Beguilement

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement is a fantasy novel by Lois McMaster Bujold, published in 2006.

Plot Introduction

Beguilement is part one of Lois McMaster Bujold's latest novel series and setting, The Sharing Knife. In it she establishes a fictional space based on the part of North America she has spent her life in: the country south of the Great Lakes. However, the time is an unspecified span into a future when recovery from a grand collapse has brought population and technology back to roughly their state in the early 1800s --- minus gunpowder. The grand collapse is accounted for in terms of hubris, though not in technology but in spirit, for lack of a clearer term, with a caste of near-magical aristocrats all but wiped out in a series of wars with their spirit-eating creation and its hatchlings, termed malices or blight bogles.

A malice feeds on 'life force' or, in the novel's terms, ground. It is able to mold man-like agents out of wild animals, called "mud-men", and to absorb the knowledge and skills of humans that it kills. The role of the clans of Lakewalkers, descendants of the said near-magical aristocracy, is to patrol the lands around the Dead Lake (remnant of the several Great Lakes) and to kill newly-hatched malices as early in their careers as may be. This they do with knives made from the thigh bones of their own dead, "primed" in the suicide of a mortally wounded or aged Lakewalker so that their death may be "shared" with the otherwise immortal malice. Hence the series title.

The Lakewalker caste's lifeway approximates Native Americans' hunter-gatherer-warrior nomadism after adoption of the horse. East-coast survivors from the commoner caste have been invited by them to re-settle the area south of the Dead Lake. Labelled Farmers for their pioneer farmer lifeway, they have little or none of the Lakewalkers' great talent and tool: "ground sense". With this, it is possible to detect and read details of all living things to a distance varying with individual talent and training --- including the presence of malices. In its absence, Farmers tend to take a jaundiced view of Lakewalkers' activities and abilities, and to discount the role of Lakewalkers in their own survival.

Characters & evaluation

The heroine, Fawn Bluefield, is an 20-year-old Farmer's daughter. The hero, Dag Redwing, is a 56-year-old Lakewalker. Marriage between Farmer and Lakewalker peoples is rejected by both, and their reaction is made more intense by the age difference. The novel's strength is in the way it handles all the characters from each family and people, both the admirable and the contemptible, and portrays them as variants on familiar types.

Awards