carolinepmannMira’s Last Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc., 2017 and Subterranean Press, 2018
This story is what I had been wanting from this series all along. The story itself is simple and often farcical; the characters need to escape from where they are, and they do so via a skillful masquerade. But in the lean plot, dynamics which had only been mentioned previously in this series come to the fore. For the first time (reading publication order), Penric has to give up control to an aspect of Desdemona, and he must then deal with the consequences of having done so. An ascendant demon has been mentioned as a threat since the very first book, and, while that isn’t the dynamic here, it finally feels like a… not risk, exactly, but perhaps one gets the appeal, both for the demon and for the human.
In this book, one of Desdemona’s former riders, Mira, has a chance to come out specifically and in some depth as distinct from the whole, again fulfilling a promise made by the conceit of this series. If Penric is to be possessed by a demon who has the personalities of 10 women, I want to meet those 10 women as individuals as well as as the collective. Sometimes in other books, Desdemona herself can feel secondary to the plot or to interpersonal dynamics, but here she is crucial not only for her magic, but also for one of her personalities, and the people around Penric and Desdemona respond directly to that personality. Desdemona is more of a character and less of an internal sidekick this time around. Mira in particular is either entrancing or rather off-putting depending on who is watching her, and Penric faces the real consequences of being a collective of 10 people in addition to himself and what that means for his own interpersonal relationships, for, again, almost the first time. Having a demon is not easy in this book, for all that it is sometimes quite a lot of fun.
Penric’s skill in and distaste for healing comes up yet again. Here Bujold has to thread a tricky needle by giving Penric a backstory which occurred between volumes and which we did not see, but which is crucial to his current character. The result could feel like a random traumatic backstory was inserted midstream, or, alternatively, we could feel like we missed out on seeing such a formative episode. That’s the risk with a novella series that hops around as much as this one. To compare it to Vorkosigan, one might feel that one was reading Miles’ second act without having read Memory. I think she has pulled it off, though. Penric carries the burden of healing in a way that feels real and world weary, and it is paired all of the time by his fundamental decency.
This book cannot stand alone, but it felt to me like the culmination of so many of the intriguing elements that have been dangled in front of us since the first book. In this book, Penric and Desdemona have fully arrived.