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igenlodeA pair of sequels due to go back to the library: "Shadow of Night" by Deborah Harkness and "Empire of Ivory" by Naomi Novik. I feel a bit guilty about sitting on the latter for so long (and keeping it off the shelves), but it has taken me several months and multiple renewals to get through the other (Diana Bishop) novel. Not because it was a bad book, but because it wasn't quite un-put-downable enough for a 550-page tome; I've had it out for so long that they're now advertising a TV series of the original; novel ("A Discovery of Witches")!
Ideally I should really have reread the latter first, since "Shadow of Night" doesn't make a lot of allowances for a lapse of several years between volumes; a lot of minor characters from the previous book are referenced in passing on the assumption that the reader will remember who they are and why they are significant, and the whole daemon thing is taken as read -- most of us have an idea what it means to describe characters are vampires or witches, but the role of the third class of non-humans was presumably elucidated in the previous book, because it remains almost totally opaque here :-p But all you really need to remember is that Diana Bishop, descendent of Salem witches, and Matthew the vampire have gone back into Elizabethan England to look for the lost document categorised as 'Ashmole 782' which was the pivotal McGuffin of the original novel. The author is apparently a history professor herself, and the time-travel descriptions of Diana getting used to everyday life in the sixteenth century are intriguing and convincing in their detail -- the characters also manage to run into all sort of important historical personages of the era, to a degree that begins to strain credulity somewhat (the author attempts to defend against this by having Diana herself remark upon it, but the character subsequently goes on to become best friends with Mary Sidney!)
From the plot point of view it's one of those annoying-in-retrospect novels in which the characters spend an entire book in the pursuit of something only to find themselves reset back to their former positions at the end of the volume; having finally got their hands on Ashmole 782, they discover that it has already suffered the damage that the future copy will exhibit, they can't take it back to the future with them, and so far as I could tell they don't actually manage to decipher it before they have to give it up. So the entire adventure has been for nothing in that respect. However it is hinted that they have succeeded in changing the past considerably during their stay there, and that this is likely to have consequences for their own time in future novels...
The aspect of the book that probably impressed me the most is the handling of Philippe de Clermont, mediaeval vampire lord and Matthew's progenitor (vampire 'family' relationships are rather confused, which results in the amusing situation of one of Matthew's retainers addressing Diana throughout as 'Auntie'). Philippe starts off as a ruthless threat to any relationship between Matthew and Diana, and all we really know about him is that he eventually died in the Second World War, before the present-day characters ever met. But by the end of the book both Diana's and the readers' perception of the character has changed, and we come to grieve for his forthcoming fate as much as Matthew does -- it's a clever shift.
"Empire of Ivory" puzzled me a little because I was pretty certain that I had read it before, out of sequence, since I remembered being puzzled by the gap between this and "Temeraire" and by the character of the Chinese dragon Lien -- however on this reading I really didn't recognise any of the events beyond the opening pages! (The scene of the marriage between a reluctant female officer of the dragon corps and her upright naval lover who doesn't understand why she would hesitate to regularise the situation felt like a replay of events from the first book, since the surrounding African context didn't ring any bells at all -- but presumably it wasn't, and it was in fact this half-recalled episode that I was remembering from a previous reading...)
The description of the dragon plague is terrible enough not only to justify the African expedition but the twist at the end, where Laurence becomes a traitor at the behest of Temeraire and his own conscience. As above with Philippe, I liked the handling of Nelson as a minor character here -- at first it looks as if the author is going to take a revisionist route and mark him off as simply a preening, prejudiced authority figure, but in the event, having built him up as a touchy, vain opponent to Wilberforce and the anti-slavery campaign (which he was), she then brings in his (equally genuine) personal charisma and dedication to his duty to make a much more nuanced character. And I liked the detail that the Nelson of this universe wears melted medals to boast of his close encounter with a dragon at Trafalgar :-D
As usual, one of the charms of this series is the alternate-history take on real-world events (Baron Hausmann's redevelopment of Paris into dragon-friendly boulevards, for example!)
Ideally I should really have reread the latter first, since "Shadow of Night" doesn't make a lot of allowances for a lapse of several years between volumes; a lot of minor characters from the previous book are referenced in passing on the assumption that the reader will remember who they are and why they are significant, and the whole daemon thing is taken as read -- most of us have an idea what it means to describe characters are vampires or witches, but the role of the third class of non-humans was presumably elucidated in the previous book, because it remains almost totally opaque here :-p But all you really need to remember is that Diana Bishop, descendent of Salem witches, and Matthew the vampire have gone back into Elizabethan England to look for the lost document categorised as 'Ashmole 782' which was the pivotal McGuffin of the original novel. The author is apparently a history professor herself, and the time-travel descriptions of Diana getting used to everyday life in the sixteenth century are intriguing and convincing in their detail -- the characters also manage to run into all sort of important historical personages of the era, to a degree that begins to strain credulity somewhat (the author attempts to defend against this by having Diana herself remark upon it, but the character subsequently goes on to become best friends with Mary Sidney!)
From the plot point of view it's one of those annoying-in-retrospect novels in which the characters spend an entire book in the pursuit of something only to find themselves reset back to their former positions at the end of the volume; having finally got their hands on Ashmole 782, they discover that it has already suffered the damage that the future copy will exhibit, they can't take it back to the future with them, and so far as I could tell they don't actually manage to decipher it before they have to give it up. So the entire adventure has been for nothing in that respect. However it is hinted that they have succeeded in changing the past considerably during their stay there, and that this is likely to have consequences for their own time in future novels...
The aspect of the book that probably impressed me the most is the handling of Philippe de Clermont, mediaeval vampire lord and Matthew's progenitor (vampire 'family' relationships are rather confused, which results in the amusing situation of one of Matthew's retainers addressing Diana throughout as 'Auntie'). Philippe starts off as a ruthless threat to any relationship between Matthew and Diana, and all we really know about him is that he eventually died in the Second World War, before the present-day characters ever met. But by the end of the book both Diana's and the readers' perception of the character has changed, and we come to grieve for his forthcoming fate as much as Matthew does -- it's a clever shift.
"Empire of Ivory" puzzled me a little because I was pretty certain that I had read it before, out of sequence, since I remembered being puzzled by the gap between this and "Temeraire" and by the character of the Chinese dragon Lien -- however on this reading I really didn't recognise any of the events beyond the opening pages! (The scene of the marriage between a reluctant female officer of the dragon corps and her upright naval lover who doesn't understand why she would hesitate to regularise the situation felt like a replay of events from the first book, since the surrounding African context didn't ring any bells at all -- but presumably it wasn't, and it was in fact this half-recalled episode that I was remembering from a previous reading...)
The description of the dragon plague is terrible enough not only to justify the African expedition but the twist at the end, where Laurence becomes a traitor at the behest of Temeraire and his own conscience. As above with Philippe, I liked the handling of Nelson as a minor character here -- at first it looks as if the author is going to take a revisionist route and mark him off as simply a preening, prejudiced authority figure, but in the event, having built him up as a touchy, vain opponent to Wilberforce and the anti-slavery campaign (which he was), she then brings in his (equally genuine) personal charisma and dedication to his duty to make a much more nuanced character. And I liked the detail that the Nelson of this universe wears melted medals to boast of his close encounter with a dragon at Trafalgar :-D
As usual, one of the charms of this series is the alternate-history take on real-world events (Baron Hausmann's redevelopment of Paris into dragon-friendly boulevards, for example!)