The Monster Baru Cormorant – Seth Dickinson

Brilliant writing, somewhat depressing reading. This review has spoilers for “The Traitor Baru Cormorant”, the first book in the trilogy.

Falcrest is the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the lands surrounding the Ashen Sea, and it is expanding. It is a land governed by bureaucrats, it has no apparent moral center, and it is chillingly good at programming people - or societies. At the start of TTBC, Falcrest takes over Baru’s homeland /island- Taranoke. ‘Conquered’ would be the wrong word. It’s more that Falcrest undermined and replaced Taranoke’s economy, and one day people woke up and noticed that someone else was in charge.

Falcrest is oddly meritocratic. Bright children are welcome to attend its schools, adopt its culture, and become part of its elite. Baru is very bright. In TTBC she is sent to Aurdwynn - another not-exactly-conquered land that is in perpetual revolt. She foments a rebellion good enough to draw in every potential rebel - and betrays it thoroughly. This includes executing a rebel leader she loves. Her reward is to be made one of the hidden rulers of Falcrest. Her goal is to use her new power to destroy Falcrest, and free the lands it has seized.

In TMBC, the story changes scale in several ways. The immediate stage is small: Baru spends the entire book on a single, uncompleted, sea voyage, with stops at three islands. (The islands take a lot of damage. Baru is the focus of a very-high-stakes political struggle.)

The grand stage has grown larger. In the south are the Mbo, a federation of four lands that are surprisingly immune to Falcrest’s schemes. (There actual military power is hard to characterize. They are much larger than Falcrest, but they don’t play hardball - and last time there was fighting, a quarter century earlier, they did badly.) Baru’s voyage is at intersection of several plots against the Mbo. And the stakes are ridiculously high, because the worst-case scenario in a war between Falcrest and the Mbo - a scenario that looks increasingly likely as the book progresses - is one of economic collapse, pandemic, famine, and universal collapse.

In TTBC, Baru is a savant, a genius who is able to out-think and out-plot those around her. In TMBC, Baru is trying to out-plot her peers. They are as smart as she is, and they are more experienced. Too, she made a lot of enemies while being the traitor, Baru Cormorant, and they are gunning for her.

TMBC is very much a middle-book-of-a-trilogy. It gives us the pieces that will make sense of the third book. It brings together the people whose interactions will determine the outcome for their entire world. It gives Baru the time and opportunity to escape the ethical vacuum in which her betrayals have trapped her.

I started by saying that the writing was brilliant. Except for interludes of death and destruction along the way (about a day per island), there isn’t much action - but the pages keep turning.

There is a lot of ugliness. Some of the characters do horrible things, and they are embedded in a society that is expert at doing horrible things. That makes the book less fun to read. I’m not saying the author had a choice, given that the trilogy follows a protagonist who is trying to bring down down a horrible society. But it does make the second book of the trilogy more depressing to read than I would have preferred.