A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, by K. J. Parker

I read A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, a nominally fantasy novel by K. J. Parker, pseudonym of Tom Holt.

I love K. J. Parker to an unreasonable extent. I’m not really capable of objective criticism with his books. Sorry if you were looking for that here.

As is typical, this book is fantasy in that there geography and the cultures are made up, but there’s no magic. It’s about people in an approaching-Industrial society who make war on one another.

After something like fifteen years of my intense Parker fanhood, I think I’ve figured out why I like him so well. It’s his prose style. It’s witty and droll. Every sentence, every paragraph is an exercise in deadpan delivery. I would give my left kidney to write like he does.

The hero of this book, if that’s what you’d prefer to call him, is a professional translator. It’s not that he has political aspirations, but when he realizes a young woman is slated for execution due to a mistake in translation, he intervenes. And the young woman happens to be a princess from one of the distant, savage tribes.

Parker excels at world-building. He’ll happily go on a tangent chock full of details about the intricacies of bow design or the how the clearing of a forest affected a region’s agriculture and economy.  It ought to be tedious but isn’t.

This was a delight as an audiobook. Ray Sawyer isn’t great at female voices, but one, no one will ever accuse Parker of passing the Bechdel test, and two, the characters aren’t the main point of Parker’s novels. Sawyer’s the perfect narrator for the book because his reading is bony dry. He deadpans his way through the whole novel.