Khaavren Romances

The Khaavren Romances are a series of fantasy novels written by Steven Brust and set in the fictional world of Dragaera. The novels are swashbuckling adventure stories involving war, intrigue, and romance. They are heavily influenced by the d'Artagnan Romances written by Alexandre Dumas.[1]

Books

The title of each book roughly corresponds with its equivalent in the d'Artagnan Romances. The Phoenix Guards names the guard organization to which the main characters belong, as does The Three Musketeers, Five Hundred Years After describes the length of time between it and the previous book, as does Twenty Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilankha is the name of the next generation of hero, as is The Vicomte de Bragelonne. The third novel of each trilogy is broken into smaller volumes.

Characters

The heroes of the Khaavren Romances roughly correspond with the heroes of the d'Artagnan Romances. Brust conceived of the series after assigning each of the Musketeers a House of the Dragaeran Empire. [1]

Historical fiction

Brust uses the conventions of false documents to present the books as historical fiction novels within the world of Dragaera. The author of the novels is Paarfi of Roundwood, a nobleman and historian from the House of the Hawk. Through his narrative, Paarfi attempts to dramatize historical events of Dragaera that he has studied but not witnessed himself.

Steven Brust presents himself as Paarfi's English translator. At the end of several of the Khaavren books, Brust and the character Paarfi have a comedic interaction or interview, and the two often quarrel. Brust claims to have changed Paarfi's original text in a number of ways in order to accommodate the differences in language. For example, the Dragaeran language has gender neutral pronouns, which Brust has translated into the generic male, a change that outrages Paarfi during one of their conversations.

Writing style

Paarfi narrates with a distinctive voice that satirizes the flowery and verbose style of Alexandre Dumas and his contemporaries.[2] Paths of the Dead includes an essay by Brust's editor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, titled "How to Write Like Paarfi of Roundwood", which identifies 17 characteristics of Paarfi's style. Many of the Khaavren Romances include essays credited to Paarfi's Dragaeran colleagues, who use similarly overwrought language.

A Dragaeran essay (in fact written by Pamela Dean) in Five Hundred Years After notes that Paarfi writes in a style similar to Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate, a Dragaeran play. This is a reference to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Brust took inspiration from that play, especially the "questions" game, in writing the Romances' bantering dialogue. A running joke throughout the series is that characters must ask a question multiple times before receiving an answer.

Paarfi's writing also makes heavy use of metafiction, as he frequently calls attention to his twin roles as historian and storyteller. He often pauses the story to defend the historicity of a certain plot detail or to explain a literary technique that he is about to use. Paarfi's regular intrusions, combined with the biographical information included in several of the peripheral essays, make him into a frame tale for the series.

Continuity

The events described in the Khaavren Romances take place several hundred years before the events of the Vlad Taltos novels. Dragaeran society is somewhat different in the Romances than that in which Vlad lives. The capital of the Empire is Dragaera City, which serves as the primary setting for the first two novels of the series. In addition, sorcery is much weaker and more rare. Most of the characters in the Khaavren Romances know little about sorcery and rely on flintlock-like "flashstones" as their only source of magical weaponry. By Vlad's time, the abundance of sorcery has transformed Dragaeran society.

There are many crossovers between the Khaavren Romances and the Vlad Taltos novels. Due to the long lives of many characters in Dragaera, some characters appear in both series. Paarfi wrote The Phoenix Guards during a time roughly contemporary to Vlad's life, while the rest of the series was written at least one hundred years later. Some of Paarfi's other work is referenced in the Vlad novels. There are some discrepancies between the two series, but many of them are intentional. Paarfi, like Vlad, is not a completely reliable narrator. Brust has stated that while Paarfi is very well informed, he does not know as much as he thinks he does, and sometimes simply makes things up.

References

  1. 1 2 Books by Steven Brust - The Dream Cafe
  2. Paarfi and Dumas
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