osprey_archer | Book Review: The Thief

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Book Review: The Thief

Last week when I was organizing my tags I realized that I didn't have a tag for Megan Whalen Turner, and moreover apparently never reviewed any of her books on this blog?? Which lit a fire under my long-smoldering plan to reread the first five Queen's Thief books before at last tackling Return of the Thief, which has been on my TBR shelf for *mumblecough* a while.

Today at long last, I have begun this journey with The Thief! I first read this book in the late nineties, when I was eleven or twelve, and I must have reread it more a few times back then because I found I remembered it far better than one single read would account for. But it's been years since my last reread, so while I was rereading it as an adult I also felt a clear echo of my childhood reactions.

The first time I read it, I was absolutely gobsmacked by the revelation at the end that Gen was, in fact, the Queen of Eddis's cousin Eugenides. As far as my younger self was concerned, this came completely out of the blue, but rereading it now I can see all the hints seeded throughout, right down to the fact that Gen gets flustered when he and the Magus discuss the Queen's cousin Eugenides! I'm curious if people who read the book for the first time as adults are more apt to guess Gen's true identity? Let me know if you did.

Also, this book offers some truly high-quality whump, to which I couldn't put a name as a child, not that this stopped it from fascinating me so deeply that it stuck in my mind for years. The part where Gen gets dragged into the sunlight after months in the dark prison and he has to drag his arms free to shield his eyes! The way Pol just cuts off the infected scab on his wrist! The scene where Ambiades ties Gen's hands too tightly and the blood pools in his fingers!!! Just everything.

I passionately adored fantasy as a child (actually, I still passionately adore children's fantasy; I just don't seem to have fallen in love with adult fantasy in the same way), and I loved and still love the unusual setting of this series, with its echoes of ancient Greece although the technology is far more Renaissance. The Queen of Attolia's Guard carry guns, although the guns' accuracy is so poor they tend to use swords for actual fighting; pocket watches have just recently invented. We learn so much the climate and geography and history and economics of Sounis and Eddis and Attolia just from the snatches Gen overhears of the Magus's lectures to his apprentices Ambiades and Sophos. The world feels much bigger than their little band, and so lived in.

(Aside: it's so interesting to reread the Sophos bits now. The first time through I was so intent on Gen and his adventures that I barely paid attention to Sophos, dismissing him (as Gen does) as "Useless the Younger," an inexperienced and shy young man who is always blushing... so I was rather startled when he became the protagonist of his own book, A Conspiracy of Kings.

I didn't particularly like A Conspiracy of King's, and, unlike The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, I don't think I ever reread it. It will be interesting to see how I feel about it this time around.)

I also love the way that the magic manifests in this world, that so much of it is in the realms of myths and legends, and when it intrudes on the everyday world part of the way that you know it is magic is that everyone believes, not without question, but without being able to believe their own questioning. ("Do you have any doubts?" Gen asks Sophos, when Sophos questions whether this plain gray river rock is truly Hamiathes's Gift, with the power to anoint the ruler of Eddis. "No," Sophos admitted. "I just don't understand why I am so sure.")

And I love, love, love the scenes where Gen explores the temple, which is usually underwater but exposed to the air for just these few nights of the year. The tension of knowing the water will come back, the deep quiet of the temple, the simplicity of it that is in its own way very frightening. The only trap is a door which has a keyhole on the outside but not within, so if you go in that corridor and the door closes behind you, you can't get out...

And the added uncanniness that there are no bones in the trap: surely some thieves have been caught there, but all the bones in the temple are together in one pool - as if someone moved them there. (Indeed, there are number of things that move in this temple, perhaps by the rushing water... but perhaps by unseen hands.) Gen searches the pool, just in case Hamiathes's Gift is there. It isn't, but among the bones he finds a signet ring, and steals it for himself; and in the light of the next morning finds it is marked with a dolphin.

I knew from reading in an interview (I don't remember where, sadly) that this is an intentional reference to Rosemary Sutcliff's Dolphin Ring books, so I was waiting for the scene, but it still made me clap like a seal when it happened. I hadn't read any Sutcliff when I first read The Thief; one of the pleasures of rereading things as an older and wiser person is to be able to catch these references.

Sutcliff died a few years before Turner published The Thief, and this finding of the ring feels in some ways like Turner is picking up Sutcliff's fallen mantel. Of course, they ARE very different writers, particularly in terms of prose style - I read one Sutcliff book as a child, Song for a Dark Queen, and I REALLY struggled with the prose... although the subject matter didn't help, mind. Turner's style I found far more accessible.

But they do share a central preoccupation with loyalty/fealty. The most important bonds the characters share are usually bonds of loyalty rather than romance, or sometimes loyalty alongside romance, but really, if you wouldn't get down on your knees and swear to die for this person, is it even worth calling it love?

On the topic of romance, I was curious if I would see signs of the crush that Gen (in the next book) is going to claim that he's had on Attolia for years. Maybe it was there all along, like the breadcrumbs pointing to Gen's true identity that I totally missed as a child? But alas, in the case of Gen's crush, I still don't see it. Possibly Turner wasn't planning a sequel yet (although the way she sets up the wider political situation SO sounds like she was) or hadn't yet decided that the sequel would involve a romance between Gen and Attolia...

However, those are musings I should save for my review of The Queen of Attolia! Onward in the readalong!

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but really, if you wouldn't get down on your knees and swear to die for this person, is it even worth calling it love? --FOR REAL

This is one of those books (another is The Moorchild) that I read when my kids were the target audience age--I think this was given to one of the kids. I really enjoyed it--I didn't love it in the intense way I loved The Moorchild--but I still really liked it. I recall thinking was really a well-told story that took some twists and turns that were surprising and good. And I liked the setting a lot, and the way gods were referenced (... IIRC???)

I knew from reading in an interview (I don't remember where, sadly) that this is an intentional reference to Rosemary Sutcliff's Dolphin Ring books, so I was waiting for the scene, but it still made me clap like a seal when it happened.

I read the book for the first time when it came out and recognized the ring at once and Sutcliff was an important writer to me, especially The Eagle of the Ninth and its first couple of sequels, and I wasn't even sure what the intertextuality signified in this context, but it made me so happy.

Possibly Turner wasn't planning a sequel yet (although the way she sets up the wider political situation SO sounds like she was) or hadn't yet decided that the sequel would involve a romance between Gen and Attolia...

I would have to source it, but I remember Turner saying in interviews that she pruned a lot of wider-world, non-essential character material out of the final draft of The Thief because she thought it was going to be a standalone and then haha, whoops. I believe the emotional scaffolding of that relationship may have been one of the casualties.

Which lit a fire under my long-smoldering plan to reread the first five Queen's Thief books before at last tackling Return of the Thief, which has been on my TBR shelf for *mumblecough* a while.

YAY!

I read the series for the first time last year, but I already feel like I should re-read it, or at least The Thief— especially, as you said, because of a new understanding of the Sophos bits post-Conspiracy of Kings but also because, somehow, I got my wires crossed and thought Gen was supposed to be in his mid-to-late 20s rather than late 'teens (?) in The Thief.

Wandering through from network:

I'm curious if people who read the book for the first time as adults are more apt to guess Gen's true identity? Let me know if you did.

I picked up that Gen was hiding something, but because of my past reading and a trope I particularly liked, I guessed that Gen was hiding his gender and was actually a girl. And I assumed that was the case so much that when the actual reveal came, it was disconcerting. (I adored girl-masquerading-as-boy stories as a kid and teen.)

TBH I thought he was, perhaps, mid-teens, but also I read it when I was eleven, at which age mid-teens feels Very Grown Up, so really who knows how old he is. Probably not older than early twenties in Queen of Attolia, given that everyone keeps commenting how young he is.

Rereading The Queen of Attolia after Thick as Thieves is also giving me a VERY different view of Nahuseresh and Kamet.

I mean really isn't it just intense liking if you wouldn't swear to march with this person into the mouth of Hell? What is the POINT of love if it does not involve loyalty unto death.

And yes, there's lots of stuff about the gods! On the road the characters sometimes pass the time by telling each other myths about the old gods (ancient Greek flavored, but also their own separate thing), and occasionally arguing about what's the right version, and later on Gen starts having dreams about the gods, and then meets them in the temple...

I love the way that Turner writes about the gods - the way they are so human and yet also very much not - and I meant to write about it in this post, but I see I got so distracted by everything else that I did not. Perhaps in a future review.

That idea did not occur to me! (Was child!me even aware that Gen was hiding something? I think that I took him totally at face value and was not.) But I can see how it would be disconcerting to have a totally different twist show up in its stead.

I honestly can't remember if I spotted Gen's identity or not in the first book. I inhaled these books all at once some years ago but haven't ever been back to them - your reread is making me think I might like to revisit them.

really, if you wouldn't get down on your knees and swear to die for this person, is it even worth calling it love?
Truer words were never spoken! (You can tell I grew up on Sutcliff, can't you...)

The dolphin ring link is particularly striking to me because I've always seen Turner as somewhat unique among modern writers - I don't think anyone else right now is writing stories quite like what she's writing. But the ring ties her specifically to Rosemary Sutcliff and more generally to an older tradition of historical fiction with these heavily fealty-based relationships - I'd say D. K. Broster writes in the same mold, and some of Mary Renault's ancient Greek novels are similar.

(Turner's innovation is the make two of the main fealty-inspiring figures into queens. In fact, the first king on the scene, Sounis, seems notably unable to inspire this kind of allegiance.)

IIRC The Thief was Turner's first novel (she did publish a book of short stories earlier) so there couldn't have been any guarantee she'd get to write any sequels. There is a whole scene in The Thief where Gen meets Attolia, so there's an opportunity for some pining right there, but if it had ended up just being a standalone a Random Pining Scene would have felt really weird.

I am always in favor of anyone rereading the Queen's Thief books! They're such an experience, and I don't think anyone else today is writing anything quite like it - you really have to go back to earlier generations, Sutcliff and D. K. Broster and maybe some of Mary Renault's historical novels, to find a similar vibe.

Now that I've read Sutcliff, I can feel the Sutcliff ALL OVER The Thief. The centrality of loyalty is just So Much - and this is probably the book in the series where it's least important! Certainly the Magus doesn't seem to feel that sort of loyalty toward the King of Sounis... but you can feel it here in Sophos and Pol's relationship, and of course in Gen's relationship to Eddis once that is revealed.

Now I'm really going to have to reread it to see if I spot the connections! Because I don't remember thinking that the Thief books were All About Loyalty, and normally I'm all over stories that strike me that way. I haven't read the most recent book (books? I'm not actually sure which was the last one I read) in the series, so that might be a good prompt.

I remember I spent a great deal of time combing my school library for books that might have the same hit of Intense Loyalty Feels that Sutcliff did. There were some other historical novels that went in similar directions - I still have great fondness for the absurdly titled One Is One by Barbara Leonie Picard, which is all about a young squire and his knight, and To Spare the Conquered by Stephanie Plowman, which is about a young Roman officer during Boudicca's revolt in Britain and his various loyalties - but nothing ever could quite match the reliability of Sutcliff.

The dolphin ring link is particularly striking to me because I've always seen Turner as somewhat unique among modern writers - I don't think anyone else right now is writing stories quite like what she's writing.

She has always constellated strongly with Elizabeth E. Wein for me, especially Wein's cycle of Aksumite Arthuriana that I desperately want to see her finish one day. (She was in the middle of writing the novels that turned out to be the necessary scaffolding between the first book and its originally planned sequel and then the entire project went on hold for WWII and she's been in WWII ever since. The Winter Prince (1993) stands on its own, however, and is exceedingly worth reading if you have not. It's one of my favorite Arthurian novels and does a bunch of things I haven't seen any others do.)

I'd say D. K. Broster writes in the same mold, and some of Mary Renault's ancient Greek novels are similar.

When I discovered Broster last summer, I was surprised that I hadn't read her as a child, considering how much I grew up on Sutcliff and Renault. The link between Broster and Sutcliff can be confirmed. I don't know about a link between Broster and Renault, but I would be shocked, shocked if there weren't some link between Renault and Turner. Also in the mix is Diana Wynne Jones, whom Turner has acknowledged as an influence on her writing of gods. And Dunnett, but I have to take that one on faith, never having read any of the Lymond Chronicles myself.

(she did publish a book of short stories earlier)

Which as I recall gives absolutely no sign of the directions in which she was going to develop as a writer: I read it after The Thief and, okay, that happened? My memories suggest the stories were a little twee. I'm glad she got past it.

Edited (link to post, not comments; descendants of Broster discussed therein, however) 2022-01-25 23:09 (UTC)

I read all The Thief books just last year (in the midst of having a very hot summer, so the vaguely Ancient Greekness of them seemed very appropriate) and I loved them, and honestly The Thief was probably my least favourite of the bunch? I’d heard that there was A Big Twist and I clocked to Gen being Eugenides The Thief, and then spent the rest of the book thinking “surely that can’t be it?” but then that mostly was the twist. I also read The Thief right after reading another book series which used ‘not telling the reader everything’ to incredibly well, to devastating effect, and The Thief rather paled in comparison on that front, unfortunately for it! But then I adored all the rest of the series and read them very quickly (when it was truly too hot to do anything but hide in a basement with all the lights off and read).

I loved the Gods in The Thief so much, though. And the series definitely feels Sutcliffian to me, which is so much my jam, I read a steady diet of Sutcliff as a kid and it definitely shaped me. All that loyalty, to person and to country and to ideal! Queen hit so many of my buttons on so many levels - Oh, delightful!

I also didn’t think Gen/Irene was set up in The Thief, but then it really got to me by the time we got to King of Attolia. (Honestly if I’d just read Thief as a stand-alone I feel like I would have come out of it wanting Attolia/Eddis complicated politics and complicated romance.)

I've never read Elizabeth Wein's Arthurian books. Maybe I should sometime? But I know at least one of them has quite a lot of incest plot, which I realize is something that happens in Arthuriana sometimes, but it's nonetheless put me off.

However Code Name Verity is ALSO all about this kind of loyalty kink, and I can't believe that it slipped my mind. It's not a theme in ALL of Wein's books the way it is in Turner or Sutcliff, but when it does show up, she does it so well.

There's an interview (it's over on

sutcliff_space, although I don't remember exactly which one) where Sutcliff confirms reading Mary Renault. (She's all "How could she do that to Lysis?" and I felt a moment of deep emotional kinship.) That might be the interview where she talks about Broster, too? Or those might be separate interviews.

I've also thought that maybe I should read the Lymond Chronicles sometime. Half the things I hear about it make me think I would like it, and the other half make me think I would want to strangle Lymond, which makes it hard to decide.

The Thief is so different than the other books. It's a children's book and very much a children's adventure story (the political stuff is there but definitely backburnered) with this extra mythological twist, and then the rest of the books are All Politics All the Time, so much loyalty and intensity, etc. etc., just a really different feeling. I love The Thief for what it is, but it didn't stab me to the heart like some of the other books in the series.

I suspect the twist in The Thief works better for children, because as a child I never saw it coming. Maybe if someone had warned me there was a twist, I might have guessed? (I also suspect it was easier to go in utterly unspoiled in 1999 or whenever I read it, as I was basically not online at all.)

By the end of King of Attolia I was totally sold on Gen/Irene! Which genuinely stunned me, because I had SUCH mixed feelings about it in Queen of Attolia.

DELIGHTED to discover that my library has One Is One. Once I've finished my Queen's Thief reread I will have to get my hands on it and report back!

However, at the end of the day I don't think ANYONE is as reliable as Sutcliff about this. Other authors get distracted sometimes, but Sutcliff goes straight for the loyalty in almost every book.

Side note, have you read Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series? It has more wizards and less politicking (as far as I've read, anyway) than the Queen's Thief series, but appealed to me in a similar "charming thieves roped into geopolitical shenanigans" way.

I should probably mention that in the best Sutcliff tradition, you will need your hanky...

Here's the interview:

https://sutcliff-space.dreamwidth.org/20900.html

She also talks in that one about how she thinks blood brothers are often homoerotic. I've wondered about a Broster influence on Sutcliff too. I'm very interested to hear there's a documented connection (that I can't access, sob.)

The incest in The Winter Prince is mostly subtext and implication, if that helps, and I think it's absent from the sequels. IIRC it's only super explicit in an adult short story, "No Human Hands to Touch". (Also fun trivia: the series is another one with an reference to Sutcliff.)

Thank you for linking that! Yes, I LOVE the confirmation that she was totally aware of the homoerotic overtones in her work. God bless you Rosemary Sutcliff.

I have not.

That's good to know. Sometimes you just want to have your heart wrenched, and it's good to be able to save up a book like that for that time.

I've also thought that maybe I should read the Lymond Chronicles sometime. Half the things I hear about it make me think I would like it, and the other half make me think I would want to strangle Lymond, which makes it hard to decide.

Fwiw these were my exact reactions throughout reading the Lymond Chronicles. Massive enjoyment of the prose and wit and amazing set pieces and whump, while simultaneously wanting to slap Lymond out of his stew of manpain. Overall I'd say it was worth it though, for the half-gleeful sensation of recognizing Dunnett's influences in a ton of other works, if nothing else.

Yeah, I'll probably get to it someday. (Ditto Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey-Maturin books, two other mental entries on my long TBR.) Someday I'll just wake up and say "Today it's time for Lymond."

I can never tell anyone to read Lymond but I will LOVE to read what you have to say about it if you ever do ... but as

whimsyful said is really fascinating in an academic sense at the very least to trace the literary chain from Peter Wimsey --> Francis Crawford of Lymond --> Eugenides and Julie Beaufort-Stuart and all the other characters written by people who read DD at a formative age and then reflected the polymath protagonist through their own particular narrative mirrors. I do think you will want to strangle Lymond, though.

I was extremely aware that Eugenides was coyly keeping something back as a narrator and was probably the Thief when I read the book for the first-time-I-remember in college, but also I got so many moments of, like, narrative half-remembered resonance throughout the experience that I walked away convinced that I had probably actually read it for the first time a few years prior and had simply forgotten all about it. Unfortunately I only started keeping records of my reading after that date so the truth will never be known! (But I tend to keep an extra eye on first-person narrators in case they are cleverly dancing around some particular piece of truth -- I blame Mary Stewart's Ivy Tree for that one.)

The Temple scene is so good, the best part of the book, IMO. I love all the other books for a lot of other reasons but I'm not sure she ever again matches quite that level of eerie helplessness in the hands of the gods.

To be fair, it sounds as if I would not be getting the full Lymond Experience (tm) if I did NOT want to strangle him at least half the time.

The Lymond Chronicles have been on my lengthy mental TBR for some time and will probably remain there for a while... but they have moved slightly but perceptibly upward as a result of this discussion. I mean, if they're in Eugenides' DNA, worth giving a look...

Isn't it SO WEIRD when that happens? There have been a couple of books that I've read that have given me that exact same feeling of "I've read this before, I KNOW I've read this before... or have I?" and it's so maddening. There is no way to know for sure!!

The Temple scene is AMAZING. The whole Temple sequence, but especially the bit at the end where he meets the gods. I also love Eugenides' encounter with the gods at the end of The Queen of Attolia, where he demands answers and Moira's like "No" and Eugenides is like 'YES" and then the gods burst every window in the palace... but it is just one scene, it doesn't have the wonderful eerie build-up of the Temple sequence.

The only thing I've ever read that's like the Temple sequence is Piranesi, actually. I wonder if Susanna Clarke ever read The Thief.

Ohhhhh you're doing Queen's Thief reviews, I'm excited! It's been long enough since I first read The Thief that I'm not sure if I picked up that Gen was the Queen's Thief or not, but I did have the mistaken impression that he was a girl for the first part of the book (I think I had read some other book where the main character also started out in prison, and was a girl, and mixed them together in my head). I spend a lot of time hanging out in a discord server for the series though so I can tell you that there are definitely adults who do not pick up on the twists on their first readthroughs...we are all constantly bemoaning our lack of reading comprehension, haha.

Anyway I'm excited to read the rest of your reviews, and also to see what you think of Return of the Thief when you get to it!

Did you realize he wasn't when they stripped him off and washed him in the innyard? I feel like that would have exposed SEVERAL things if he was, in fact, a girl.

To be honest, I suspect that a lot of the twists in the political maneuvering go over my head even after however many readthroughs - not in The Thief, because the political maneuvering quotient is fairly low, but in the later books where there's a lot more of it. I read these books kind of like how I read murder mysteries, I think - I'm interested in the character dynamics, and if I ALSO pick up some of the clever plotting that's great, but if it goes over my head then such is life.

Haha, that was EXACTLY the moment I figured out he was not, in fact, a girl...it would be pretty tricky to conceal, at that point.

And yeah, I feel like that's one of the joys of rereading these - I have lost track of how many times I've reread them now, but I keep noticing new things! Plus like...every subsequent book in the series gives the books before it a new context, or at least some of the other books, so it feels like reading something new every time.

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Book Review: The Thief

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