/lit/ - Literature

Assassin's Price, Imager Portfolio #11 - L.E. Modesitt Jr. (2017)

Six more years have passed. For the first time in the series the protagonist isn't an imager. They're still important to the narrative, but this is almost entirely about the dysfunction of the government and how it's reformed. That'll probably be the theme of the final book as well. There are several plot threads that are introduced and developed, but seem they won't have any payoff until the next and final book.

At first I didn't like Charyn, but by the end I came to think that he may be the best protagonist in the series. The love interest in this may have been the best, it was at least the most interesting. That may be because in some ways he has to struggle the most within his limitations and there aren't any easy solutions and almost none that could be solved by brute force.

I felt similarly about the book as a whole by the end, which surprised me. It's definitely one of the best of the series for me and I don't know what to think about that. This one doesn't have any large scale conflict unlike several of the books. It really is just about the government collapsing upon itself and what can be done about that.

I'm surprised the government even functioned at all considering how much corruption, incompetence, malfeasance, and unreasonableness was involved. As noted by the title, there are many assassination attempts, to the point where few want to be involved with anyone who may be the leader because he may well soon be dead.

The four powers are the Rex, who has a rather weak and overall ineffective central government, the Factors' Council which demands the government do everything while wanting to pay nothing, the High Council representing the aristocracy which still resents not being 1,500+ independent fiefdoms, and the Collegium of Imagers which acts as a failsafe. The interactions between the four were quite interesting for me to read.

This is a critical juncture for every aspect of their society, which makes for a rather tumultuous time. Trade becomes every more important and there are a number of scenes involving the commodity exchange. As in the third book of the series, water rights make a return. There's even talk of standard coinage. As always, the seemingly intractable circumstances of taxation must be wrangled with, this time with the introduction of a progressive tax.

The series overall is just fun to read. This is the penultimate book, which after this eleventh book is both relieving and mildly disappointing. I would have liked one more subseries that takes place after the first trilogy, but it doesn't seem that's to be. I would have also preferred the series overall to be more like this book. I didn't enjoy the wars as much as I thought I might, though I did expect to have liked the rest more by comparison.

Rating: 4/5