Paladin of Souls

This is a sequel to [b:The Curse of Chalion 61886 The Curse of Chalion (World of the Five Gods, #1) Lois McMaster Bujold https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1322571773l/61886.SY75.jpg 1129349], and it continues with some of the same characters, although most of them remain offstage for this story. The first book was about the ordeals of 35-year-old Lupe dy Cazaril; this one is partly a story of gods, demons, and sorcery, and partly a character study of 40-year-old Ista dy Chalion, who has lived through the deaths of her parents, husband, and son, is tormented by guilt and self-doubt, and is generally thought to be insane. She goes on a journey in search of escape, and encounters an unwanted and dangerous adventure that brings out her hidden strength.As with the preceding novel, I very much like the characters, the scenario, and the writing style, and there are some welcome touches of humour here and there. There are aspects of the story that I'm not entirely happy with, but overall I'm willing to give five stars to this one: it's a fine novel.There's a rather grim patch near the end, when the characters are at their lowest ebb, that I'm sometimes tempted to skip, but perhaps it's dramatically necessary.In her first three novels set in this world, I suppose Bujold was experimenting with her newly conceived gods and her new concept of magic, deciding how it should all work and what the limits on it should be. She'd already decided that direct contact between gods and humans should be very rare; nevertheless, Ista has close encounters with three different gods during her life, and meets one of them repeatedly during this story; which might be described as excessive. I don't think the gods appear so often in any other story set in this world.There are some magical applications here that we don't see again. The ability of a strong demon to control at least 18 other demons seems to be unique; that phenomenon never reappears in other stories. And the magical link between the half-brothers of Castle Porifors doesn't reappear either, although it took only one ordinary demon to create that. I don't suppose Bujold thinks of these as unsuccessful experiments, exactly; they were ideas that served for this particular story but didn't turn out to be useful for the series as a whole.For myself, I think they were not entirely successful experiments: both of them strike me as rather contrived and dangerously powerful. In the science-fiction world, I think [a:Larry Niven 12534 Larry Niven https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1596428206p2/12534.jpg] has commented that, whenever you introduce some new gadget X, you have to consider its implications in every subsequent story: why can't the problem be solved by using X?In the Penric novellas written after the novels, the use of magic and the gods seems generally more disciplined and restrained, which suits me. The danger in writing fantasy is that you can do anything and explain it away as magic or act of god; I think fiction works better, seems more credible, if you impose self-discipline and convince the readers that these things work within definite limits—fictional laws of nature.