Alianne of Pirate's Swoop

I’ve been poking away at Tamora Pierce’s Trickster dulogy again. Newsflash! They still drive me absolutely crazy. The character assassination of Sarai in Trickster’s Queen, the cop-out with the death of Dunevon the boy king, the whole “what these people need is a honky” thing, Alianne of bloody Pirate’s Swoop -

There are a lot of things I could complain about with Aly. She never makes any serious mistakes, which drains the tension and danger from the book. Whenever she does make a slight mistake Kyprioth saves her (charming though Kyprioth is, he’s basically a textbook case of How Not To Write Gods in Your Fantasy Novel), which further leaches the tension. She appears to be unable to speak without quipping.

But all these pale beside the main problem with Alianne of Pirate’s Swoop, which is that she appears to be incapable of emotion. She reacts to everything with detached, bright-eyed interest; she’s not cruel, but not particularly interested in other people as people rather than pawns in a chess game, either.

This would actually yield a really interesting heroine if deftly handled and intentionally done. But it isn’t deftly handled here: there’s something off-putting about Aly’s detachment, but the other characters never seem unnerved by it - they barely seem to notice it - they’re too busy admiring Aly’s omnicompetence.

Moreover, Aly’s inability to feel fear sucks up every bit of tension left over by her inability to make mistakes and protection by a god. It’s impossible to get excited when Aly reacts so cooly to every terrifying thing that happens to her: getting a knife held to her throat; being interrogated by the Rittevon’s spymaster, being kidnapped and sold into slavery -

- seriously, her reaction to being kidnapped and sold into slavery is inhumanly calm. Aly’s only (mild) concern is that she might get raped. She can’t think of anything else horrible that might happen to her? Whippings! Beatings! Working in sugar cane fields! Having to eat gruel every day for the rest of her life! Accidentally breaking something valuable and being sold to the salt mines!

And leaving aside these violently traumatic possibilities: what about the trauma inherent in being sold into slavery? She’s gone from high nobility to the mud beneath the bottom rung on the social ladder; she’s cut off from everyone and everything she’s ever loved, and she may never return to it.

Which doesn’t seem to bother her. Anymore than her workload, which is surely heavier than anything she had at home, bothers her; anymore than she is bothered that the food she has to eat, the clothes she’s forced to wear, the bed she sleeps in are all entirely different (and doubtless much lower quality) than she would have experienced as Alianne of Pirate’s Swoop, scion of the high nobility of a powerful nation.

Aly reacts to the catastrophic social dislocation and disempowerment of being sold as a slave like she’s on a study abroad trip. Ooooh, look at these interesting people and their interesting customs! I’ll tell Dad all about it when I get home! Alone and powerless in a foreign land she may be, but she’s never uncertain or caught off guard.

And there’s something inhuman in all that calm. These books would be a thousand times better for some uncertainty and culture shock.