Intimate Traitors by Astrid Amara – review

Title: Intimate Traitors
Author: Astrid Amara
Genre: m/m, science fiction, erotica
URL: Loose ID
Price: US $ 4.99
Pulbisher’s warnings: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Anal play/intercourse, male/male sexual practices, strong violence.
Summary [from the publisher]:

Armen Markus is a member of the resistance fighting the corrupt regime of the Council. He works as a double agent within the Council’s most notorious prison as Commanding Interrogator, with one special purpose: to keep the secrets of the rebellion safe.

When he discovers that his ex-lover, Ravi Jai, has been arrested, Armen wants to help him. But he can’t risk compromising his position. Now, more than ever, he must stay the course; for the Council has captured the man who has the one weapon needed to end the war, and Armen must find him.
But his newfound power over Ravi proves too much of a temptation. Armen can’t resist the lure of Ravi’s body, shackled and at his mercy…
For his part, Ravi Jai is shocked to discover his lost love has become a torturer. Now with secrets of his own, Ravi needs to escape before he’s discovered and he’s pretty sure his old flame Armen can help him. He just needs to be convinced the right way.

My review:

Stories of future dystopias sometimes wear their political hearts on their sleeves, which makes them less effective as fiction. This is not the case with Astrid Amara’s smoothly written Intimate Traitors. The author sketches the recently-installed authoritarian Council that drives the conflict with a deft impressionism that heightens the tension and sense of danger in the plot, but never overwhelms the human story at its heart.

The characters are also compelling. Armen, the double agent, is weary of his status but still committed to his mission within the vast Council prison. We meet him at the moment he begins to regret the sacrifices he’s made in service to the resistance. Amara gives Armen’s voice a convincing urgency that plays very nicely against the doubts that assail him when Ravi arrives as a prisoner. As if that balance weren’t enough, Amara plays his current condition against some of the most naturalistic flashbacks I’ve read — reading about the serious student, fervent revolutionary, and naïve lover Armen used to be frames the contemporary action beautifully. It’s also in Armen’s voice that Amara achieves some of her best turns of phrase, such as this, shortly after Armen sees Ravi being processed into the prison and feels impelled to help him despite the danger to his larger mission: “He ran his hand through his hair, hoping to pull out a brilliant thought.”

Ravi is more enigmatic and, to my mind, a somewhat less effective character than Armen. Most of what we know about him is through Armen’s point of view and memory which, since they parted six years before when Armen took up his mission for the resistance, is remote enough to reduce our sense of intimacy with him. Further distancing us as readers from Ravi is the fact that we know none of his secrets, whereas we not only know all of Armen’s, we know how he feels about them. Ravi’s secret is essential to the plot, and though I suspected what it might be, Amara chose not to drop more than the barest of hints; I wished she, through Ravi, had taken us readers more into her confidence, as the experience of the story would not have been compromised in the least. Amara boxed herself in with this device, and it’s one of two problems I had with this otherwise rewarding story.

The other problem was sexual. Make no mistake: the sex in Intimate Traitors is as smoothly written as the rest of the novella, and there’s enough emotional depth and tension to give the sexual encounters great texture. We see, through Armen’s eyes, the early days of his relationship with Ravi that were dominated by a sense of wonder and discovery, and we also see the ripening of that discovery into something the characters, university students at the time, fail to name as love. Rather than seeming thick or detached, these vignettes convey a rather charming callow laddishness that had me rooting for the couple even though I knew they were soon to part ways.

That emotional connection reawakens instantly for Armen, and his first encounter with Ravi easily convinces us of his sense of loss and the shock of his reawakened desire. It’s the trajectory that desire takes that strained my disbelief. Ravi’s presence, but even more, his vulnerability, inflames Armen, and even as he resolves to help his former lover, he’s engaging in a seduction that skates awfully close to non-consent (at least on the surface and from his limited point of view). This rings false for a principled man like Armen, and the fact that the early accounts of his and Ravi’s liaison contain not the slightest hint of his proclivity to dominate intensified the jarring note (Ravi was the adventuresome, experienced one in their youthful relationship). It’s imaginable that years of undercover work in the service of a brutal authoritarian regime could have encouraged Armen’s tastes in that direction, but if that’s the case it’s hardly desirable for a hero (and it’s not suggested by the author).

In the same vein, the distance I mentioned that is enforced between the reader and Ravi is not alleviated by his behavior once the interrogation room doors are closed and he and Armen are alone. He needs to escape — we begin to suspect why — and he resolves to use Armen to do it. This makes sense, especially as Ravi believes that Armen has betrayed his revolutionary ideals, the ideals which were the reason for their long-ago breakup. To her credit, Amara deftly sidesteps any hint of Stockholm Syndrome. Ravi surprises himself by enjoying the risky sexual encounters with Armen, but never loses sight of his greater purpose. However, as we become more intimately aware of Armen’s reawakened humanity, we become more distant from Ravi, who, since we are not privy to his great secret, comes across as using Armen and putting him at risk for nothing more than the personal desire to escape.

I raise these points because they interfered with a very good novella that could have been great. Amara writes crisp, atmospheric prose, naturalistic dialogue, keenly sketched secondary characters, and a world that is chillingly real. (One world-building detail I particularly relished was the ruling Council’s nano-robotic surveillance system — very cool.) She also gives us a rich romantic and political backstory, clear character development, very involving edgy sexuality, and a satisfying if predictable ending. That the central relationship had its problems detracted from the delights the work could have offered, but it by no means diminishes the excitement with which I add Astrid Amara to my auto-read list. She’s a sharp author, new to me, to watch out for.