Kogiopsis's Reviews > Kushiel's Dart

TW for this review: long discussion of rape and consent.

Edit: No, one more thing. WHERE ARE THE CONTRACEPTIVES. WHERE.

Edit x2: Is it bothering anyone else that Phedre's name is apparently pronounced close to 'FAY-dra', but the accent on the first e is an accent grave? as opposed to an accent aigu, which would actually produce that hard 'a' sound in French? Because it's bothering me. If you're gonna do expy!France, don't fuck up the language. What's written there is closer to 'Fedruh'.
Edit x3: I stand corrected.

I first encountered this book when I was much younger and just getting into Orson Scott Card's work - they're shelved next to each other in most bookstores and libraries, and after a while I got curious about the huge books with the rather prominently placed half-naked women on them. Reading the dust jackets, I concluded a few things: 1. that these were Sex Books; 2. that the main character would get raped, probably repeatedly; and 3. that they were not for me.

I was, as it turns out, correct on all counts.

A friend of mine convinced me to give them a shot this year, insisting that the political intrigue was fascinating and the sex wasn't that bad, really. I don't like gainsaying my friends, especially in an area where they objectively have more knowledge than I do, so I agreed, tracked down an ebook, and slogged through it. I came out the other side with... well, I guess I can argue back if anyone tries to convince me to read them again.

There were two major disappointments for me in this book: court intrigue and consent. Consent is, obviously, the more important one, so let's talk about that first.

One of the interesting things about this book is that it's written as if Phedre is looking back on the events of her life - there's a lot of "if only I had known then" which, believe you me, gets annoying. What this means, though, is that there's no room for character development to change perspective. The perspective of the narrator is that of adult Phedre and is cast as knowledgeable, omniscient as a result of hindsight. I mention this because, were this not the case, some of Carey's choices could be explained by Phedre's lack of knowledge or self-reflection in earlier stages of her life - but that's not an option.

Maybe it's an asexual thing, to be hyper-tuned to situations of dubious consent and grooming? I definitely seem to be in the minority both here and with regards to Deathless; I can only guess that, because compulsory sexuality is so inherently threatening to me, it stands out more than it does for allo people?
The Night Court runs on child grooming. They raise kids from infancy in a situation where sex work is normalized, start teaching them about it sometimes as young as six, and initiate them at 13. (not that they weren't sexual objects before then - a 10 year-old boy is once told that "They'll be marking their calendars until you come of age".) Now, here's the thing: I don't believe there's anything wrong with choosing sex work freely. However, the Night Court and its influence are coercive - we see this in Alcuin, who nearly gets himself killed trying to make his marque and get out of his contract, and earlier in a comment a Valerian House adept makes regarding the use of flechettes as a sex toy: "He gave an involuntary tremor beside me and his voice changed. 'I hate them.'" Both of these characters have clearly been put into sexual situations in which they weren't comfortable, and continued to participate as 'Servants of Naamah' nonetheless. That's coercion, not consent.
And then there's Phedre, who gets pleasure in pain, and so whose contracts always include a safeword. Which she then never uses, even when a client burns her skin with a poker. The thing about this is - yes, technically speaking, it's possible for someone to have a safeword and never encounter a situation that crosses their boundaries. But that doesn't work here. This whole situation is constructed; Carey chose to give Phedre a safeword but never to show her using it. This means we never see her exercising control over her assignations, nor do we get a demonstration that the nobles of Terre d'Ange would actually respect her choice to end a scene/encounter. The safeword, unused (view spoiler)[except for when Melisande orders her to use it (hide spoiler)], has no power.
Finally: the handling of rape in this book. As I said, I anticipated it and rightly so, but what I didn't anticipate was Carey's choice to draw a division between kinds of rape.
Minor spoilers: Terrible things happen and Phedre gets drugged by the series antagonist and sent to be a slave to the not!Germans over the border. Before she's sent away, though, the antagonist rapes her.
Well. I say 'rape', because she was drugged and bound and never asked for consent, and because the sex was literally used as a coercive attempt to get information from her. What Phedre - and thereby Carey - says is this:

What she did to me that last night... she would have ended it, if I'd given the signale. I do believe that. It was my choice to withhold it.

So, when someone feels they can't safeword out of a situation because of other pressures, that somehow becomes consensual? Since when is rape defined more by whether the attacker will stop if the victim gives them what they want, rather than by the fact that they started against someone's will in the first place?
This is made worse by the way that Phedre's hindsight is used to emphasize it: "It was my choice". 'Choice' it might nominally be, but consent can't be freely given when the choice is weighted with the lives of people you love and the stability of an entire kingdom. 'Submit to assault or betray your friends and family' isn't a balanced decision at all.

The entire setting is built on the idea of "Love as thou wilt" being the guiding precept of the land, and while I sort of see where Carey was going with that idea, it just wasn't carefully considered enough. (For a smaller example, as other reviewers have pointed out, 'whore' is still an insult in this culture even though one of their minor deities was literally a prostitute by trade.) If compulsory sexuality is a problem in the real world, it's even more so here, where everyone is expected to be just merrily fucking their way along. (Well - at least, the people we see most of are. Which are the nobles and wealthy merchants. Does 'love as thou wilt' extend to the peasantry? Does Carey care? We may never know.)

Right. So. Consent: F-. Abject failure.

On to the thing that persuaded me to read this book: the promise of court intrigue!



I finally put my finger on why this book's 'intrigue' didn't work for me, and it's this: there's only ever one thing in play.
Everyone wants the throne. Right. I get it. But because the major players all have one sole interest, they rarely interact in complicated ways - they're all just rivals for a single thing. Nobody is, say, out to get a better trade agreement with so-and-so, but will trade a favor for a favor even though they don't care about the rest. The 'machinations' at work here are ehh... I'd say maybe four steps at most? This is partly because none of them are playing within the system (if there is a system - we got very little info on the actual political structure of TdA) and they're all just gathering up armies to smash it from outside, but it just had no spark. The intrigue was, well, unintriguing. There's little more to say about it because it was just so damn shallow and dull.

I'm still a bit iffy on giving this book two stars, but for the moment that rating stands. The reason for the second: the last quarter or so was pretty much straight up epic fantasy fare (clashing armies, desperate alliances) and that, despite everything else, was pretty enjoyable. Not that there weren't issues involved in those parts - see 'Phedre has hardly any close relationships that don't involve sleeping together' and 'sex is the solution to every problem' - but the pace picked up. So, extra star for that.

Oh god, and before I end this review: the writing and the constant insistence that Terre d'Ange is the greatest thing that's ever existed, and all D'Angelines are supernaturally beautiful and no one else will ever be as pretty as them and blah blah fucking blah. Ugh. Infuriating. By the end of the book I about wanted TdA to get razed to the ground by invaders - though I suppose then all the characters would just wax poetic about its lost beauty. You can't win against this arrogance.