And I have to say it was pretty remarkable on a number of levels. The books weren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination - the end of book one, in particularly, struck me as treading perilously close to
deus ex machina - but the neatness and perfection of the twists struck me as metaphorically appropriate given the theme and subject of the books.
The books' plot is actually fairly simple: an Engineer named Ziani Vaatzes is sentenced to death for attempting to improve upon specification. This is considered an Abomination in the city of Mezentia - specification is definitionally perfect and cannot be improved upon. This sentence and its justice are in no way controversial, though it proves problematic: Vaatzes loves his wife and child too much to accept the death sentence, so he escapes the city and begins teaching the city's enemies how to build siege weapons. It seems he will do anything - including smashing the city's walls and murdering every man, woman and child within it - if it lets him see his family again.
Only it's not that simple; It never is, because otherwise there wouldn't be a book worth reading.
I'm not going to go into too much detail, because I know some of the people who read this blog actually look to it for book recommendations. But I'll say a few general things about why I'm up past midnight writing about the series after just finishing the last book.
On a purely literary level, Parker understands how to build upon theme; Every character is in some way related to engineers or their tools. Some characters act upon the world and create their own designs according to exacting specifications, some are acted upon; the thing that unifies both the engineers and the tools is love, and love's a bitch. Because of this sharp division between characters, Parker manages to create textbook examples of literary foils.
The Engineer is contrasted with a nobleman named Miel Ducas; Vaatzes shapes the world around him, while Ducas is shaped by feudal obligation and social demands to such an extent that he seems to be devoid of free will. This is complicated by the Dukes of the two backwater provinces near Mezentia: Duke Valens of the Duchy of Vadani is a perfect ruler who shapes the land and the lives of his people for the better, while Duke Orsea of the Duchy of Eremia is a fop who married into the title and who, despite his attempts to do the right thing, always fails. Back in Mezentia a clerk named Lucao Psellus is charged with investigating Vaatzes' crime; a cog in the administrative wheel, Psellus is about as far from the Engineer he's investigating as one can get.
What amazed me about the books is how skillfully Parker managed to enact the theme of mechanization in the story and the characters; As the books progress, characters gradually shift between engineers and tools. Every aspect of the narrative - be it tedious accounts of feudal obligations, how to work a bellows at a forge, hunting etiquette - is employed to building on this theme, on demonstrating the ways the world is just a mechanism waiting to be manipulated. Everyone plays their part - because of love, because of fear, because that's the way the machine is supposed to work - and the book's events seem necessary, even when they're contrived.
Scratch that -
especially when they're contrived.
But what I found most compelling was that this is a novel that boasts a main character who is explicitly planning out genocide. For Vaatzes to return to the city, he has to build a machine that will get him where he needs to be: a machine of innumerable and imprecise human parts. The only thing that can keep such a machine's wheels greased is blood on a massive, unimaginable scale. It's hard to imagine that someone who is planning genocide could be a compelling and sympathetic character; But Vaatzes is a compelling and sympathetic character because in some ways he's a sociopath.
Most people who design weapons and directly cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people feel bad. Vaatzes insists he can't be responsible for the deaths because his actions are justified. He wants to see his wife and child again; ergo, he has to build a machine that will let him do that. The machine's specification calls for death on a massive scale - to do otherwise would be to commit an Abomination.
There's a lot more going on in the novels than the above. But I'd think the above is a pretty compelling reason to consider reading the books. I don't think most people would like the books - you can sum them up by saying horrible things happen to horrible people, and no one's happy by the end - but I'm not like most people, and that was an absolute joy for me to see play out.
