How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It

K. J. Parker's How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It is the sequel to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and begins approximately 10 seconds after the previous book ends.

Ok, maybe more like seven years? But we get enough flashbacks with our shiny, new unreliable narrator, that it is possible for the reader to piece together the continuous storyline of what has happened in the empire --- now reduced to a single walled city --- since the first book.

This book's narrator is an actor/playwright who, in the opening chapter, pitches a play wherein a nobody gets poached off the street by "the lord high chamberlain and the grand vizier. In disguise, of course. ...And they point out that the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the king. ... And it turns out that the king's been abducted by traitors in the pay of the enemy, who want to start a war, so we need you to pretend to be him" (p. 1-2). This is an incredibly bold move! -- to open a book with a Chekov's screenplay so heavily foreshadowing that it seemed like I might require the attention of a head trauma specialist. The snide narrator, of course, does this all with a wink-to-camera so big that he probably required an optometrist visit afterwards, all while waving and dancing and screaming "I am an unreliable narrator!" What a way to start a novel, ending chapter 1 with a sneering summary of plot points to make a story marketable:

Virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. I have to confess I'm no scholar, so for all I know there may be unicorns, in Permia or somewhere lie that, so maybe one component of that list does actually exist in real life. Wouldn't like to  bet the rent on it, though. (p 3)

I found this fun and absolutely in the style of the previous book, except that for some reason I liked this unreliable narrator more than that one. Maybe it was the incredible boldness of starting with such an obvious completely-unhidden augury that I actually wondered if all those things would come true, and which would be subverted, by the end --- would there be a unicorn? Maybe as a metaphor? Maybe as a prop?

The house was easy to recognize, because some clown with an unfortunate money-to-taste ratio had thought twin gateposts in the form of winged horses was a good idea. (p 32)

I liked this hint of unicorn-y-ness and the phrase "unfortunate money-to-taste ratio".

There was a ring of authenticity in the actor-narrator's reflection "I'm being him, which I can do as easily as I am me --- which isn't exactly easy in any realistic sense of the word. Because being me has never been easy. and on balance I'd far rather be anybody else but me." (p 51)

And there was an aching bruised feeling to the summary "I looked for just such a plan. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, or maybe it's top secret. Or maybe --- It slowly dawned on me that it's possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and  not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can't figure out the politics, or they think it'll be horrendously unpopular, or it'll cost too much money, a commodity you can't take with you..." (p 77)

Overall I liked this book better than the previous one, although the two narrator characters were basically identical in attitude and tone. I enjoyed that book 2 started by immediately disavowing the entirety of book 1 and even calling into question whether the narrator in book 1 even existed. My main negative about this book was that it tried to have so many twists that it twisted itself up, and the solution that was obvious from early in the book --- that one solution that would completely resolve all the plot conflicts --- was just ignored in favor of weird oblique strategies-with-a-twist!, as if this were some sort of Oceans-Eleven-style caper. It's not. So the final book resolution was the thing that had seemed obvious from the start, and I did not believe that the smart characters were surprised, because even I, with the limited information made available by the unreliable and manipulative narrator, was able to anticipate the conclusion.

It was diverting, and the cover art is great! Weirdly, book 1's cover is velvety but book 2's cover is crisp, even though I got matching editions.

This post's theme word is annelidous (adj), "of or relating to worms." There is an annelidous sequence of undermining, counter-undermining, contra-counter-undermining, and Bitter-Butter-Battle-style tunneling in this book about a besieged walled city. 

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.