Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

On paper, this final book in the Vorkosigan saga is doing some really neat things. It creates such a pleasing parallel bookend to the opening book, Shards of Honor. Both are set on Sergyar with Cordelia as a point of view character, Aral features heavily in both (although as a palpable absence here), and both thematically are about choosing new directions for your life. It's a nice way to send a series off into the sunset.

This book also has an incredible plot hook, to my mind. We learn that Aral, Cordelia, and Jole have been discreetly in a relationship together for twenty years off page. Or, probably better put, Cordelia and Jole have both been orbiting around the gravity well of Aral and both been in a relationship with him. This isn't that surprising as the reader was already aware that Aral was bi, and Cordelia is Betan and so likely wouldn't be flapped by such an arrangement. When Aral dies, Cordelia and Jole both have to work through their feelings in unhelpful ways: Cordelia forced to grieve publicly and closeted Jole forced to hide his privately. This book focuses on them reorienting their relationship to each other without Aral in the picture. What a great setup!

What hurts this book a little is that Admiral Jole is a fairly unknown character. We see him on page for about ten seconds in The Vor Game and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. He carries Aral's coffin in Cryoburn (and we tragically don't even get his point of view). That's it! It's a risky maneuver to try to bring back this minor character and tell the reader that secretly he's been in a relationship with two of the most major characters in the series. We also don't explicitly know how Barrayarans would feel about this sort of relationship or homosexuality or relationship inside a chain of command (although there's an intuition of disapproval earlier in the series). I think the book still works, but more foreshadowing would have made all of this much more powerful. That said, this series has been written across thirty years and not in chronological order, so if this is one place where cross-book foreshadowing falls flat, it's still got a great record over all.

What also hurts the book for me is that I think the interesting bits of setup are all told to us as the reader as having already happened. We don't get to see Cordelia and Jole grieving Aral. We don't get to see Cordelia sending Jole a message about Aral's death directly, showing how much she values his relationship with Aral. We don't get to see them try and fail to continue the relationship they previously had without Aral there. We just get a "three years later" when most of this has already happened and then are told about it. Without the investment in feelings of how things are broken, the resolution where they are mended feels so much weaker.

Instead, this book largely focuses Jole coming out of the closet about his past relationship with Aral and his newly forming relationship with Cordelia. In large part, Jole seems to naturally hide these personal details out of inertia and habit from how he discreetly had a relationship with Aral earlier; and, the consequences of coming out for him seem to be that... drumroll some people might feel a little weird about it. This is an incredibly low stakes hook to hang an entire book on, especially for a character the reader barely knows, especially for the final book in your series.

Look, as a not young queer person who lived in the closet well past its expiration date, a story about coming out and consequences cannot be more in my wheelhouse. This story, sadly, is just not it.