Evil for Evil and Escapement

I failed to post on the Meditations, and will do so soon. In the meantime I will post about the last two of three books in this series.

Both of these books are from The Engineer Trilogy, written by K. J. Parker. The series is part of the fantasy genre, in the sense that it is a complete deconstruction of the fantasy genre. Of course, it has a made up world and military conflict, but the other normal parts of such a story are subverted utterly. The main character is a very competent engineer, but a horrible fighter. He sets in motion events, out of love for his wife, which result in the sack of at least one major city and the deaths of 200+ thousand people. Obsessive love is in fact the motivator for much of the plot. Other tropes are also subverted. The two best fighters, who are intensely capable in general, are a boring buffoon and a murderer/rapist, the Evil Empire is run not by any grand emperor, but by committees and guilds, and characters are not able to take pain very well. In the end, the two great love stories throughout the series (for which all the death has occurred) fail or turn out to be partially false, meaning that most of the things that happened were almost pointless in and of themselves, although they turn out to be instrumental to the punishment of the person who manipulated the main character into initiating the horrifying conflict that is the center of the plot, meaning that there is satisfactory resolution. Overall, it is a very good series, even if it is quite grim, but at sixteen hundred pages or so is probably not worth it for someone who is not a fantasy reader like I am. So, if you want to see a criticism of the genre in the form of an interesting and somewhat realistic novel, then go for it, but, once again, its longer than The Brothers Karamazov.