Sunday, April 29, 2018

Book Review: A Natural History of Dragons, by Marie Brennan

WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS!?

Erm, excuse me. That was a bit uncalled for. Anyway:



Advertising is deception, and I'm no stranger to warping the truth when it better suits me, but even so I can't help but feel a bit betrayed by A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent. I was expecting more dragons.

The subtitle is the most important part of that title - ANHD is not any sort of faux textbook. It is a fantasy novel, written in the style of, as it says, a memoir by one 'Lady Trent'. When this framework is at its best, we get some very good insight into her character. We see the germination of an old woman who is passionate about her study, sometimes critical of the society around her, and nostalgic for her youth. We follow her from childhood as she discovers a love of dragons and peruses her urge to study them first into marriage and then into a perilous expedition to a foreign land. She recounts her thoughts and actions and intersperses the writing with a few of the drawings she made during her adventure, many of them depicting the dragons she has encountered.

Although Lady Trent has a strong voice, the other aspects of the novel fall short. The society it depicts is vaguely Victorian, and quite often Trent voices her discontent with the way woman are treated and how she, as a child, had little say in the path of her life, but it all feels a bit abstract. Her mother is the only character that embodies the negatives of this society in any real way, and she is only present in the margins of earlier chapters. Lady Trent's father is shown as a kind person who lets her indulge in her dragon fixation, and though he forces her to marry, the grooms he lets her choose from are all tailored to her preferences. The man she ends up marrying--Jacob Camherst--also has an interest in dragons, and is more than happy to continue supplying her with books and research journals about them. Although she has to persuade Jacob somewhat in order to accompany him on his dragon-hunting expedition, his resistance is flimsy. Throughout the book she experiences very little fallout for any of the taboos she violates, and her social commentary amounts to little more than "Patriarchy sure sucked back then, but luckily I dodged most of it."

This would be less of an issue, I think, if we understood something about why Jacob and her father are apparently such great exceptions. But they, as with most of the supporting cast, are very underwritten. We get some sense of what they do and why they are interested in dragons, but they show no growth, and we do not spend enough time with them to get to know how they think. Lady Trent's maid, Dagmira, is the only secondary character I felt I understood at the end of the book. The others feel as if they exist only to fulfill their function in the plot; they seem disconnected from the society they were born into. As it is, we are told about a system of oppression without seeing any of its actors or victims.

Alone, this shortcoming might be overcome by a strong plot or an interesting world, but neither are quite as engaging as they should be. The setting is generic. It's not Tolkien-esque fantasy--there are no elves, nor is there any magic--but more of an alternative Earth with dragons. It feels very similar to Ursula le Guin's Malafrena, which was an alternate history that took place in a fictional European country. But while Le Guin takes the time to flesh out the geographic and political landscape of her world, Brennan has Lady Trent gloss over most of the details. In the same way Will Save the Galaxy for Food relies mostly on established tropes to serve as shorthand for its setting, ANHD just sort of assume we get what's going on. The result is a world that feels empty and unexplored. This is a world with dragons, and though they are the primary motivator of our protagonist, they seem like an almost superfluous layer of the world. They are curiosities, little more than exotic big game. There is no indication of how they might have shaped this land's history, or a hint at what alternative taxonomy they might fit into in this world. It's as if dragons showed up in Victorian-era England and everyone just shrugged and ignored them. They exhibit fantastic abilities, yet it seems no one was bothered to really study them before our hero. There has to be a first, I guess, but because we don't have a good understanding of our setting's history it all feels very arbitrary.

Lady Trent talks about how she has become famous for her dragon discoveries, but we only get a glimpse at what she has accomplished. She has lived a full life, but these memoirs cover only a small section of her personal development. Throughout the story she mentions the other adventures she's had, and all of them sounded much more interesting that what was on the page before me. We don't get enough gossip to be engaged in drama; we are too insulated from her society to really get a feel for it; and the plot does not start to get very tense or interesting until the last 50 or so pages, when actual stakes are introduced.

The dragon details we do get are intriguing, but neat tidbits do not make a compelling narrative. In a book called A Natural History of Dragons, there is barely enough of either the science or the animals to hold my curiosity--another unfortunate waste of a good title. There are sequels to this book, presumably where more dragons are seen, but spreading out those scraps just makes for multiple unsatisfying meals. This endeavor would have been better as an anthology of Lady Trent's adventures, or a more scholarly tome with dragon details. As it is I'm not really interested in finding out more, either about the dragons or Trent herself.

Yet, even after everything I have said, this is not a bad book. I was never mad while reading it, only a little bored at points. I can't quite say it's good, but it far surpasses something like Autonomous, which was interesting because of its flaws not in spite of them. The prose itself is good, and Lady Trent is a strong character. The dragons, when they do show up, are interesting and creative; if only they showed up more. The artwork is lovely, but too sparse to elevate the work as a whole. A Natural History of Dragons displays real talent and has good ideas, but the entirety of the work is less than the sum of its parts. This is just above average as a novel, I'd say. Probably still worth a read, if you like dragons, but only if it's on sale.

 A Natural History of Dragons is available on Amazon and in most retail book stores.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Popular Posts