For a cast of characters, see my earlier review of Engineering Trilogy Book I, Devices and Desires.
If you listen to K.J. Parker’s characters, the ruin of the world is the myth of eternal passionate love. Valens is cursed by it. Miel Ducas is cursed by it. Ziani Vaatzes is cursed by it, and as it turns out some of the other characters are bound by it as well, and their lives are all equally miserable. They are all convinced to greater or lesser degrees that their love was the reason behind the war that destroyed the country of Erimea, drove the citizens of Valens’ duchy to the desert, and by the end of Book II, Evil for Evil, put the Eternal Republic of the Mezentine at the mercy of a million barbarian invaders from the desert.
But then, the characters have these revelations in their most self-absorbed moments. At one point, Lucao Psellus is convinced that he’s ordered the genocide of Eremia because the jailing clerk failed to lock his window. At another point the reader might be convinced that the whole war was caused by Ziani Vaatzes being sentenced to death over springs that were a 1000th of an inch too large by Guild standards (or at least him being sentenced to death and refusing to let that sentence be carried out)
One could even blame the whole war on Ziani Vaatzes, who is at least its engineer and orchestrator. He, after all, turns his engineering skills away from metal and towards engineering a war that will get him home to his wife and daughter. He puts the people in place, uses them, breaks them where necessary without (at first) a thought of remorse in his head. You’re tempted to lay all the blame at his feet by the end of the first book, but the fact is, and it’s demonstrated quite well in the larger trilogy, (and any engineer will tell you) that you can’t make a spring out of wood.
The simple war is not the story that K.J. Parker tells. However eloquent her characters are, and however elegant it is to see the war’s causes in the light single, clear events, this is not a simple war, and it was not caused by love any more (or less) than World War I was caused by the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. These are just flashpoints. It is caused by inequity, by a continent on the brink of massive changes, by technology, by the mutual unintelligibility of different cultures, and because war is simply and sadly the most convenient method for social change on a scale like this. The tension in this society is palpable from the outset of the novels. There is a people to the south, deep in the desert who may have discovered a shallow underground river allowing them to cross the desert safely. They are nomads, and their numbers are too massive to support the nomadic lifestyle anymore. There are two anachronistic duchies stationed between the “barbarians” and the most advanced society in the world. The most advanced society in the world, the Mezentine Republic, covets its monopoly on engineering enough to wage war to stop neighboring countries from acquiring the ability to make artillery, and is for all purposes practically stagnant and through festering internal politics and the weight of tradition.
The continent is a hundred year old powder-keg under a magnifying glass in the summer sun, much like the Europe of World War I and II. This is a perfect situation to study moral ambiguity in the individual — which is part of K.J. Parker’s aim in writing these novels — if only because so much evil is going to be done in such a short amount of time, and because the people whose stories we watch unfold are major players in the evil that gets done. When you read these books, don’t blame them for the crimes their own self-pity would have you believe they’ve committed. Don’t let them off easy, either, as mere cogs in the machine of war, because these are people with choices, however narrow those choices may seem, and some of those choices cause thousands of people to die needlessly (although the war will go on, the right choices, when they’re made, save lives, and sometimes those choices have nothing to do with the morals we hold ourselves to in peacetime). They’re all sympathetic characters, though, in many ways, and I think this and the clarity of the war machine are the greatest strengths of The Engineer Trilogy.
I’m starting the third book now, and I’ll write a review of the whole trilogy when I’m done with it, but these are wonderful books, and if what I’ve written appeals to you, you should definitely go out and get them and find a quiet room to read them in.
