God is not great, but Mad Dukes definitely are

Am I a bad person for loving these LJ communities? Probably, but when did that ever stop me before?

So, remember a while back I was talking about Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint? Well, you should definitely run out and get a copy of it. Because, if you don’t, you won’t enjoy the sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, half as much, and, while half as much of “a lot” is still “a lot”, trust me, it’s worth it.

Privilege of the Sword has all the aspects I loved about Swordspoint without the ones I didn’t and more besides. Intriguing teenage, female protagonist who challenges social convention without being a complete psycho? Check. Not-boring romantic relationships that don’t kill the plot dead yet are still realistic? Check. Characters whose actions are morally ambiguous instead of black-and-white, right-or-wrong? Check, check, check.

The basic plot is as follows: Alec, now older and known as the Mad Duke, drafts his niece, Katherine, to become the first female swordsman…. person… thing. At first, Katherine wants to be a regular debutante and have a lovely season in Society instead, but she eventually comes to accept her new role. The end. Naturally, there’s much more to it than that, which is what makes the book so good.

One caveat to the more prudish reader: there’s a lot of sex and mention of sex-related stuff in this book. Personally, I think that’s one of its strong points, as sexual freedom is a huge strand of the thematic web Privilege of the Sword weaves, and Kushner manages to be evocative and plausible without being vulgar, silly*, or unnecessarily explicit (she’s writing sex, not pornography). However, when I was but a little tiny boy, with hey ho the wind and the rain, reading sex scenes made me very uncomfortable and often spoiled a perfectly good book. So…

Actually, The Privilege of the Sword puts me in mind of the Alanna series by Tamora Pierce, in which another spunky female character challenges gender roles and adopts a male warrior role. While Pierce follows the story from Alanna’s personal point of view the whole way through, Kushner insinuates plot threads from other characters’ perspectives; the reader gets to see inside the head of Katherine’s sort-of-friend, Artemisia, and also watches Alec interact with his household from a distanced, omniscient angle that doesn’t let us in on his thoughts. So, in the end, Song of the Lioness ends up being more about Alanna’s specific journey, and The Privilege of the Sword winds up tackling overall themes about individualism and sexuality and gender-ism. Both approaches have their virtues: Alanna is an easier character to get to know and has more exciting adventures, but Katherine’s world is more complex and profound.

It might also be useful to note that, at the end of this book, I wound up liking Alec and Richard a lot more than I ever did when they were reckless twenty-somethings in Swordspoint. (I was going to put “Especially Alec”, except then another part of my brain went, “But especially Richard”.) All I got from Alec in Swordspoint was that he was intelligent and humanitarian, but one messed-up SOB. Privilege!Alec is still one messed-up SOB, but, by the end of the book, he’s demonstrated that his heart’s in the “right” place. And seeing Richard through Katherine’s eyes kind of made me think, “Oh. Even though he was a wee bit psycho before, now he’d kind of make a good father.” So, if you found the pair only mildly intriguing or even hateful in Swordspoint, don’t let that stop you from reading its sequel.

It’s time now to Artfully Segue into the first half of this entry’s title, which, coincidentally, refers to someone else who grew on me like Alec and Richard, although this person happens to be real. The first I read of Christopher Hitchens was an interview in the Ottawa Citizen where the reporter seemed to be doing his or her darnedest to make Hitchens out to be an irascible good-old-boy who smoked in no-smoking restaurants and said all sorts of shockingly politically incorrect things in order to draw attention to himself. As you can imagine, this flattering portrait failed to win me over. However, when I finally got Hitchens’s God Is Not Great from the library, I found myself unable to put it down.

As I mentioned before, Hitchens’s book is not about God per se; instead, he’s interested in giving the various reasons why he believes organized religion should have no place in an ethical society. Unlike Dawkins, Hitchens appears to have an understanding of the social and cultural history of religious practice; he makes his points more plausible by drawing upon his personal experience as a journalist that brought him into contact with people of many regions and many faiths in a variety of circumstances. He skirts the Western-centric attitude that usually characterizes debates about religion in North America and Europe and points out that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism don’t have the monopoly on harmful religious practices. He’s also brave enough to argue (NB: not rant) cogently against the popular saint-like perception of famous figures like Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hitchens urges his reader to recognize goodness not as something that springs unadulterated from the desire of the faithful to follow the True Path but as human virtue often mixed with vice but no less laudable for all that.

Sometimes, his modesty rings a little false: “Don’t worry, I’m not arrogant because I can point out that I’m arrogant!” At other times, he strikes you as impractical: even granting his conclusion that religion is an overwhelmingly harmful practice, exactly how are we supposed to phase it out? Alcohol is overwhelmingly harmful, too, but it’s so engrained in our social rituals that the last attempt to ban it failed miserably. (In fact, you could argue that it just further romanticized drinking and made it more popular. After all, everyone knows the easiest way to get people to like something: tell them they can’t have it.) And, as entertaining as his personal stories are, as I’ve read on LJ recently**, “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘evidence’”.

So, while God is Not Great is a convincing and entertaining book, its ultimate audience seems to be people who already share (perhaps mildly or doubtfully) Hitchens’s views. On the other hand, it’s ridiculous to expect a single book to cover all possibilities and provide the kind of exhaustive argumentation you can only find by reading a variety of authors on both sides of the debate. Hitchens’s work is a good place to start: engaging, fresh, and well-argued.

*Okay, one of the sex scenes is pretty silly. I mean, I’ll buy that a character is surprised to find herself aroused by the sight of two women kissing and might stand in the doorway watching without making her presence known, despite the possibility of being caught. But, um, then proceeding to masturbate while still standing in the doorway despite the possibility of being caught? Now *that* sounds like a recipe for “awkward first meeting” if I ever heard one…

** Sorry, I was browsing random follow-the-links journals and can’t for the life of me remember where I spotted this. If it belongs to you or someone you recognize, let me know and I’ll credit or delete.