from the real thing. 

It did get tiresome, as it's perfectly fine for your characters to be down on themselves, but for Ingray to constantly harp on "Well, I will never be mother's heir, she'll always pick my brother, and not for one minute has there been any doubt" was irritating, especially by the end when it was clear that multiple people were trying to tell her that well, actually, she was a serious contender, and in fact her mother did offer it to her in the end.

I think I liked the antagonist in Ancillary more, as Breq had a bit more get-up-and-go, and none-of-that-nonsense to her/it than Ingray, although I did appreciate that Leckie threw in a murder plot and a hostage situation to spice things up on this one.  That being said, the murder plot devolves quickly into the very dry political machinations that Leckie favors, and the hostage situation is somewhat ludicrously set up as Ingray is permitted to just waltz in (so to speak - true to her character she actually just sits on the floor and weeps until allowed in) despite various people with the authority to refuse to allow this telling her not to do it.  They later handwave this as "Oh this random person who by the way was being hunted down by an alien ambassador suggested you would come up with a plan so we decided to let this play out." There is definitely the sense that everyone in the book has some over-inflated appreciation of Ingray's skill in problem-solving that isn't really borne out much in practice.

All in all, it's fun to break out of the normal sci-fi regime from time to time.  This felt like a close approximation of some of the Vorkosigan saga as well, except with fewer defined pronouns, but I am not interested in reading any more about Ingray - a lot of times, she felt like the least interesting person in the story.  And sometimes that can work, if they have a rich inner life, or a sarcastic narrative, but here, Ingray is just - gray.



47: Two Books That Share The Same Title