Lara Elena Donelly: Amberlough
Mar. 17th, 2018 06:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaLara Elena Donelly’s Amberlough is a secondary world spy novel, a mashup of cold war intelligence narratives and Weimar Republic society, sources which Donelly explicitly acknowledged by taking chapter epigrams from John Le Carré novels and the musical Cabaret. There’s no other fantasy or science fictional elements, just an imaginary world with pre-WWII technology and a complicated political history, not unlike Europe of our own timeline and space.
The novel’s main character, Cyril DePaul, is an agent in the Amberlough intelligence service. He’s been out of the field for a year, following a traumatic mission which resulted in serious injury; his nerves are still shot, but a mission has come up that he’s uniquely suited to.
Amberlough is one of four loosely federated states that make up the nation of Gedda. Up until recently, this has suited everyone fairly well. However, a new political power, the One State Party (colloquially referred to as the Ospies) is on the rise and threatens to take power in the upcoming elections in the state of Farborough. The OSP is quite clearly a fascist-trending political movement, and with Amberlough being a place of rather profound liberal tendencies (sexual freedom, some degree of racial integration, along with a fair amount of smuggling and corruption, all politely conducted with an eye to tradition and balance), the powers that be in Amberlough are concerned. They’ve found hints that the OSP is planning to interfere with the election, and DePaul’s mission is to pose as a wealthy potential moneyman while he tries to uncover exactly what their plans are.
The mission goes wrong, and DePaul finds himself in a deadly game, forced to become a double agent for the OSP. Survival also means giving up the man he loves, Aristide - a cabaret drag queen and underground smuggler and drug dealer, at least until he can find some way to get out of the trap he’s caught in, and take Aristide with him.
But nothing works out as hoped. Unable to be open with each other, DePaul and Aristide end up working at cross purposes, tangling even more of their respective colleagues and contacts in the web of deceptions, the most vulnerable of whom is Cordelia, a burlesque artist and sometime drug runner, who Aristide persuades to act as DePaul’s beard. And through it all, the OSP moves inexorably toward power in Amberlough.
It’s a good thing this is the first book in a trilogy, because if the story were over at the end of this volume, I would be a very unhappy person. As it stands, I’m a very impatient person, waiting for volume two.
The novel’s main character, Cyril DePaul, is an agent in the Amberlough intelligence service. He’s been out of the field for a year, following a traumatic mission which resulted in serious injury; his nerves are still shot, but a mission has come up that he’s uniquely suited to.
Amberlough is one of four loosely federated states that make up the nation of Gedda. Up until recently, this has suited everyone fairly well. However, a new political power, the One State Party (colloquially referred to as the Ospies) is on the rise and threatens to take power in the upcoming elections in the state of Farborough. The OSP is quite clearly a fascist-trending political movement, and with Amberlough being a place of rather profound liberal tendencies (sexual freedom, some degree of racial integration, along with a fair amount of smuggling and corruption, all politely conducted with an eye to tradition and balance), the powers that be in Amberlough are concerned. They’ve found hints that the OSP is planning to interfere with the election, and DePaul’s mission is to pose as a wealthy potential moneyman while he tries to uncover exactly what their plans are.
The mission goes wrong, and DePaul finds himself in a deadly game, forced to become a double agent for the OSP. Survival also means giving up the man he loves, Aristide - a cabaret drag queen and underground smuggler and drug dealer, at least until he can find some way to get out of the trap he’s caught in, and take Aristide with him.
But nothing works out as hoped. Unable to be open with each other, DePaul and Aristide end up working at cross purposes, tangling even more of their respective colleagues and contacts in the web of deceptions, the most vulnerable of whom is Cordelia, a burlesque artist and sometime drug runner, who Aristide persuades to act as DePaul’s beard. And through it all, the OSP moves inexorably toward power in Amberlough.
It’s a good thing this is the first book in a trilogy, because if the story were over at the end of this volume, I would be a very unhappy person. As it stands, I’m a very impatient person, waiting for volume two.