The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

By Seth Dickinson

Baru Cormorant believes any price is worth paying to liberate her people-even her soul.
When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home, overwrites her culture, criminalizes her customs, and murders one of her fathers, Baru vows to swallow her hate, join the Empire's civil service, and claw her way high enough to set her people free.

Sent as an Imperial agent to distant Aurdwynn, another conquered country, Baru discovers it's on the brink of rebellion. Drawn by the intriguing duchess Tain Hu into a circle of seditious dukes, Baru may be able to use her position to help. As she pursues a precarious balance between the rebels and a shadowy cabal within the Empire, she orchestrates a do-or-die gambit with freedom as the prize.

But the cost of winning the long game of saving her people may be far greater than Baru imagines.

I don't know what I can or should say about Traitor: I liked it well enough, but I did find it losing my attention as I tried to track names, characters, backstories, action.  There are thirteen duchies in Aurdwynn, and even despite the map at the beginning, I wasn't like, super on top of who was who.  Also, and here's the thing: in any book that revolves around betrayals (not any more a spoiler than the title, come on) there's going to be that plots-within-plots feeling that is a little bit expected and a little bit exhausting. Although it's not a surprise to the reader that Baru betrays the rebellion (or, it shouldn't be - if you've picked up on any of the hints, or read the fucking title of the book) Dickinson does a pretty good job still making you feel bad about it.

The plot felt a lot like Red Rising: child of the oppressed somehow infiltrates the ruling class and ends up in a competition/test to prove themselves while also gathering enough power to bring the ruling class down from within.   Traitor deals a lot more with the sticky political things: colonialism, and germ warfare, and economic subrogation, and religious tyranny.  It doesn't want to be an action/thriller, it wants to get at the idea of becoming the very thing you swore to destroy.  What if, in seeking to undo the crime done to you, you commit those very crimes against someone else? What good is revenge when you have already killed everything you meant to save?

The pace of the first section is pretty quick, as Baru makes it from island to school to posting to uncovering and imploding a rebel plot fairly quickly, but we spend more time in the later sections, where Baru first infiltrates the (newest) rebellion and then helps to win it, which I felt started to drag a little, if only because of the aforementioned need to remember names, backstories, action, and plots.  It's possible some of the convolution will pay off in later installments.  It can be so tricky to review firsts in a series that way.  I still remember JK Rowling promising big payoffs and answers to mysteries raised in the first couple of books that kind of fizzled out by the time she finished the seventh (i.e. why does Harry Potter have so much money in his vault, and I am so unsatisfied by the answer.  We waited ten years to find out his dad is just rich, really?).

I read the whole thing in one go, but a few days out, I'm just not feeling the need to read the sequel right now, which is a bad sign for me finishing the (forthcoming) quartet.  I think you get back to this idea of: how much time do you want to spend in a mind that is this unhappy, and in a world which is this difficult and unpleasant?  Even Baru's successes were in service to a greater tragedy, and there's a point at which it's just not that fun.  I enjoy a good revenge story - I'm very excited to be re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo for my final book - but Baru so far is unrelenting misery, and the reviews for The Monster Baru Cormorant sound like more of the same.  When are we going to get REVENGEEEEE?? Would I practice revenge in real life? No.  Do I want a revenge fantasy while Baru seems hell-bent on a realistic look at what revenge does to a person? YES.


One of the things I didn't like about Wonder Woman when it came out was this scene where they're trying to hold a war council and talking about sacrificing a town, and Diana's like, "How can you not try to save absolutely everyone?" which is such an unrealistic attitude to have in war.  Contrast that with The Imitation Game, which I just watched yesterday, when they realize they have to lie about cracking Enigma in order to prevent the Germans from changing their cipher, thereby sacrificing loads of people they could have saved for the greater good.  I appreciated that as being both a more realistic and a harder (and therefore more heartfelt) choice.  It's easy to just indiscriminately help people, it's harder when you have to decide who you will let die.  Here, Baru takes the stance that everyone is worth sacrificing, which I think tips the spectrum too far in the other direction - too easy when you only have one thing you want to save, you know it will always win. Baru is sort of like the anti-Wonder Woman in that respect.

We'll see how I go - I might end up waiting until the whole series is published and trying again then.

25: A Debut Novel