1985 SF, fourth of its series. After Rudolf Rassendyll gets poisoned
on a train in Germany, our heroes have to provide a substitute double
for Rudolf V of Ruritania.
This book definitely feels like a re-run of previous highlights,
and book four is a little early in a twelve-book series for that: once
more Finn Delaney is a perfect double of a fictional historical figure
who's died untimely thanks to intervention from the future, with a
wife (in this case fiancée) who's unimpressed with the original but
falls for Finn. Once more the Temporal Corps has apparently read the
start of the novel they're working in but not the ending that would
give them useful details that they clearly don't know. Once more the
sole female villain uses her sexuality as primary means of
manipulation, and there's a strong suggestion that female promiscuity
and non-vanilla sexual tastes are reliable signs of being a Bad
Person.
But I read and enjoyed these books in a more or less random order as I
found them shortly after they came out, and I'm determined to reread
them in order.
I know it's a conceit of the series that selected works of fiction are
in some way real, but I do find it difficult to care about the Great
Historical Significance of Michael of Strelsau's coup attempt in
Ruritania, when Ruritania never shows up again in the historical
record. It would have helped my suspension of disbelief if someone had
said something like "of course it was incorporated into Yugoslavia
after WWII, but the Ruritanians were a key part of the revolution in
(futurewards-from-1985 date)" or something like that, chaos butterfly
blah. Without, naturally, going too far into the basic problem of
stories about preventing time-meddling, that if chaotic effects really
work then someone just being in the past potentially creates a huge
change. But this is something that's simply never touched on, and
which to be fair I didn't notice myself first time through…
Anyway. That's not what we're here for; we're here to play tourist in
The Prisoner of Zenda. And we do; there's a rather fine multi-sided
plot in which our heroes prevail in part because at least three of
them can more or less trust each other, while the other factions are
mostly individuals who will betray each other at the drop of a hat (or
a scented handkerchief). There's also a connection with the Temporal
Corps's leader, who after all had a military career before he got
promoted to that post, and…
…well, this is a good example of the "Swiss cheese" theory of
accidents. A whole lot of improbable things have had to line up to
cause this particular villain to exist and be in opposition to the
good guys, and if I sometimes found myself saying "oh, come on" I
have to grant that all those things are plausible within the context
of the story. There's even a gesture of sorts towards possible
redemption.
Not a particularly enjoyable book, though it has its moments.
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