Empire of Ivory

By Naomi Novik
Read: June/July 2008
Rating: Fascinating

I put off reading EoI for a long while because I just wasn’t in the mood. I read the first three Temeraire books back in ’06 and they have since been passed on to both my parents. All our paperbacks now have warped spines and white, messy edges. Signs of very well-loved books. Since I got to read them all in one big chunk, I let them wait… until the fifth was released. Now I’m frantically trying to catch up with the rest of the Temeraire-loving world.

And what a world!

Need I remind you? This is the Napoleonic Wars… WITH DRAGONS.

Laurence and Temeraire return to England after their year abroad to find the English dragons decimated by a mysterious disease. They are sent to Africa in hopes of discovering a cure, and there get themselves into a world of trouble.

I have to say, it’s getting a bit scary. More and more Laurence is getting in trouble with the Admiralty, and they keep threatening to lock him up and hang him. Then the African kingdom thinks they’re slavers and DO lock them up. This is an awful lot of imprisonment, Naomi!

Reading about South Africa, specifically Cape Town, was very odd for me. I was born there, but have spent maybe a year and a half there, total (one year after birth, MAYBE six months of vacation time). So, very, very strange. Particularly because I had family on the continent, if not at the time the book is set, then not long after. It’s really not nice to imagine my birthplace under threat from dragonic decimation.

The descriptions weren’t really in the same vein as what I would have gone for, but I suppose that is to be expected. I suppose a part of me always wants to have South Africa depicted at its best and most beautiful. I get irritated every time television shows decide that any Africa wrongdoing must have South Africans involved. Because the Nigerians are incapable of seeing their own shit through. (Wait, bad example…) I do wish there had been more about the lives of ordinary people. Some things felt a little stereotypical, like the attitudes of those ‘ordinary people’ being sort of flat and anti-kaffir. I dunno. It’s nothing to blame Novik for, she’s an outsider focusing on protraying a British male in the time of imperialism.

The African dragon culture she devised, however, is amazing. As usual, there’s a mock factual text excerpted at the end about said culture. The central African tribes have remained united due to their common dragon beliefs, which require a certain amount of trade and communication. In past books we learned that baby dragons learn languages while in the shell. Novik herself says they absorb what they can about their new environment before hatching so they’ll be better to prepared to face it, and among humans that usually means learning to understand the language. The Africans, however, tell their eggs stories of a recently deceased person who they feel deserves great honor and reincarnation. They call the egg by that person’s name, and the dragon is born believing itself to be the reincarnation of so & so. It’s quite ingenious. The mock text says the humans don’t believe the people are really reincarnated, but no word on what the dragons think.

On the whole, this book was frought with scary things. Death and suffering on all fronts, and the brighter points fewer and further between. It’s a very necessary books, but I’m glad to have started #5: Victory of Eagles and see things are on a different route there.