My epic problem

Last week, while home from work with a sore throat, I spent the whole day reading the new highly-touted novel, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. I liked it, as did the folks at Publisher's Weekly and Booklist (which gave it a starred review). Even more impressively, it showed up at number 2 on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list in its first week -- nice to see a first-time novel by an English professor up there in Patterson/Larsson land. Yet. Toward the end, I found myself racing through -- not quite skimming but definitely not paying close attention. This is a bad habit of mine, especially if I'm reaching the end of a book at the end of the day and know I won't be able to sleep until it's done. But I found myself also getting a tad annoyed and I realized what that was about.

It's the "Wait, there's more!" syndrome, commonly seen in action/epic movies (Wyatt Earp and The Dark Knight come to mind) where there is just one denouement/near death experience/ultimate showdown too many. Or three.

I realize that's kind of the point of an epic book like this one -- and it's the first part of a trilogy so there's more to come. But after awhile, especially in a single volume, it starts to feel like Too Much. This is the reason I've given up on Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. Each single volume just involves too many James Bondish escapes. Even in a fantasy where you've suspended disbelief (time travel and all that not to mention a brawny, sexy Scotsman who's also really smart and thoughtful, too), it's asking too much to follow these characters through yet another traumatic event. I think if you're going to follow the same people on epic adventures it helps to break it down into more digestible episodes like your standard mystery or thriller series. And one of the geniuses of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series, I realize now, is his ability to take us along on extended periods where nothing much actually happens, plotwise, but we're still enthralled by just hanging out with those characters in those settings.

I feel the need here to repeat that I really did like Harkness' book -- which contributed the new (to me, at least) feature of supernatural beings doing yoga together as well as great European settings and the always-alluring enticement of ancient secrets hidden in an old book in the archives of the Bodleian Library. This book, like Justin Cronin's blockbuster from last year, The Passage, (which I also read and liked but felt a little annoyed at its super-hype) is getting a lot of props as a sort of genre/literary hybrid, although the vampires in A Discovery of Witches are more traditional dangerous romantic hero types, not the viral predators of The Passage. I rated A Discovery of Witches 3 1/2 stars on LibraryThing which is my standard "enjoyable read" rating and I will probably read the next installment. The fact that I'm spending so much time thinking about this book indicates that it's good, good enough to stay inside my head for a bit. And I am glad to see a non-Patterson-violent-male thriller book up there selling well. As the review in the Miami Herald pointed out, Harkness's book uses elements from fantasy, romance and historical fiction, and I'm all for all those genres getting more play.

Maybe it's the English major in me, or the romance reader, but the parts I like best about these books are the characters and their idiosyncracies. I know you need lots of action to keep people interested and I know if you're talking about some kind of supernatural showdown there has to be lots of conflict with lots at stake. I just hope Harkness, Cronin and others (I'm sure their success means there will be tons of others) trust their readers, and themselves, to know that we're reading these stories for more than just one more Incredible Cheating of Death.

Oh yeah -- dragons again

I've already gushed several times about my fondness for Naomi Novik's Temeraire series -- it's the Napoleonic Wars ... with dragons! Which sounds a bit silly but as someone who's not a frequent reader of fantasy, I found the series enthralling. I was tipped to it, by the way, from an unlikely source -- the romance site Smart Bitches Trashy Books, where I was scanning through their highly graded reviews (of which there are not that many -- unlike most romance sites, these women are tough graders). I came across the review for His Majesty's Dragon, the first book in the series, and was intrigued, even though I don't think I'd read anything with dragons since an Anne McCaffrey book or two when I was a kid and they didn't really stick. Harry Potter doesn't count. Anyway I rushed through the first five ... and then had to stop and wait for Novik to publish her next one. Which finally happened this month, and I wanted it so badly that I downloaded it onto my Kindle and read it.

(Small diversion here: I find I don't read all that much on the Kindle, since I have such preposterous access to books on the job, but I think it is extremely useful for two things: 1) Classics, which you'd like to read someday but aren't necessarily sitting on your public library shelf. They are way out of copyright and thus cheap as hell on the Kindle -- I have loaded mine up with pretty much all of Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell and dammit someday I really am going to read them and 2) when a new hardcover comes out that you must have THIS VERY INSTANT and you're not willing to sit around and wait for the library copy to show up -- in that case, the Kindle is cheaper than buying the physical version and has the added attraction of being instant. That was the case, for me, with Tongues of Serpents.)

OK back to the book.

It's been long enough that I actually wish I had gone back and re-read the previous books in the series -- I knew the general outlines of why the characters were where they were (Australia, or as it was called at the time New South Wales) but some of the minor characters escaped me. It would be cool if series novels had little reviews like "previously on" segments of TV shows on DVD. Then again, I could easily have just looked up the earlier books myself on Amazon or LibraryThing or Novik's own website, I suppose.

There wasn't a whole lot of action in this one, in which the dragon Temeraire and his human "handler," more like partner, Laurence are sent across Australia looking first for a potential traveling route and later for a stolen dragon egg. What makes this series so great, though, and this book worth the while if you're already into the series, is the characterization and specifically the relationships between dragons and people. The dragons are intelligent, highly so -- there are ways Temeraire outstrips Laurence, such as mathematics and languages. But the dragons have far less sense of duty to King and country and overwhelming loyalty to one person -- his or her handler -- so persuading the dragon to do what you want can be an interesting negotiation. This is especially true for Temeraire, who was Chinese-bred and has seen China, where dragons are treated far better than in Europe. In the middle of that, the people have to navigate their own worlds where military and diplomatic protocol matter ... but so do morals and ethics. So Laurence, for example, has to deal with the attempts by William Bligh (of Bounty fame) who has been overthrown as the colony's governor and wants Temeraire to help re-install him -- even though it's clear that pretty much everyone on the continent hates his guts and he's a terrible administrator.

But it's not all complicated emotion -- it's all done with a nice light touch and a lot of it is quite funny, especially with the firebreathing dragon Izkierka, whose handler is Laurence's (and Temeraire's) former first lieutenant and who gets some interesting ideas of her own.

Does this all sound crazy? Maybe it is -- but it makes for an interesting setup and all kinds permutations that you could never have in straight-up historical novels of, say, Patrick O'Brian or Bernard Cornwell. I'm giving this one 3.5 stars just because I have high standards for Novik but I still recommend reading it -- though not if it's your first one. This is a series you want to read in order, from the beginning. We have the first four in the series in the collection of the Monroe County Library.