A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Rating:
Summary: Flandry faces his final betrayal, and his greatest foe.
Review: Anderson's recurring hero, Dominic Flandry, is like Horatio Hornblower, shown at different points of his career. In this, he is middle-aged, with a grown son...and in his final battle with a mind-reading foe from an elder race he has fought many times before. It is their final battle, and in it Flandry is not only betrayed, but goes through a self-betrayal of many of the principles he believes in. In this one, Flandry ceases to be a pleasure-loving, decadent Simon Templer, and instead shows true depth of character, and indeed, true tragedy, on several fronts. Easily the best of all the Flandry books, which is high praise indeed

Rating:
Summary: Dominic Flandry grows up
Review: In "A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows," Poul Anderson did the nearly impossible and unthinkable before this book. He managed to get Dominic Flandry to grow up.

Before this book, Flandry, while a brilliant secret agent for the Terran Empire, always was a bit juvenile, and reveled in it. He figured that if he was going to die soon anyway (as secret agents rarely live long lives), why not make the best of it? So, he slept with many lissome women, ate lots of good food, and drank lots of great liquor along the way.

His other attributes, of loyalty, self-sacrifice, intelligence, a certain type of shifty honesty unusual in a secret agent -- well, they always were underplayed, partly because Flandry was an interstellar James Bond and that might not have been "sexy," and partly because Flandry looked at them as bad qualities.

Well, no wonder. The Terran Empire was in decay, and only people like him were holding it together, before the advent of this book. At the start of this book, Hans Molitor has seized the throne -- with Flandry's blessing, as at least he was a strong military man, and as he was better than any of the other contenders for the throne. And trouble's brewing all over the Empire . . . .

Without the trouble, there's no way Flandry would have been able to go off on his own. He's now in his 40s, and although he's still an international bon vivant, he's not the same man he used to be. He's found out he has a son, Dominic Hazeltine, by Persis D'Io (the dancer in "Ensign Flandry), and he's starting to perhaps slow down a bit in his travels.

But his mind is as keen as ever, so when an exotic, aristocratic slave girl from Dennitza shows up, his interest is piqued. The more he finds out, the more upset he gets. Then, he flits off with her, to find out the truth -- which is more shattering than he ever expected.

He does run into Aycharaych again, but it's almost more of an afterthought. Because before this book is done, his life stands in ruin, and about all he has left is his honor, pride, and a job well done -- rather than the life he'd briefly glimpsed in the eyes of Kossara, the Dennitzan slave girl (who never should have been sold for slavery).

As he destroys Aycharaych, he realizes that nothing, but nothing, can bring back love -- and wonders what's next for him. These are astonishingly adult thoughts for Flandry, and extremely moving.

This book deserves over five stars because of how moving and heart-wrenching it is for Flandry to go through all this. I truly believed in his pain, while enjoying his witty repartee with Chives (his Shalmuan body-servant/cook/batman/everything), Kossara, and son Dominic. Flandry is no intellectual lightweight, and he really does have a heart. Excellent book; truly one of Anderson's best (and I've read most of his output).

Btw, "A Stone in Heaven" is also another great book about Flandry in his age -- I recommend that one, too, extremely highly.