Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

K. J. Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a low-fantasy swirl of sardonic, unreliable narration. It is told in the style of direct address, with the narrator in full acknowledgement of his readership audience and historical context; it tells the story of how a lowly ethnic-minority army engineer lied, cheated, manipulated the bureaucracy, and used commonsense engineering-brain to protect the capital city from complete obliteration.

The narrative style was clever and comforting, but after about three chapters which end with a twist or cliffhanger, I came to expect it. This undermined my enjoyment of the unreliable narration, since it was easy to make the assumption "some stuff is lies and the rest is obscured to make a dramatic reveal later" in every chapter and always, always be correct. In the end it answered lots of questions and didn't leave me with much to mull over.

The very clever and self-contradicting narrator, in a style of direct address, the preface and addendum notes that directly disavow the historicity of the contents of the narration (it's a low-fantasy medieval walled city of no particular resemblance to anything), all the snide to-camera comments making fun of personalities around him... all these are elements which I enjoy, but overall the book didn't capture me and I found myself thinking wistfully of how excellent A Deadly Education was. This book doesn't seem like it will stick with me, but it was fun.

We've been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven't let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It's a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were. (p 113)

This post's theme word is propugnaculum (n), "a fortress; defense; protection". The trained defense soldiers and maintenance workers are a vital part of your walled city's propugnaculum; in this case, the public gardeners! 

P.S. Every time I catch the title of this book out of the corner of my eye, it triggers my subconscious and "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" starts playing in my head. I had been idly humming it to myself for days before realizing that this book was the cause.