ancillary justice (ann leckie)

Say you were split, you were split in fragments
And none of the pieces would talk to you
Wouldn't you want to be who you had been?
Well, maybe I want that too

I had no idea what was going on in this book until the halfway point, at which point I became faintly obsessed. We see the protagonist of this novel in two timestreams: in the present, and in a nineteen-year flashback. In that flashback, she is one small part of an artificial organism: Justice of Toren, a warship kitted out with human bodies that have been colonized by and for an empire. But in the present, she has been severed from her ship and is on her own, still the ship, but also not the ship. This two-track structure is maddening until you understand, and then it is so beautiful and strange, feeling the difference in texture between the two lives this character has lived, starting to comprehend the scale of her loss.

There are several disorienting features about this book, but to me the moral disorientation surrounding the protagonist is the most extreme. The first-person structure instinctively places our sympathies with a creature who, by typical Western moral standards, should not exist at all, as she represents the ... deensoulment of a person. And yet Breq is not Humbert Humbert; we are not meant to hate her; as far as we can tell, she bears no moral culpability for inhabiting this stolen body. Through the course of the story she begins to be humanized, and although she does not quite see it for what it is, we do as readers, and we see too that it is not really a replacement for what she has lost. All this makes for a deliciously uncomfortable read, because there is no resolution possible, and the author doesn't even attempt one.