The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

Full disclosure: When The Traitor Baru Cormorant (or ‘The Traitor’ in the UK) came out, I raved about it to anyone who would listen. I still do. It was, easily, one of the best books of its release year. So I met the sequel with a great deal of anticipation, and, through no fault of its own, the story had some rather high expectation set for it.

Does it meet them?

 I think so. The Monster Baru Cormorant (just 'The Monster' in the UK!) is a complex, thoughtful book. It examines identity and empire, the way people are shaped by the forces around them and what they can do about it. It looks at revolutions, their costs and consequences. It explores internal ethics, and the politics of judicial murder. It talks about trust, and about vulnerability. It’s a story of love and loss (often at the same time). And it doesn’t flinch away from making that loss bloody, figuratively or literally. It’s dense with personal examinations, with politics, and with the occasional poisoning.

It’s also a book about consequences.

Baru has, if not everything she wants, then certainly everything she worked for. She’s part of the elite of the great Falcrest imperial project, a guiding hand that can shift politics from afar, with gunboats or currency. Perfectly positioned to redirect or, perhaps, scupper that project. Baru is a titan. She is, however, also bereft. The story shows us how she copes with loss, and the answer is…not always well.  However, as a character study, it’s incisive, insightful and unforgiving. Baru drinks too much. She makes impulsive, perhaps unwise judgements. She somehow manages to step out of herself and be something more, and crawl back into her own personal hell of internal judgment and second-guessing simultaneously. The portrayal of grief and loss, the process of, if not acceptance, accustoming oneself to a missing part, is played pitch-perfect.

This examination of love and grief is, I think, the emotional heart of the book, and it has the brutal, razor-edged honesty which compelled so much in the first book, but it’s backed by something new; we’re given different points of view here, from others around Baru. There are old friends, but also peers, and those who see her as a threat, or an enemy. Getting those distinct perspectives from time to time, seeing the world from another set of eyes, lets us see the harm living inside the protagonist, as well as how successful she is in masking it. These other viewpoints also invite consideration of what seem like good decisions through other eyes, and the picture they paint is equally intelligent, equally nuanced, and often not as accepting of Baru’s motives as she is. There’s a lot of introspection going on here; characters are questioning themselves and their motives as well as each other, which is always fascinating. Taking a deep dive into potential antagonists, and seeing them as the heroes of their own stories, of their own resistance, is wonderful – and makes the impacts they have on Baru (and vice-versa_ all the more terrible for our empathy.

It’s not all scheming and self-recrimination, mind you. It’s also the story of how Baru is off on a journey to look into some oddities and weirdness for her not-quite-superior in the cabal that runs the Falcresti empire. But there are people who look on her rather askance, and have their own schemes in play – and several of them are going with her. But they do see marvels and horrors along the way. We get to see the Mbo, sometime foils to the Falcresti, whose social system, based on mutual support and understanding may mask a certain amount of class division, but seems baffling to the remote, incisive cipher Baru wants to become. The Mbo are about people, about connection, about understanding and consensus – where Baru is a lone intellectual blade on the board, they’re a net. Whether they’ll snare her is another matter. But it’s marvellous to see a cultural antidote to Falcrest, even if it inevitably has its own demons.

The character work isn’t just limited to Baru (and her enemies!) either. Aminata surfaces again, wondering if Baru is herself, or who she’s working for. Questioning her old friend’s motives, and wondering whether she needs to do her duty or put her trust in the Cormorant. But Aminata isn’t just a foil for Baru – she’s made her own choices in the meantime, has made her own reputation, her own legend, carries her own demons. Reading her parts hurts, because of what it shows us about people trapped inside a system they despise, and about the compromises they make within it, which can eventually break them.

This is (less directly) explored throughout the text; the question of when you’ve become so compromised by the system that you become the system is an undercurrent in a great deal of the dialogue. Each of the actors is making their own decisions about how far they’re willing to go, and who else they’re willing to sacrifice – and for what. It’s a slow simmer under the multitextual layers of prose, but it’s there.

I do want to talk about the prose for a moment. Dickinson brings the A-game here. I caught symbology, intellectual asides, callbacks. And that was on a first reading. It feels like there’s a lot here to unearth, a lot of meanings sliding in the subtext in the dialogue, a lot of understandings that need further parsing before I can really say I get the book. That it reads as cleanly and clearly as it does is a triumph. There’s a heck of a lot going on, even from an initial read; I ‘m looking forward to digging into the text again to see what other gems I can sift out of the text.

Coming back to my initial question – does this meet my expectations of a sequel to the superlative The Traitor? Yes, I think it does. It’s a different book though, structurally and narratively, as much as Baru is a different person. Much of the first two thirds feels like a slow simmer, as the pot gets warmer by inches, as Baru struggles to find her agency in a situation where the more power she hands out, the less she actually has. It’s interesting, mark you – seeing the world through other eyes, seeing Baru fall into a well of grief but try to function like a person. Seeing her pay price after price, and justify it to herself when others pay it – it’s painful, emotionally honest, and it kept me turning pages. And the back third is an absolute joy of dangers braced, horrors met, and Baru  trying to understand herself and the world a little more.

This isn’t always a positive story. There’s blood and death and moral qualms and philosophy and more than a little atrocity. But it always had interesting things to say and interesting ways of getting there. I think it’s built a solid foundation under its feet for whatever comes next; or, if you prefer, built a damn good fire which I suspect is going to set the world ablaze.

If you’re coming to this fresh: Stop. Go and read The Traitor Baru Cormorant. You need the context that gives you, to feel the passion and pressure and despair and hope sliding around here under the words. If you’re coming in after reading the first book in the series: yes. It is good. Let it pick you up and carry you along in the story it has to tell. Even now I’m not sure if it’s the story you might expect, where Baru does amazing smart things to save the world. But it’s certainly one where a hurt and lonely woman drives herself to succeed against the odds, while asking herself what it is she actually wants.

It’s a complicated, complex book, but then, Baru’s a complicated person, and the world she lives in is, er, complex. There aren’t any easy answers, except perhaps to the question of 'Should I read this?'

Yes, yes you should. You should read this.