Marie Rutkoski, The Winner’s Curse (2014)

I don’t want to hate-on this novel (indeed, it is very competently done and not in the least hatable) just because it’s at the Harlequin Romance end of the Fantasy genre. Putting it like that probably sounds snider than I intend. There’s really nothing wrong with Harlequin Romances, and nothing wrong with what my friend Justina Robson calls ‘Fit Bloke Fantasy’ either. Kestrel is the feisty, pretty, immensely rich daughter of an aristocratic general in the Roman-ish empire of Rutkoski's imagined world—different to actual ancient Rome in trivial ways (for one: Kestrel is expected to enlist in the army, which fate she resists). Her relationship with her father is the kind Disney Princesses enjoy with their paternal figures of loving authority. Since this is like Rome a slave society, Kestrel one day buys a slave: the handsome, proud, muscular and altogether dishy Arin. In the author’s note Rutkoski explains the title—it’s a phrase that "describes how the winner of an auction has also lost, because he or she had won by paying more than the majority of bidders have decided the item is worth. .. I was fascinated by this version of the Pyrrhic Victory—to win and lose at the same time. I tried to think of a novel in which someone would win an auction that exacts a steep emotional price. It occurred to me: what if the item at auction were not a thing but a person?” [357]

Anyhow: The Winner’s Curse is the first vol of a trilogy, and so doesn’t work out all the consequences of Kestrel’s impulsive decision to bid ‘fifty keystones’ (that’s a lot of cops) for the dreamy, slightly-dangerous-looking-but-with-a-beautiful-singing-voice Arin. But we get the idea. There’s rebellion and war, but only as a means of magnifying the gosh-wow-ness of the impossible love between them. So, yes: Rutoski has taken a Roman-era Greece model for her Fantasy empire, and dropped-in a few things (like female military officers, and gunpowder, and hundred-key pianolas) to make it clear she’s not writing history. That the actual society written here doesn’t cohere or ever really convince me doesn’t actually matter, because the function of the book is not to mount a socio-economic critique of the logic of slavery. It is to explore the psycho-sexual fantasy potential in the institution, and that’s (of course) an extraordinarily widespread aspect of human sexual play. That slavery itself is the greatest evil humankind has perpetrated does not, oddly enough, mean that men and women playing slave-girl, slave-boy submission and ownership games in bed are bad people. On the contrary. But a book exploring the erotic and emotional potentials of the slave-market has, I suppose, to be judged on how effectively its turns its reader on. Your sexy mileage may vary, but this book left me cold.