Gentleman Jole & the Red Queen: After the Happily Ever After

Bujold’s latest, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is a treat. It’s the first from Cordelia’s point of view since Barrayar, and it’s a double treat, because it’s also such a quietly powerful book. The genre Bujold is working in this time is women’s fiction, an unjustly maligned category if there ever was one. It’s about Cordelia reevaluating her life as she accepts the fact that she’s far closer to the end of her life than the beginning.
Warning: Major spoilers for the entire Vorkosigan series lurk below! (But only minor spoilers for the new book.)
On the surface, it is about Cordelia’s recovery from grief after losing her beloved Aral. It’s also about her late-life romance with Admiral Oliver Jole, who, as it turns out, was one-third of the Jole-Vorkosigan-Naismith marriage. Since Aral’s death, the other two have drifted apart as, essentially, they were married to Aral and not each other. It’s a measure of the quality of Bujold’s writing that by the third chapter, I was hoping for a happy ending for this pair, even though I adored Aral and Cordelia above any other of Bujold’s pairings. (They are among my favorite fictional pairings ever.)
While this is a romantic book, it’s also a book about coping with change, dealing with grief, and discovering that your twilight years can be filled with as much discovery as the heady days of youth. That’s the women’s fiction part, though I hate that term; “women’s fiction” is about the main character’s universal journey of discovery, which is what most regular fiction is about, but because the main character is a woman, it’s somehow… less than, much as romance is looked down upon even among its genre cousins: mystery, science fiction, fantasy.

When I finished this book, I wanted to hug it, hard. Not just for the fun of getting plopped down in Cordelia’s head once again to experience her unique point of view—she thinks raising six daughters will be a fun retirement project!—but also because I’m getting to that “certain age” where one reevaluates life choices. Cordelia and Oliver’s struggles to envision their future resonated with me. At one point, Oliver asks Cordelia if she knew “back then,” when she ran away from home to join Aral on Barrayarto Aral on Barrayar, if would she make the same choice again.
She says no, not then, because if she knew then what would happen, she’d have been too afraid. But now, from her future vantage point, she would make the same choices. A paradox, of course, because only the wisdom of years allows her the courage to accept the consequences of her long-ago choices.
For long-time readers, well, this book certainly puts past events in a different context. Miles Vorkosigan, who takes center stage for most of the Vorkosigan novels, and who is so perceptive in many areas, has been oblivious to his parents’ unique marriage, and seeing him adjust to the new status quo is fascinating. (And, too, the news that he’s going to have 11 new siblings.)

In a strange way, this is Aral’s book too: a glimpse into what he meant to the people who loved him best—Cordelia, Oliver, and Miles. Of the three, Cordelia has the best view of the entirety of the man who expanded Barrayar’s horizons, including all his flaws. Some of the revelations force fans to reevaluate their heroes too; any upset about the fact that Aral and Oliver started their physical relationship when Cordelia was away will have to take at face value the the implication that Cordelia gave him tacit permission to act before she left, which is fine by me.
My favorite sequence of all is a conversation between Cordelia and Alex, Miles’ 11-year-old son, who is feeling the burden of being the heir to the Vorkosigan legacy, with certain expectations about his life choices. Cordelia shows her grandson another side of his grandfather by pulling out his private paintings and drawings. She plants the idea that Aral himself would approve of Alex making different choices. It’s a lovely scene, though I can’t help wondering what Miles will make of it when he realizes just what kind of fire his mother has ignited in his son.
Will there be another Vorkosigan book? Perhaps, perhaps not, though I feel we might have heard the last from Cordelia, as she and Oliver seem content to raise their new brood of Jole/Naismith/Vorkosigans together. I attended a reading with Bujold while she was on tour for Cryoburn several years ago, during which she read a snippet from a scene of an adventure with Miles and mysterious doings at Vorkosigan Vashnoi, the irradiated part of his inheritance on Barrayar. Maybe that will come to something.
A major plot bunny is also dropped into the mix here: the mysterious motives of the Cetagandan Empire, as information comes to light about how they were “defeated” in their invasion of Barrayar. The Empire’s bioengineering, including the dangerously viral kind, may be something the residents of the Barrayaran Empire will eventually have to fight, and the odds don’t look good for them at the moment.
I would ask Bujold to “write faster,” but I fear it would produce work both less thoughtful, and less dense.
Instead, I’ll hope she writes more, in her own good time.