Okay, Penric and the Bandit was a charming addition to the Penric novellas, decidedly better than several of the more recent novellas.
Let me see, what are all of the Penric novellas? Okay, they are, in order:
Penric’s Demon
Penric and the Shamen
Penric’s Fox
Masquerade in Lodi
Penric’s Mission
Mira’s Last Dance
The Prisoner of Limnos
The Orphans of Raspay
The Physicians of Vilnoc
The Assassins of Thassalon
Knot of Shadows
Demon Daughter
And now this latest one, Penric and the Bandit.
They vary a lot in quality. If I were sorting them out, let me see …
Penric’s Demon, Penric and the Shamen, Penric’s Mission, Mira’s Last Dance, The Prisoner of Limnos, The Orphans of Raspay, The Assassin of Thessalon –> These are all really good. There may be some quibbles, but they’re all excellent.
Penric’s Fox is okay. I would put Penric and the Bandit at about this level. It’s fine. I liked it. It hit certain tropes I like a lot. It’s simple and straightforward.
Masquerade in Lodi suffers from a SCREAMINGLY OBVIOUS bad guy. Knot of Shadows did not really work for me. For some reason, I’m not sure why, neither did Demon Daughter. The Physicians of Vilnoc was frankly boring. It was a grinding slog of continual sorcerous healing and exhaustion, without nearly enough of lively Desdemona.
So, given I wasn’t all that keen on the most recent couple, I was happy with Penric and the Bandit. Especially because, as I say, it hit tropes I like a lot. It was simple, but a simple redemption plotline works for me. I think Bujold could have done a bit more with it — I mostly mean, I know what I would have brought out more if I’d been writing it. But I liked it.
Also, I was feeling fairly crappy the day I realized this novella was out, so I was happy to take a day off and just read a Penric novella and not even look at my laptop.
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I mostly rate these similarly.
I wasn’t as annoyed by the Masquerade in Lodi’s villain, but had a similar reaction to Knot of Shadows.
I liked the connection which the saint made with the little girl in Demon Daughter, and am interested to see how such a young demon, under expert tutelage and without fear of her god, might grow – could she reach more understanding, more intelligence and density sooner, without needing a century or more of accumulating imprints onion-layered on top of each other?
I’ve also been wondering if a very old and dense demon like Desdemona could develop (into?) a soul of her own. She increases in complexity and density with each layer, and loses a lot of her ‘self’ if she tries to jump into a mind that can’t accomodate her present complexity, and I fear that after Pen dies of (very) old age she might be on the border of not fitting into a human head without losing some of herself, or overwhelming the recipient just from the weight of her experience.
Her action in the Temple in this latest book, where she herself prayed for Penric instead of keeping quiet and trying not to attract attention, gives me hope something might be shifting in her relationship to the gods that might lead to a solution for the dead-end problem for a very old demon. Perhaps Atta’s fearlessness in the interaction with their god, through the saint, has helped her get a handle on her instinctive cowering reaction towards the gods.
Those developments make me like the last two books better than the one before; they seem to be exploring more positive possibilities of the demon-and-sorcerer pairings and their effects on the souls & creatures involved.
SMALL SPOILER?
Penric was very ruthless with partially paralysing a lot of the bandits, but didn’t agonise over that – since this world has capital punishment and they’ll be hanged as soon as they’re judged maybe he feels it doesn’t ruin their lives the way it would for anyone else. Also, he wouldn’t have survived against so many without such drastic measures, and Desdemona’s practicality seems to have rubbed off on him to a larger extent than in his younger years.
Those are really good observations about Desdemona maybe moving away from being a normal demon to something else. I hadn’t thought of that at all, though I don’t know why not, since Desdemona praying to the Father of Winter for Penric was indeed a really striking moment.