Book Review: Barrayar

Lois McMaster Bujold
1991
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Barrayar was the seventh novel written in Lois McMaster Bujold’s long-running Vorkosigan Saga, but it is one of the very earliest in the saga’s internal chronological order. It lays the groundwork for most of the later books, introducing us to the Vor and explaining the birth and early childhood challenges of Miles Vorkosigan, the saga’s most frequent protagonist.

                                                                                                   

In Barrayar, the story centers around Cordelia Naismith, a brilliant and charming but independent-minded and steely-tough red-haired spaceship captain from the planet Beta. She is married to the brilliant and wise but steely-tough Count Aral Vorkosigan and the two of them are deeply in love with each other. They live on the planet Barrayar in the count’s traditional family home.

Count Vorkosigan is a high-ranking member of the Vor family, which is an elite military caste in the Barrayaran empire. The count becomes arguably the most powerful man on the planet when the elderly emperor dies and the count is appointed regent to Gregor, the emperor’s child successor.

Unfortunately, the empire not only has several enemy states but is also filled with layer upon layer of internal intrigue; Vorkosigan’s new position has earned him the jealousy of several of his Vor kinsmen.

In addition, Barrayar is a somewhat conservative world and the people are constantly being shocked by Cordelia’s Betan egalitarian and feminist sensibilities. She’s constantly being too familiar and unimpressed with important nobles for local custom (but getting away with it because of her aforementioned brilliance and charm).

Needless to say, all of this earns the count and countess many stalwart friends and supporters… as well as many powerful enemies. Eventually, one of their enemies is able to get by security and release a powerful neurotoxin in the Vorkosigan home. It hits Cordelia, who happens to be pregnant at the time.

Doctors are able to rid her of the toxin, but not before it permanently damages her fetus, which will have to be gestated in a uterine replicator for the rest of its term. Then one of the other Vor counts stages a coup, during which the replicator is kidnapped. Most of the rest of the plot of the book involves the battle against the usurper count and the recovery of the replicator.

I never really got caught up in this story. I wasn’t interested in the internecine conflict among the various Vors and the writing was too much like a romance novel for my comfort. There were too many flashing eyes and swirling skirts and unbendingly loyal manservants/armsmen and people being called "Milady." Cordelia was always being called “feisty” and was always drawing criticism from the backwards Barrayans with her modern Betan views and then of course always turning out to be right.

The best part of the book, really, is that it introduces the Vorkosigans’ son, Miles. When Miles is finally born from the replicator, he is very small and has brittle bones that are easily broken; he will never grow to full adult size and will have to live with bone recalcification treatments and physical limitations all of his life. Luckily for him, he is born with the brilliance and steely-toughness of both of his parents, enabling him to overcome his handicaps in spades; this makes for plenty of fodder for the later books in the saga.


An earlier version of this review appeared on Cheeze Blog.