Mirror Dance

Five years ago, my life was a sadder, lonelier place than today.  I had never been in love.  I had never lived in Somerset.  And I had never heard of Lois McMaster Bujold.  When I met my partner, I felt that I had come home, both to this part of England and to an assortment of fictional worlds I had never encountered before, and their inhabitants.  Bujold has created some immediately engaging heroes and heroines, but she can also make us care about and sympathise with characters we don’t expect to like, especially here:

Mirror Dance

  

‘Some people have an evil twin.  I am not so lucky.  What I have is an idiot twin.’

Brothers Miles and Mark are genetically identical, but their lives couldn’t be more different.  Miles Vorkosigan is a feudal lord on the planet of Barrayar, son of the Prime Minister, and cousin and foster-brother of the Emperor.  True, it isn’t easy for him as a disabled person on a planet where disabled children are traditionally killed at birth, but he manages to combine being a junior officer in the Barrayaran army with running a fleet of space mercenaries under an assumed name.  And if people notice that ‘Admiral Naismith’ looks suspiciously like Lord Vorkosigan – well, he can always pretend to be a clone of himself.

Mark actually is a clone, created to assassinate Miles’s father and the Emperor.  After a miserable childhood being trained to impersonate Miles, he rebelled against that destiny and escaped.  Miles longs to bring his brother home to meet Mum and Dad.  Mark just wants Miles to leave him alone.

But when Mark impersonates Miles in his Admiral Naismith persona, stealing a mercenary ship to rescue a group of cloned children scheduled to be slaughtered to provide spare bodies, the rescue goes wrong – and Miles’s attempt to rescue Mark goes wronger still.  With Miles dead, Mark is forced to go to Barrayar to meet the parents he doesn’t want to accept that he has.

So, warning one: this is science fiction – or, frankly, space opera.  If you don’t read science fiction, don’t let that put you off.  This isn’t a novel about space – that’s just background.  It’s about identity, and family, and trauma, and redemption.  If you enjoy the humour of Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novels or Georgette Heyer’s historical romances, read this.  If you enjoy contemporary novelists like Libby Purves who write with warmth and optimism but not too much sentimentality about difficult issues, read this. 

But equally, if you wish that Star Wars novelisations were brilliantly well-written, definitely read this.  If you like hard science fiction with lots of technical detail – this may not be your cup of tea, but try it anyway.

Warning two: it’s dark.  Probably the darkest book in the series, with a plot involving mental illness, torture, and child abuse.  But it’s also one of the most moving and inspiring, and the one which always makes me cry happy tears by the end.  It does have a happy ending – even if Mark seriously needs psychiatric help to deal with what he’s been through, and Miles is going to find that the after-effects of dying put a crimp in his career.  But that’s another story… 

So, warning three: it’s part of a series.  Strictly speaking, it’s novel 9.  However, each book works as a stand-alone story.  If you want to read the series, a good place to start is Shards of Honor.

This introduces us to the Vorkosigan family, when Betan scientist Cordelia Naismith and Barrayaran soldier Aral Vorkosigan meet on a newly-discovered planet and fall in love, only for their respective planets to go to war shortly afterwards.  Romeo and Juliet in space?  Well, sort of – if Romeo and Juliet had been written by Georgette Heyer after she’d been watching Star Trek and thought, ‘It’d be much more interesting if the Federation could work with the Klingons instead of fighting them.’  And if Romeo was a bisexual forty-something alleged war criminal whose evil ex-boyfriend was determined to destroy anyone else Romeo dared fall in love with.  And if the evil ex-boyfriend had a huge, deranged minion who, like Darth Vader, still had some good left in him…

However, for Aral and Cordelia, being reunited and getting married is just the start.  Their story continues in the next book, Barrayar, as Cordelia adjusts to life on a world very unlike her home planet; tries to help her friends cope with mental illness, physical disability, or a confused love life; takes care of a fugitive five-year-old Emperor in the middle of a civil war; and fends off people who for various reasons want to kill her baby son.

If you’ve read Shards of Honor, you’ll probably love Aral and Cordelia, and some of the other characters, enough that you’ll want to read Barrayar.  On the other hand, if you would rather read a novel with a young male hero, try The Warrior’s Apprentice.

Here, Miles, an undersized, brittle-boned teenager desperate to be a soldier like his father and grandfather, fails the fitness test for the officers’ academy (as a friend of mine put it, ‘It’s like Red Dwarf meets How To Train Your Dragon – with a more obnoxious Hiccup.’).  With the help of a rag-tag bunch of misfits he’s befriended, he takes up arms smuggling and cons his way into becoming an admiral.

It’s a fun story which turns unexpectedly tragic.  However, as my friend said, teenage Miles can be obnoxiously self-centred – mainly because his insecurity makes him desperate to prove himself at all costs.  He’s also recklessly generous, chivalrous, crazy awesome, funny and intriguing to watch.  But plenty of readers didn’t really warm to him until Mirror Dance, where Miles has to deal with his young clone-brother getting up to the sort of ill-thought-out stunts that Miles did when he was younger – and then when Miles has to work out who he really is, at his most isolated and vulnerable.  So reading Mirror Dance first might not be the worst idea after all.