Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu’s Book Log
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
This post contains SPOILERS for His Majesty’s Dragon. Here’s the non-spoiler post if you got here by mistake.
[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]
Continue reading “Novik, Naomi: (01) His Majesty’s Dragon (spoilers)”
Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon is being talked of as “Patrick O’Brian with dragons,” which may, combined with the first chapter, give a slightly inaccurate impression. It’s not a naval story, but is instead somewhere between “if Patrick O’Brian were writing about dragons instead of ships” and “if Stephen Maturin were a dragon.” It’s set in an alternate history where dragons have been domesticated from early days, and “now,” in the Napoleonic Wars, are used as an air force: everything from scouts to bombers, with crews of an appropriate size. The dragons are sentient, articulate partners; and Temeraire, the dragon partnered with our human point-of-view character Will Laurence, holds anti-authoritarian political views rather like Maturin’s, which sit uneasily with their military service. In short, this isn’t about ships, but has a great many of the virtues of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels all the same. (Indeed the overall feel is fairly concrete and low-key; there may be some magic necessary to the dragons’ functions (hand-waving about airsacs aside), but if so, that’s about the only place for magic that I can see.)
It has virtues of its own, too, the most obvious of which is the dragons. They are a bit like Anne McCaffrey’s in that they bond with one person upon hatching; but they communicate orally not telepathically, can outlive their first handler, and are generally smarter and have more personality. The largest can also carry quite sizable crews, including riflemen and bombers; and generally speaking the Royal Aerial Corps doesn’t feel far off from the Royal Navy in its professional aspects.
It is different in some of its social and personal aspects [*], which serves two purposes: it makes the company more palatable to present-day tastes, and it pushes Laurence even further out of his entrenched habits of thought and helps him grow. Laurence’s development individually and as a partner to Temeraire is one of the book’s strands; the other is their training and first engagements in the Corps.
[*] I have a minor quibble about one of these aspects, but I’m not sure whether something that comes on page 145 should be counted a spoiler or not. I’ll put it in a separate post just to be safe.
I enjoyed this very much, finding it a solid, thoughtful, entertaining and absorbing creation. I’m looking forward to the next two, which will be released at the end of this month and the end of next; I believe, judging from advance reviews, that they are largely set out of England as relatively stand-alone stories. I do hope that we’ll get some exploration of the alternate part of the alternate history; things start diverging in this book, and I’m quite curious how important those divergences will be. On the whole, unless you’re absolutely allergic to both the nineteenth century and dragons, I’d say to check this out.
[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]
I checked Lindsey Davis’s Silver Pigs out of the library based on LiveJournal recommendations. Without that high praise, I might not have stuck with it, but I did and ended up enjoying it enough to request the next volumes from another library branch (the early ones are currently out of print, but will be coming back soon).
The prefatory Dramatis Personae list started promisingly:
Vespasian Augustus: A jovial old cove who has jumped up from nowhere and made himself Emperor of Rome.
But in the novel proper, it wasn’t two full paragraphs before I was knocked right out of the book:
When the girl came rushing up the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes.
It was late summer. Rome frizzled like a pancake on a griddle-plate.
I read that and said, “Wait—it’s A.D. 70, did they have pancakes then? Or griddle-plates, for that matter?” Possibly they did and this is the “Tiffany problem” [*], but all the same, my chain of association goes something like “pancakes — maple syrup — Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
[*] Coined by Jo Walton. Tiffany is a genuine medieval name, and yet no reader of a historical novel would put up with it.
Pancakes aside, it took me a while to feel that the style and content worked together. The first-person narrator is very much your archetypal private eye, all mocking cynical patter shielding wounded chivalry. I think of that as a very modern idea, and so I had some trouble suspending my disbelief about such a narrator living in ancient Rome.
Eventually the characters caught me, though, and I fell through the page. Marcus Didius Falco is our narrator, a low-level private informer (apparently a historical position, though probably less P.I.-like than Davis portrays). A beautiful young woman in distress runs into him one day; he investigates a bit, finds a plot against the new Emperor involving stolen Imperial silver (hence the title), backs off, but of course is drawn back in against his will.
I was trying to figure out if I liked this, not whodunnit, so I can’t really say how difficult the mystery is to a new reader. In retrospect, it seems both fairly well-constructed and fairly obvious. There’s one bit towards the end that struck me as superfluous even at the time, but otherwise I don’t have many quibbles with the plot. The real pleasure is in the people: Falco, the partner he finds, and the various strong secondary characters. I like the way the characters have established relationships, histories that matter, and problems that aren’t easily solved. And the combination of a more-idealistic-than-cynical P.I. and tough, sensible, kind women is generally a good one.
(I do enjoy the historical setting, but it’s not the principal attraction because I don’t know how far I can trust it. I was telling Chad about the book, and he said he’d heard it mentioned on some con panel or other; the panelist said that there are three detective series set in ancient Rome, and they sell in inverse relation to their historical accuracy. He recalled Davis as being on the high-selling end of that relationship. Me, I’m just surprised that there’s as many as three series with this premise.)
I’m quite looking forward to seeing how the characters develop over the next volumes.