rusty_halo

I finished His Majesty’s Dragon and was very disappointed by it.

It was competently written, but terribly, terribly bland. The world never came to three-dimensional life; I never smelled the ocean or felt the wind through my hair.

The specific problems I had were:

1) It was passionless. It lacked any kind of edge or bite. Everyone was basically decent and logical; no one was a screwed up irrational mess. Human beings aren't machines, but these characters were. Even the traitor had perfectly logical reasons for doing what he did. And Laurence was nauseatingly perfect, flawed only in instantly understandable, forgivable ways. He was shocked by the existence of female aviators, and then just... never mentioned it again, never even struggled to get over a lifetime of institutionalized sexism. He was friendly, social, kind... never irrational, never bitter, never traumatized... completely inhuman. Or, a one-dimensional slice of humanity labeled "likable protagonist" with nothing else added.

I realize I'm a bit biased in that I always go for the characters who are complete emotional wrecks, but it just compares so badly to the Lymond Chronicles. Dunnett has such a nuanced understanding of human psychology; every character is a mess of conflicts and issues and motivations that even they don't understand. I'm not saying every lead character has to have an emotional breakdown and try to kill himself at least once per book like Lymond does, but there's got to be some middle ground. Some complexity, some motivations that don't all tie up into a neat little bow.

2) It lacked humor. There were probably a few mildly amusing moments strewn throughout, but nothing that made me laugh or even smile. This is a dealbreaker for me in pretty much any media.

3) It was so unlikely. No one has ever spied a female aviator before? Word has never slipped out, from a stablehand or a family member or a random bystander? Seriously? It's just absurd to think that the aviators would be able to have this whole other culture--while serving as a military arm of the country--that the rest of society could be so ignorant of.

It was like the writer wanted to set her book in Napoleonic times, but wanted equal gender roles in the action parts. I applaud the instinct, but she didn't pull it off convincingly, and it just felt like she was trying to have her cake and eat it too. I would've been much more interested in seeing how the existence of dragons--and a species that required female riders--would've changed the structure of overall society, rather than pretending that the female aviators could somehow be hidden off in their own utopia of equality. (I did get the impression that this might be explored further in later books. I liked the female characters--or at least the idea of them, though sadly they lacked psychological realism just like everyone else. And I liked how clearly unfair it was that they had to be so offensively constrained whenever the need arose to blend into "normal" society. It was like the sketch of an interesting idea, but it never went anywhere.)

4) It was so black-and-white. The good characters like dragons, the bad characters dislike dragons. Okay.

(She sort of tried to muck it up with the traitor who did it to protect his dragon, and the guy who risked his life for the country but treated his dragon like shit, but ultimately the ambiguity was minimal. The characters were just too simplistic and it was too obvious where our sympathies were meant to lie.)

5) It was squicky. The whole idea of the aviators having to give up their whole lives in order to spend every moment with their dragons? ICK. It's like those soulbonding fics where the characters "own" each other. There's a reason I choose to be single and childfree; the idea of chaining myself to another being is viscerally horrifying. And the book sets up this incredibly squicky situation and then doesn't even bother to justify it; as far we can tell, Temeraire would be fine if Laurence wanted to go off to theaters and parties every so often. (I suppose we can assume they're tied together by their own obsessive codependent bond rather than by actual necessity, but that's even squickier!) I get the sense we're supposed to be cooing over their ~bond~, but I found it horrifying--it's not a healthy relationship if the partners have no lives apart from each other.

The whole idea of the dragons being enslaved by humans (by chains, ignorance, and dependence on their perhaps-equally-brainwashed human masters) and used to fight human wars is so obviously squicky that I can only assume it's a setup for Novik to deconstruct it in later books, so I won't get into why it's horrifying (and at least Temeraire seems to question it a bit, although it is also creepy that he abandons his questioning and just goes along with it because Laurence wants him to and Laurence is just so unbelievably awesome [why, exactly?!]). To the humans, the dragons occupy a position somewhere between children, pets, partners, vehicles, and weapons, the convergence of which is grotesque no matter what angle you look at it from.

Too bad.

Meanwhile I am also reading The Pitt Report, an odd and kind of fascinating look at David Bowie through the eyes of his early manager (fascinating mainly for how much goes unsaid and how much Pitt [apparently unconsciously] reveals of his own biases), and Bruce Campell's autobiography If Chins Could Kill, which isn't as interesting as I thought it would be.

Waiting on the shelf: C. S. Forester's Ship of the Line (the next Hornblower book), Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, and Elizabeth Pope's The Perilous Gard. Canceling my cable TV was a good idea! Any recommendations for which I should read first?

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.