You can make your way by your own wits and claws, while I must always be dependent upon some male to protect me. Wits I may have, but claws I am without, and while hands are useful for writing and fine work they are no use in a battle. [p. 63]
Patriarch Bon Agornin dies, and his children gather at the deathbed to distribute his wealth amongst themselves. Penn the cleric hears his father's confession; eldest sister Berend and her husband Daverak take more than their share; Avan, enraged by Berend and Daverak's behaviour, mounts a legal case against them; Selendra is compromised by another cleric, Frelt; and Haner is dispatched to live with Berend and Daverak, away from her beloved Selendra and the only home she's ever known.
So far, so Victorian. Walton acknowledges a debt to Trollope, and adds that 'this novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like…if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology'. Bon Agornin and his children are dragons; the wealth to which Berend and Daverak help themselves is the flesh of his body (dragons only grow when they devour another dragon); and Selendra's 'compromise' happens when Frelt gets close enough to trigger a full-body blush, traditionally linked to marriage.
This is an entertaining comedy of manners, with doomed romances, buried treasure, disapproving mothers and loyal servants: and the darker sides of those elements, sexism and class privilege, oppression, servitude, snobbery, and (unlike Trollope) cannibalism. Set against this, there's a strong thread of radical thought, as Selendra in particular begins to question why the servant class must have their wings bound and be denied dragon-flesh. Selendra is probably my favourite character, though Sebeth (Avan's lover, lower-class and 'no maiden... head to toe an even eggshell pink') has a poignant and fascinating history, and a very satisfactory resolution.
Yes, there are humans (the loathed Yarge) but they are mentioned only in passing, apart from one scene at the end of the novel with an Ambassador. The focus remains on the dragons, with their railways and their hats, their legal and physical conflicts, and -- as the last line of the novel tells us -- 'the comfort of gentle hypocrisy'. A delightful pastiche with some thoughtful world-building.
I have owned this novel for over a decade: I read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list. I enjoyed it a great deal, and can't say whether I regret having ignored it for so long, or whether I'm glad to have read it at a time when it granted me some much-needed uplift.
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