"Mer Celehar's notions of obedience are most individual," Maia said wryly. -The Emperor of The Goblin Emperor on Thara Celehar.
It's been a while. What can I say - it's been a long pandemic. Logging back on here I see that I've got a couple of half-written posts that I don't even really remember doing, but they're not bad and I can probably work them back into shape. But this is something I recently read and I want to do it first, so here goes.
The Goblin Emperor was a 2014 novel which explored the unlikely ascension of Maia Drazhar to the throne of the Elflands, and roughly his first year of reign as Edrehasivar VII. I have a review of it elsewhere here (notably it contains a major error in the number of grandsons the prior emperor had, which I cringe on recalling but don't want to pull a George Lucas and retroactively fix). I find it very hard to describe why it grew on me so much over time, but I've reread it on several occasions since. The word that I would use for it is "comforting", and despite the fact that it contains a couple of coup and assassination attempts, it's not really a novel of intrigue as such. With one notable exception the people that are against Maia are threatening and obnoxious (the single exception is in a trusted position, but I just looked to make sure and he's only got one line of dialogue prior to his betrayal - Maia might have good reason to trust him but the audience sure doesn't). A large portion of it is Maia trying to fit into the role he wasn't really prepared for and trying to some very minor degree to challenge the rules that keep him entirely separated from anything besides the nobility and their court problems.
This sequel doesn't take place at court and starts with protagonist Thara Celehar being called in to try to identify a dead hooker pulled out of a canal, so you can see we're dealing with something entirely different here.
So here's a brief recap on what Celehar did in the first book. Maia's father was sort of a Henry VIII type in terms of marriages and his fifth wife was a young trophy wife airhead. As the widow of the former Emperor she gets to hang around at court and maintain her own household, which includes her distant cousin Celehar. Maia is not satisfied with the progress of the inquiry into his father's murder, and one of his staff suggests that he might want to bring in a Witness for the Dead, a cleric of the god Ulis with the ability to actually speak to the spirits of the departed, one of whom just happens to be at hand. Maia summons him to give him this commission, discovering an unenthusiastic, morose man who clearly doesn't want to be involved in any of this but nonetheless accepts. He's taking things seriously but not making much headway either; eventually wind of this gets back to his cousin, and Celehar ends up having to explain to Maia the circumstances which led him to him being stuck in semi-exile; he'd been involved in a same-sex love affair with a married man, and after that man killed his abusive wife Celehar ended up being called upon to investigate. Celehar easily solved this crime but his lover was executed, and afterwards the scandal led to him being more or less defrocked and unemployable.
Shortly thereafter, Celehar claims that he had a dream from Ulis about how to proceed with his investigation and skips town on the next available airship to a far-off provincial city without bothering to explain himself beyond a cursory note as he's leaving. This leads to Maia's quote from the top, and Celehar spends most of the rest of the book appearing only by virtue of sending letters to Maia explaining what he's up to off page. This part also explains why Celehar got his own spin-off novel, because what he does in the town of Thu-Athamar is single-handedly figure out how the prior Emperor was assassinated, identify the likely culprits, insinuate himself into their social circle and later work with the local police to round them all up and return them for trial. He also tells Maia the identity of the nobleman whom he believes bankrolled the whole thing - which he's also right about. This earns him the approval of both the chief priest of the Elflands and an Imperial favor, which he uses to receive reassignment as sort of a freelance criminal investigator priest.
This is where we find him at the start of The Witness for the Dead, back in the city of Thu-Athamar but this time with his own office where supplicants who need his particular services can find him. Or the local watchmen can rope him into solving their issues as well. In case you're wondering about what Maia and his entourage are up to then you are out of luck; he's off in the capital doing his Emperor thing and no one talks about it that much.
Anyway, the woman in the canal was actually an opera singer and not a hooker as such, although The Goblin Emperor implied that female opera singers were widely considered to have this sort of reputation and this book establishes that this isn't entirely without basis.
You'd think that the ability to speak with the spirits of the dead would be incredibly useful in a murder investigation, but in this you'd be only partially correct. These aren't omniscient dead and they tend to fade away pretty quickly, so first of all they won't know any more than they did when alive and second of all they quickly forget all but their names or things they felt really strongly about as their spirit transitions to wherever it is dead elves go. So Celehar was able to use his abilities to ID his doomed lover very easily because the murdered wife saw her husband very clearly as he killed her and was very pissed off about it even in the afterlife, but Celehar wasn't able to get anything useful off the deceased Emperor because he'd been blown up with a bomb he knew nothing about and his last thoughts were more along the lines of "Aaaaaaaaaaah". The dead opera singer is more along the lines of that latter one; although he's able to figure out who she is pretty quickly, he isn't able to solve the murder through strictly supernatural means. And as it turns out the trick is finding out who didn't want to kill her - she was something of a jackass and a kleptomaniac, among other things.
It's possible to have an entire book revolve around resolving one murder, but this one doesn't take that route. In addition to this investigation, Celehar also gets caught up in a bureaucratic turf war among the local priesthood, participates in a contested will, tracks down and destroys an undead monster, goes through a trial by ordeal due to the participants in the aforesaid will contest getting pissed off about his testimony, works with some other priests to discover then track down an entirely unrelated serial killer, and helps out in the aftermath of a horrible industrial accident which kills dozens. It's amazing that he has the time in the day to do all this stuff.
But here's the thing. Celehar is suffering from major depressive disorder and although his sense of duty keeps him going (and he's competent, dear lord is he ever) none of it really affects him that much. Unlike Goblin Emperor, which was in third person through Maia's eyes, this one is first person through Celehar's bleak and gloomy perspective. He just feels he was put on Earth (er, or wherever planet this takes place) to do this stuff and it's not worth getting excited over. About the only time he really has a big emotional reaction is when he's about to get ripped apart by the ghoul, and again, it's more along the lines of "Aaaaaaaaaaah". I get the feeling that if the ghoul was a little slower and Celehar had a little more time to think about it he would have ended up being indifferent even to that. He doesn't really want to do any of this but he can't imagine quitting. It's certainly off-putting when an author tells you how amazing and incredible things are without actually presenting them that way, but this is one of the very few books that I can remember where the narration actually seems to be trying to clog up the fascinating events actually contained in the book with the protagonist's constant Eeyore like musings. At some level, if even Celehar isn't that invested, how can you be?
But of course for those of us that can relate to this, and I unfortunately have felt this feeling myself, it's moving nonetheless. I felt bad for this guy, who manages to do the right thing every day for not much money and barely more respect. I wanted him to succeed. And I liked that we finally get a little inkling of what's really eating him - not that he had the illicit affair, because he's pretty adamant that there's no real issue with that; not that he had the guy turned over to the law, because that's just how he sees his job description; but that he still mourns for someone who did something that horrible, and wonders whether that makes him horrible too. Then at the end he gets a little bit of unexpected advice that it's okay to mourn just the good parts and forgive himself for the rest.
Does he take the advice? I don't know, but unlike the very extreme on-the-nose hopeful ending of The Goblin Emperor it basically just ends with Celehar not cured and not happy but with the potential to get to those things. It's a lot shorter than The Goblin Emperor and I don't think I'll read it as many times, but I think I enjoyed getting back into this world even through the eyes of someone who doesn't necessarily want to be there himself.
