Lord of Emperors

This is an adequate sequel and conclusion to the series, GGK's prose and world-building continue to improve on what I thought was a perfect rendering of a fantastical Byzantium. I'm not even sure if I want to classify this as a sequel, it felt more like an expansion; with new characters, more depth, and a greater emphasis on city life. Unfortunately, issues that I wrote off in the first entry have returned and are even more obvious, my two main issues being the romance/portrayal of women and the ending. I will admit that I finished the last third of this book while fighting a nasty cold, but I really felt this story come apart as I approached the closing chapters.

This book picks up right after the first and details the remainder of Crispin's stay in Sarantium, the affairs of a newly introduced Bassanid (Persian) physician, and Emporer Valerius II's plan to reconquer Rhodia. The bulk of this novel is devoted to the characters and their development; Crispin in particular. I did not love the balance of plot to development in this one, it felt like none of the characters had any influence on what was going on, and their development was likewise forced and poorly articulated, which is a surprise given how amazing and lyrical the prose was.

The main problem that I kept running into was with the female characters. First of all every single female character in this book is otherworldy gorgeous, mensa-level intelligent, and witty, and fashionable, on-and-on. There are no normal women period, and GGK writes every interaction and description of these pseudo-goddesses as if he'd never spoken to or met a woman in his life. The descriptions of sex and the intermingling of sex and politics are written from such a bizarre and detached perspective. The emotions involved totally absent from the dialogue, the female characters acting more like tools than women. It's a serious issue given how prominently the female characters feature in the plot and in the development of the principal male cast. A big part of this novel is Crispin's relationship with the four most powerful women in the story, and which of them he ultimately beds/couples with. Given the way they are written, it's hard to get a sense of the characters' feelings for each other, so the fact that any one of them was interested in Crispin came off as contrived.

My knowledge of Byzantine history largely agrees with the details that GGK has included in this series, with my only real question remaining being whether Rhodias is supposed to be Greece or Italy. Where Sailing to Sarantium largely stuck to the record, this book deviates significantly. I get that this is historical fiction and that GGK was trying to tell a historically flavored story not a retelling of Justinian and Theodora, but this book breaks many of the conventions established in the first entry. It makes me question the need for such attention to the historical record when the plot never intended to respect it in the first place. I would normally be fine with deviations, but where this story deviates it turns into a very generic fairy tale with themes pulled straight from the catalog of the Brothers Grimm. It offended me to see such lyrical prose, incredible world-building, and historical detail wasted on a nonsense plot.

This brings us back to the issue with the women in this novel. It compounds with everything else to make the entire novel worse off. What I loved in the first book, the fantastical realism and attention to detail, are still there but robbed of their authenticity and diminished by the presence of what I am coining as Machiavelli-fuckdolls™. I can see some readers saying that this portrayal is by design and that women in this period of history were to some degree as this book portrays them. I'm not buying that. I could understand a lack of agency being excused by the historical record, but these women don't lack agency at all, instead, they're politically focused robots even at their most intimate moments. Real women aren't like that, and I don't care if they're part of some ruling caste and trained from birth to be pragmatic and unfeeling, it just doesn't jive. As I've noted above this entry doesn't even care to stick to the historical record all that closely, so the women are as they are by the deliberate choice of the author. It sucks.

This book gets full credit from me for the quality of the writing, and the city of Saratium is spell-binding, to say the least. The Chariot race in particular is probably my favorite moment of the entire series. All that said this is a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig because the core story mechanics just weren't there.

TL;DR: Come for the city and the chariots, Stay for the Machiavelli-fuckdolls™.