Blood of Tyrants: a novel of Temeraire by Naomi Novik

This next to the last book of the Temeraire series is truly dazzling. While the idea of having Will Laurence, captain of the dragon Temeraire, get hit on the head and forget the last eight years of his life seems a bit fanciful at first, in its execution Novik masterfully replays for us and Will all that has happened to him since he became an aviator and how his life changed so dramatically, from being a British sea captain to an aviator in his Majesty’s Aerial Corps. In Novik’s alternate telling of the Napoleonic Wars, dragons, which are capable of speech and reasoning, are harnessed to be the countries’ aerial forces.

Laurence has always been tremendously sympathetic as someone who, when thrust into an unexpected situation, grasps (almost always) the essential dignity and character of whoever he is faced with - be they a dragon, a female fighting as a soldier, even his archenemy Napoleon Bonaparte. And if he is mistaken in his assessment, he is always quick to acknowledge his error.

Novik realistically portrays Will suffering from amnesia, without any insight into dragons or how countries make use of them, and also without his hard won experience of how governments may abuse power, taking any means at their disposal.  As he learns more and more about his life, we, the readers, are taken again over the terrain of these conditions which changed him. We already know him (and Temeraire), yet this helps us to know him better. Novik has used Will as our sounding board, for how he knows Temeraire and all of the others, and this plot device serves her well.

The scenes of this book are many - feudal Japan, a China challenged to take her place in the global economy of trade, and a Russia which boasts European culture yet oppresses its workers, human and dragon alike. The pace is swift, as we are accustomed to with Novik, with abrupt changes of fortune. Yet some developments continue steadily onward, such as Laurence’s realization of his present life, his attachment to Temeraire, and Napoleon’s march into Russia.  

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Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik

This is the seventh of the Temeraire series, set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Novik has made some changes in the events of that time, and also determined that those mythical creatures, dragons, are a strategic component of many countries’ military might. Western nations have Aerial Corps, using dragons instead of planes for battles both on land and at sea. A captain in the Aerial Corps forms a bond with a dragon when it is hatched from the egg, but each dragon also has a crew that rides it by locking onto a web of harnesses, dropping bombs and firing weapons. While the concept sounds a bit whimsical, Novik’s detailed knowledge of that historical era, coupled with her ability to spin an exciting narrative, makes the series a success.

The dragons are fully capable of thought, speech and action when they are hatched, although they are able to mature with experience, like humans. They are characters in their own right and Temeraire, who the series is named after, is both noble and yet touching in his desire to help his own captain, Will Lawrence be successful and be looked up to both in the Corps and in society at large.

What has stymied Temeraire’s goal is the corruption and treachery that is part of human endeavor, so that Will and Temeraire both have found themselves outside the Corps and even banished from England. In this novel they have been asked to join the Corps again to help fight against Napoleon’s latest venture in Brazil. Many African dragons closely bound with village communities in their native country suffered the depredation of the slave trade, losing men, women, and children taken by the Europeans to the New World. (In an earlier book, Empire of Ivory, we met one of those dragons.) Napoleon has enlisted the African dragons to attack and lay waste to Brazilian colonies, giving them the inducement of finding and recovering their lost villagers.

In South America we see a culture permeated with dragons, like China, but with a different slant. Novik is not content to leave dragons (or people, for that matter) in one state of development, but keeps devising historical scenarios that allow for new characteristics to emerge. Because so many native peoples were stricken and died by disease brought to them by Europeans, the dragons set great store on those that remain, and care for those in their community like brooding hens, eager to have them raise descendents to continue their close companionship.

All of this makes for some complicated plots and subplots, yet the careful reader is rewarded with a panorama of political intrigue and simple soldiering that rings true. We can feel how long it takes to sail at these latitudes, in those ships, and how long it takes to struggle through mountainous passes. The series is rumored to be drawing to a close, and I will not be the only reader sorry to have it end.

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Beat to Quarters by C.S. Forester

C.S. Forester was an English author whose series about the British naval Captain Horatio Hornblower was a great success both in England and the United States. Although Forester came of age during World War I, he was diagnosed with a heart ailment that kept him from enlisting. He studied to become a doctor, but found he was not suited to it and became an author instead. Beat to Quarters, published in 1937, is the first novel Forester wrote about Hornblower.

Forester was not a seaman, but he had read accounts of England’s naval exploits during the Napoleonic Wars, and made use of this material when he wrote Beat to Quarters. Eventually Forester wrote a total of 12 books about Hornblower, continuing his exploits and also detailing his early career.

Horatio Hornblower is a captain of a frigate ordered to South America to give aid to rebels in Spain’s colonies, with a view to breaking the Spanish domination of the New World. But after he has fought against Spain, news of an alliance between England and Spain against Napoleon changes things, and Captain Hornblower is forced to turn about and fight against the very foes he was risking his men and his ship for at the start of the book.

Forester was writing almost three generations ago, and there are obvious differences in his political and social views from a European writing today. Hornblower has definite opinions of men according to their class and race, and what kind of treatment will best engage their loyalty and their labor. He sees many of his crew as childish brutes. He believes they need to see floggings to curb their restiveness and that their captain must act lighthearted in the midst of heavy warfare to motivate them to fight with renewed purpose. Hornblower is all too aware of the primitive recruiting system which forces sailors to their trade against their will, but he lives with it as a given necessity, as with many of the other privations and hardships that the crew endures.

The wonderful thing about Hornblower’s character is how human he is. In spite of his prejudices, he is sensitive to the circumstances of those around him regardless of their station. When we read, we are getting a full picture of not just the action but of the characters – if the seamen are handling guns in full battle, we are made aware of the incredible backbreaking labor that’s involved, as well as the smoke, the heat, and the capability of return fire to demolish their limbs and their lives.

Forester makes Captain Hornblower vulnerable to self-doubt, yet once he determines on an action all his faculties are brought to bear on the situation, whether it is remasting the ship or fighting a two day battle. Forester skillfully educates the reader regarding the details of navigating and managing such a ship, so we can appreciate the careful calculation and boldness behind each move that Hornblower makes. I’m now reading through the series, and I wholeheartedly recommend them for readers who appreciate naval history, set with stirring action and memorable characters.

Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History / by Penny Le Coeur & Jay Burreson

In 1812, Napoleon and his Grande Armée boldly, albeit naievely embarked on the most illustrious, most daunting and most elongated military expedition the European continent had ever seen. The campaign proved a disastrous failure as the stark, bitter elements of the Russian winter decimated much of the emperor's army. But what if something else, something smaller indirectly contributed to the deaths of so many soldiers and, subsequently, the demise of the French Empire? Say, like the buttons on the greatcoats worn by all members of the army, buttons made of tin, which is now known to be comprised of properties which disintegrate in extremely low temperatures. It's no mystery that the French soldiers were noticeably worse off than their conquered counterparts, many of them serfs or peasants who'd never worn any kind of buttoned apparel yet were more adapted to the elements dressed more layered, better fastened garments of wool and sheepskin.

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Authors Le Couteur and Burreson, both chemists, not only believe in the seemingly somewhat far-flung correlation, but back up their hypothesis with hard scientific evidence, highlighting certain key groups of molecular compounds, particularly several very suspect alkaloids, which did the most damage. But 1812 wasn't the only time or place where molecules may have largely determined some pretty fascinating events. The book takes a very up-close look at some instances like the unlikely synthesis of heroin from Bayer Aspirin, or the inception of rubber used for tires from a combination of sulfur atoms and nitric acid, as well as numerous other interesting historical anecdotes. With short manageable sections, it involves chemistry at a practical level. So for people who may shrivel at the thought of having to learn any hard facts, it's not quite as foreboding. Uniquely, it shows, both visually and narratively, how a change as small as the position of an atom can lead to enormous alterations in the properties of a substance--which, in turn, can influence and even change dramatically the course of history. (540.9 LECOUTEU)

Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero / by William Makepeace Thackeray

Overshadowed for much of his relatively short writing tenure by others, W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863) was nonetheless a notable scribe, satirist and observer of human nature, particularly well-regarded for his fiction and editorial anecdotes by the reading public as well as the very same members of the British upper-class which he so cleverly caricatured. Born in India, Thackeray was brought to England permanently in 1815 after the death of his father. During the passage, his ship was shortly detained on the island of St. Helena where the then exiled Napoleon Bonaparte was pointed out to him. The emperor's permanent deposition, brought about as a result of the Battle at Waterloo, was an event which indirectly forms the backdrop for his 1848 serially published book Vanity Fair, the author's most celebrated novel and a prized work of Victorian literature.
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"Revenge may be wicked. But it's natural".

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Becky Sharp is a sly, artful woman always scheming towards a better deal in life. Orphaned as a girl after the deaths of her artist father and opera singer mother, Becky was kept at a privately run finishing school until she came of age and inherited a moderate income, though not one guaranteeing her financial independence. With her beauty, wit and devilishly clever charms of which few women can match, eligible bachelors and married men alike routinely fall prey to her wiles, exemplified when her hasty marriage to the easily manipulated Rawdon Crawley, done solely for want of financial security, is brought about without the consent or blessing of any of the man's relations. With Rawdon now her willing pawn, Becky feels no less limited to tampering with those in her immediate circle. She routinely intermingles herself into the company of men in high standing such as General Tufto and Lord Steyne, both fashionable aristocrats, while still finding time to aid Rawdon in cheating at cards and fleecing wealthy members of the ruling class out of their money.
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Though her flirtatious cocquetry is always winning her new male friends, Becky's shrewd, self-promoting lifestyle, enacted without conscience, has essentially eliminated the potential for female companionship. Amelia Sedley is the exception to the rule. A benevolent and compassionate though naievely ignorant and, in her own way, vainly fanciful girl brought down in society by her family's financial ruin, Amelia has remained Becky's loyal ally ever since their days at finishing school together, even spurning rumours that her own beloved husband Capt. George Osborne has been lured in by Becky's arts. But when the captain is killed in the war with Napoleon, Amelia's misfortune seems to only increase as her own father's spendthrift ways and misuse of her meager widow's legacy plunge Amelia and her newborn son into further destitution and misery while Becky's amoral behavior, often executed at Amelia's expense, seems to only elevate her financial status and social standing. Yet, tragically, such is the lot of those in 'Vanity Fair', where "the general impression is forever one more melancholy than mirthful".
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The title Vanity Fair is a direct homage to the term's original inception in John Bunyan's seventeenth century Christian allegorical treatise, The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a town called Vanity holds a year-round fair devoted to worldly novelties, tawdry attractions and all kinds of "licentious, fleshly" activities--"moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, knaves, and rogues, and that of all sorts." (Bunyan, 96)*. Thackeray's novel is in parts full-on parody while at other times soliciting solemnly stern lessons. Yet the narrative is always whimsical, the author's personal running commentary on the "upraised curtain" of life routinely conjecturing, as if a casual member of the audience, about the stage on which the world and its actors tread, their lives driven by pretentious yearnings and carnal desires perpetually leading to greivous, lamentable and often absurdly cruel consequences. The character of Becky Sharp, one of the most popular female literary figures ever since, was one of the first prominently featured anti-heroines to appear within an English novel.
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*Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1972.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: a Novel / by Susanna Clarke

With this, her breakthrough novel published in 2004, British author Susanna Clarke established herself squarely in the middle of the fantasy/magical realism genre. Though the novel's length (782 pages) and breadth of detail has undergone some scrutiny, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is clearly a superior work, blending the genres of history, culture, sorcery, magic and mysticism into a prolific, engaging tale.


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Though the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment had rendered much medieval superstition obsolete by the year 1800, remnants of the old ways of magic and sorcery still aroused intrigue in select circles. In Britain especially, a country long affected by fascination with the supernatural, persons and groups preoccupied with magic were prevalent. 

In 1806, a group in the north of England have formed a society known as The Learned Society of York Magicians. Essentially it involves several men who've accommodated magic (and its Faerie world counterpart) as a topic of scholarship, publishing some quite lengthy though largely unappealing papers derived from texts "on" (but not "of") magic. An intriguing new development occurs when the society discovers a reclusive, mysterious man named Mr. Norrell living a very ordinary life at a nearby abbey. The astounding thing about Mr. Norrell is that he is the proprietor of a library containing many lost and forgotten books, all "of" magic and all holding many strange, wondrous secrets from England's mystical past. Consequently, having absorbed the content of his collection over many years, Mr. Norrell is a real magician. 

After meeting with the society (and with some gentle cajoling from its members), Mr. Norrell agrees on a trip to London where, in addition to a number of other fantastical feats, he resurrects a beautiful young woman from the dead. Instantly Mr. Norrell is engaged in service to the government whereby, despite his slight reluctance, he performs some quite astounding military maneuvers in the war with Napoleon. All is well until another magician named Jonathan Strange arrives, attracting favor not only for his equally magisterial conjurations and tricks, but for his refreshingly eager ambition and desire to display both. Though Mr. Norrell is initially pleased to discover another practicing magician, it soon becomes clear that each's ideas of how to use magic are very different. For Mr Norrell, magic is a very delicate matter, something to be undertaken with extreme caution and heed to the potential ramifications. Strange on the other hand sees no reason why magic can't be taken to its most powerful extreme. Their continued opposition soon escalates into a situation beyond the control of either man. 

Authentic, sophisticated and scrupulously convincing, Susanna Clarke's masterful novel featuring the interwoven themes of history, magic, enchantment and sorcery is as complete a work on man's confrontations with the mystical realm as may ever be published. Fans of Neil Gaiman will find this awe-inspiring novel a worthy undertaking. Even its length, if viewed by the elongated standards of novels in the early nineteenth century, which in style and approach 'Norrell' closely resembles, can be understood and forgiven.