The Curse of Chalion

The Curse of Chalion is the Lois McMaster Bujold novel I press into the hands of fantasy readers who claim they have given up on the genre. Cazaril is a former courtier who has been a slave galley oar for three years, escaped to nothing, and walks back to his childhood patron's court hoping to find work scrubbing pots. He gets a much better job than he wanted, and the book is the slow careful unfolding of what that job is going to require.

What Bujold does that almost no fantasy writer does is build a theology that makes structural sense within the novel. The five gods of Chalion (Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Bastard) are domain-specific in ways that produce actual moral problems, and the question of which god has called Cazaril and why becomes the engine of the plot. The political intrigue is sharp. The villainy is human-scale rather than cosmic, which makes it more frightening rather than less.

Cazaril himself is one of the great middle-aged-male fantasy protagonists, partly because he has the patience to be in this kind of story and partly because Bujold has the patience to write him.

Five stars. The right entry point to Bujold's fantasy work and a useful answer to anyone who claims epic fantasy cannot be morally serious. Read this first, then Paladin of Souls.