"I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on," Temeraire said. "I do not mind the deck."
He said it quite normally, not in the least as though he meant to deliver a compliment. [...] Laurence was left gazing after him in a sensation of mingled amazement and extraordinary pleasure. He could scarcely imagine a similar feeling; the only parallel he could conceive from his old life would be if [his ship] the Reliant had spoken to say she liked to have him for her captain: both praise and affection, from the highest source imaginable, and it filled him with fresh determination to prove worthy of the encomium.
As promised last week, here are a few thoughts on Naomi Novik's Temeraire (2006), the fun historical-fantasy flipside of The Music of the Spheres' bodice-ripping histrionics. Unusually, perhaps, for a draconic fantasy, it is a book that upon its release was much compared with both Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian. The latter presumably comes from the setting: Temeraire takes place largely in Britain, or in the waters around these islands, during the Napoleonic Wars - albeit a version of the Napoleonic Wars in which aerial divisions composed of dragons and their riding teams play a central (if not always well appreciated) role.
Specifically, the story is much engaged with the naval phase of the fighting, although our protagonist, Captain William Laurence, soon becomes an erstwhile sailor who sees the action only from some considerable way above the ocean. Having chanced upon an unusual dragon's egg among the spoils from a defeated French vessel, Laurence finds himself, unwittingly, in the right place at the right time when the creature hatches on the deck of his ship - and promptly selects Laurence as his future rider. Once a dragon has made its choice, virtually nothing can be done to persuade it otherwise, and thus Laurence's whole life is overturned. He, along with the dragon he names Temeraire, is obliged to leave his beloved navy for the rather less disciplined and respectable air corps. He spends much of the novel re-training as an aviator and captain for a rather different sort of 'ship' (since dragons, especially very large ones such as Temeraire becomes, have their own small crews for navigation, dropping bombs, and the like).
The Patrick O'Brian parallels largely end with the setting (and even then quite a bit of the story takes place on land at the training camp, or in the air), although arguably there is a little of Aubrey and Maturin in the dynamic between fiercely-, unquestioningly-dutiful Laurence and the impulsive, inquisitive Temeraire. But their relationship goes further than that, being much more openly affectionate and co-dependent. If the passage I quoted at the head of the post put anyone in mind of slash fiction... well, you wouldn't be far off the mark. (Novik is herself a fanfic veteran, I believe, so one can't help but wonder if these undertones are consciously, playfully, intended.)
One aviator whom Laurence meets at the training camp in Scotland compares his dragon to "a temperamental mistress", and advises Laurence when Temeraire acts up one day,
"Oh, give him a trinket and he will settle down," Rankin said. "It is amazing how it restores their spirits; whenever my beast becomes sulky, I bring him a bauble and he is at once all happiness again."
Rankin is an exception in his dismissiveness - and his relationship with his dragon is portrayed as an upsettingly neglectful, and at times even abusive one - but not in the essential quality he expresses. Dragons and their riders are like human couples, and in this society they are arguably closer, and meet on more equal (if certainly not wholly equal) terms, than the average husband and wife. A rider still has authority over his (or her) dragon, but the dragon can, potentially, answer back with significant strength (although, as with Rankin's dragon, it may be too cowed and depressed to do so); a rider is, moreover, frequently dependent on his or her dragon for safety and security, just as a dragon is at the mercy of his or her rider's care, both in and out of battle. Each has a separate sphere of activity to an extent, but as a pair they spend a lot more time living and working alongside each other in the heavily-pressured context of training and warfare than do than average early-nineteenth-century married couples.
And the emotional and tactile elements of the relationship are certainly present - there can be little doubt, I think, that Laurence and Temeraire are not just comrades and shipmates, but in some senses are in love:
Laurence had thought he wanted to be alone, but he found he was very glad to come into the dragon's encircling forearms and lean upon his warm bulk, listening to the almost musical thrumming of his heart and the steady reverberation of his breathing. The anger slipped away.
I confess I found myself reading the more subtexty passages aloud to Niall, with some glee; a particular favourite was:
When Laurence very carefully resumed the stroking, Temeraire made an odd purring sort of sound, and abruptly shivered all over. "I think I quite like it," he added, his eyes growing unfocused and heavy-lidded.
Laurence snatched his hand away. "Oh, Lord," he said, glancing around in deep embarrassment.
The O'Brian link, then, is limited - but the Jane Austen, I can definitely see. This is partly, of course, for the prose style (mannered, knowing, drily ironic, all in the omniscient third person) and the attention to social mores:
"But how did you find him and how did you come to put him into harness?"
Laurence himself would never have dreamed of interrogating a host in such a way, but he concealed his opinion of James' manners; the circumstances surely warranted some leeway. "I will be happy to tell you," he said, showing the other man into the sitting room, "I should like your advice, in fact, on how I am to proceed. Will you have some tea?"
More interestingly, there are hints of Austen in its exploration of what those social mores repress and conceal. Laurence must agonise, for example, over how exactly he might convey the news of his change of career to his parents, for whom it cannot be but a shameful thing. He knows that his father, who has always considered even the navy to be rather beneath any son of his, "would certainly neither sympathise nor approve", and
His mother's reaction he dreaded more; for she had real affection for him, and the news would make her unhappy for his sake. Then, also, she was friendly with Lady Galman, and what he wrote would certainly reach Edith's ears. But he could not write in such terms as might reassure either of them without provoking his father extremely; and so he contented himself with a stilted, formal note that laid out the facts without embellishment.
(Edith is the woman he has known since his youth and hoped to marry. Given his new station - and his duty to Temeraire, which is a full-time commitment for the rest of his life - this is now impossible, and Edith duly marries someone else.) His letter is, any case, ineffective; when Laurence stops off at his family estate on his way north to the training camp with Temeraire, he finds his parents, unexpectedly, at home, having left London out of season because of the embarrassment he has caused them. His mother is quietly devastated at the damage this has done to her son's prospects of a happy family life - but is somewhat mollified by meeting Temeraire. His father, however, is outraged and appalled, and forbids Laurence from returning home in the future.
Another social hurdle Laurence faces upon joining the air corps, besides the lax manners, is the scandalous fact that there are women aviators, since one particular - and militarily crucial - breed of dragon will only accept women. Laurence is utterly taken aback when he meets one ("she went about in male dress, appalling and illegal though it was"), but battles to be polite:
"It is very brave of you to undertake such a duty, M-- Captain Harcourt; a glass - that is to say, to your health," Laurence said, amending at the last moment and making the toast a sip; he did not think it appropriate to force a slip of a girl to drink an entire glass of wine.
"It is no more than anyone else does," she said, muttering [...]
Silently he repeated her title and name to himself; it would be very rude of him to make the mistake again, having been corrected once, but it was so strange he did not entirely trust himself yet.
Some, like Harcourt, find it a very difficult life; although women aviators are not uncommon, many of their colleagues still treat them with either kid gloves (as Laurence) or thinly-disguised contempt and the assumption of undiscerning sexual availability (in Rankin's case). Others, such as Captain Roland whom Laurence meets later on, are older or more confident hands, who find freedom and fulfilment in the less restrictive behavioural code and hazier social status of being an aviator; being something of a social pariah presumably matters rather less when even being acceptable would make one a second-class citizen. That Roland is a mother, for example, does not prevent her from returning to her calling; indeed, her daughter is training to follow in her footsteps, so that her dragon (Lily) will have someone familiar to take over when Roland grows too old to fly with her any longer. (Dragons generally live longer than humans, barring injury or illness.)
Above all, though, Temeraire is a delight to read, and I enjoyed it rather more than I'd expected. It's fluff - lightweight fun with nice heroes and hissable villains, and a happy ending that is never in doubt - but it's vastly entertaining and charming fluff, composed with enough style and wit to carry it off, even though the action is surprisingly limited for an adventure story. (Again, like Austen, Novik seems mostly interested in character interaction, and in particular in the romance between her leads.) I chuckled plenty, and wanted a Temeraire of my own within pages of meeting him; it did pretty much, I imagine, what it was intended to do.
And there are plenty of hooks for future tales, including some that may have more far-reaching consequences than this first one. Temeraire, who is (of course) an extra special breed of dragon, with a ravenous taste for books on all topics (Laurence has to read to him, though, since he cannot easily turn the pages himself - well, that and he clearly likes the excuse to snuggle), soon begins to Have Ideas:
"I have never met the King; I am not his property, like a sheep," Temeraire said. "If I belong to anyone, it is you, and you to me. I am not going to stay in Scotland if you are unhappy there."
"Oh dear," Laurence said; this was not the first time Temeraire had shown a distressing tendency to independent thought, and it seemed to only be increasingly as he got older. [...] Laurence was not himself particularly interested in political philosophy, and he found it sadly puzzling to have to work out explanations for what to him seemed natural and obvious.
Later, he off-handedly floats the idea of votes for dragons. Now that's a story I'd like to read...
~~Nic