This is the latest in Weber’s long-running Honor Harrington series, and about all I have to say is “Hmmmm.” I can’t honestly say I was disappointed, for my expectations were low, and in many ways it was better than I expected. Were there lots of scenes filled with talking heads? Yeah, there were. Were there lots of space battles with details about how many missiles were launched, and how many lost track, and how many were confused, and how many were destroyed, and how many actually hit? Yeah, quite of few of them, really. Were there Amazing! Technical! Innovations! that enabled Manticore to stand up to her enemies Yet Again, Against Overwhelming Odds? Of course! In short, in many ways it was just what I’d expect, and the amazing technical innovations actually seemed like a reasonable outgrowth of what was used in the previous book. And the climactic scene is pretty amazing.

In short, if you’ve liked the previous books in the series, you won’t be disappointed in this one, mostly.

OK, now for a long and extended “Hmmmm.” Warning: Here There Be Spoilers. If you don’t want to know how it comes out, don’t click through.

The last few Honor Harrington books have each had two main plots: what you might call the Public Plot, which is all about Manticore’s war with the Republic of Haven, and the Private Plot, which all about Honor Harrington and her friends, relations, and retainers. And both of them made me go, “Hmmmmm.”

The problem with the Public Plot is that it creaks. Manticore and Haven are at war because of a misunderstanding fomented by Haven’s Secretary of State–who, it turns out, was acting as an agent provocateur for Manpower, Inc. Manpower wants Manticore and Haven at war so as to keep them from interfering with Manpower’s business, the breeding and sale of “genetic slaves”. Weber’s clearly setting up Manpower to be the prime enemy after Haven and Manticore come to some kind of agreement. And throughout the course of the book, that agreement becomes tantalizing close. The President of Haven realized that she’s been led by the nose by the Secretary of State–who dies, conveniently, so she can’t find out who he was working for–and extends an olive branch. Queen Elizabeth is pushed into accepting it by her advisers, Honor included–and then Manpower springs some other dirty tricks, quite transparently designed to look like Haven’s fault, and Queen Elizabeth balks, and things go from bad to worse.

As I say, the whole thing creaks. It feels hopelessly contrived, and poor Queen Elizabeth comes off sounding like a complete b*tch, rather than the wise if somewhat hot-tempered head of state we’ve seen previously.

The problem with the Private Plot is, well, the Private Plot.

In the last book or so, Weber set up The Big Conflict. Honor has fallen in love with Hamish Alexander, AKA Admiral Whitehaven, and he with her. (It’s a romance that reminds me not a little of Dagny Taggart’s with John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. They are both so absolutely perfect that it simply had to be.) The difficulty is that Alexander is married to a woman he still loves, and who is much loved by the people of Manticore. Emily Alexander was one of the great actresses of the Manticoran stage, if I recall correctly, until shortly after her marriage to Hamish when a tragic accident left her in a robotic wheelchair with no use of her legs or right arm. That was decades ago, but through her charity and philanthropy, or something, she’s still greatly loved. If Hamish and Honor, Manticore’s two top admirals, have an affair and are discovered, the political ramifications, we are assured, will be devastating. If Hamish divorces Emily to marry Honor, the political ramifications, we are assured, will be devastating. And in any event, Hamish is still deeply in love with Emily, even their relationship has perforce been platonic for more of their marriage. And once Honor meets Emily, she can’t bear the though of making her unhappy either. Oh, and Hamish and Emily are Catholic, and don’t believe in divorce.

This is, of course, the Worst Thing That Can Possibly Happen, being in love with some one and not being able to consummate it, and the two of them nobly go on about their daily round making everyone around them miserable…until, at the end of the previous book, Emily calls the two of them together and more or less tells them to Get On With It, and leaves them alone together.

And that’s where things stand as this book begins. Honor and Hamish are going to have an affair in front of Emily’s back, as it were, and with her complete permission. Naturally, Honor gets pregnant immediately (there’s some quick work explaining why her Navy-mandated contraceptive implant isn’t working). She quickly rejects any thought of aborting the child…and that means that she and Hamish are going to have to go public Real Soon Now. On, no! How is Weber going to resolve this?

At about this point we have a long visit between Honor and Benjamin Mayhew, Protector of Grayson, and his family. Mayhew, like most men on Grayson, has more than one wife; that’s the way the Church of Humanity Unchained works. And that’s when the penny dropped for me. Weber, I thought, was going to have the Alexanders and Honor join the Church of Humanity Unchained, and then Honor would become Hamish’s second wife. The Graysons would be enormously pleased, and the Manticorans couldn’t be too upset without offending Manticore’s most important ally.

Turns out I was half right. Instead, the leader of the Church of Humanity Unchained goes and has a talk with the Archbishop of the diocese in which Hamish and Emily lives, and they come to a meeting of minds; and there begins, for this new Catholic revert, a very odd sequence indeed.

In Honor Harrington’s day, it’s clear that the Progressives have won. The Archbishop has no problem, at all, with the thought of Honor marrying Hamish and Emily–in the Roman Catholic Church. Old, Pre-Space notions of gender and sexual morality simply didn’t survive the transition to Galactic Society. And at the wedding ceremony, he assures the trio that experts from both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Humanity Unchained have examined each others doctrines and not found anything problematic.

Hmmmm.
I find this completely unlikely, mind you; it’s essentially the ground that The Episcopal Church leadership have staked out, and as they are discovering it isn’t a winning proposition. You don’t retain members by declaring that your core beliefs really aren’t all that important. If the Roman Catholic Church were in fact to make such a stunning change, I can’t believe that it would survive the additional centuries to Honor Harrington’s day.

Well, then they get married, the three of them, and sometime later Honor has her baby…and the baby is baptized Roman Catholic. And Weber includes pretty much the entire baptismal rite. He spends about two full pages just on the words the priest, the parents, and the godparents say–no extra description, to speak of, just the characters saying the words.

Hmmmm.

I find that I really don’t know what to make of this. I begin to think that Weber must be a progressive Catholic; and yet, there’s a reasonably strong pro-life component to this story, which isn’t the norm for the dissenters in the Church. And he clearly finds the baptismal ceremony moving, or he wouldn’t have included so much of it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen quite so much genuine liturgy included in a work of fiction.

I’d not noticed any particularly strong reference to Catholicism in his previous books.

I begin to wonder if he’s a progressive who’s slowly becoming Catholic.

I dunno. I’m really quite curious to know what he was thinking when he was writing this plot.