This is the fourth book in the Temeraire series (check out the first, second, and third books) and while I was hesitant going in it has ended up being one of the best installments of the series so far. We get to interact with the original British team from the first book while also expanding the world and in particular advancing Temeraire’s fascination with liberty and freedom for dragons from the previous two installments.
The book opens with Temeraire and Laurence making it back to England and asking about the other dragons. Turns out that all of the dragons are sick with a sort of flu that they haven’t been able to cure and is highly contagious, completely incapacitating all dragons in England. It started with a dragon from the Americas and at first they thought it was just a cold (this got Temeraire sick as well when Volly visited him two books ago) but quickly realized it was more serious. Dragons have begun dying and with Napoleon advancing the situation is becoming dire. Temeraire accidentally ends up in the quarantine area taking down a French spy dragon, but to everyone’s amazement doesn’t get sick. They suspect that when he got a cold last year they fed him a cure from Africa, and so the whole of Temeraire’s flying formation heads to Africa to try and find a cure.
Once there, they try everything they can think of, and make Temeraire sick in a number of ways. The dragons that are already sick continue to suffer though. It’s only once they get their hands on a rare mushroom that they realize they found it! Maximus was on the brink of death and starts to breathe more clearly. They head off to try and find more of it, but the jungle is littered with feral dragons, plus there are the natives that they cannot communicate with. There is a freeman/former slave turned missionary plus his wife that Laurence took with him (there’s a sidenote about how England makes Laurence the face of the abolition movement) that they take along to translate. In the jungle they find a whole cave full of the mushrooms and send the dragons back laden with the stuff to make a ship headed to England. While the dragons are away, a few natives appear. The missionary heads out to talk to them, but he says something wrong and gets a spear thrown at him leading to conflict and the humans are all captured.
They are brought to a cave and are made prisoners. Temeraire, Lily, and Nitidius (three dragons) manage to break them out and they find that the ports are all out war between the natives and the colonizers. The natives drive everyone out, and the missionary’s wife decides to stay as the tribe that captured her ends up being the one she was captured from. They head back to England and the dragons are well on their way to recovery, but they encounter huge mounds of dragon graves as well. There, Laurence learns that they released the French spy dragon in the hopes of infecting all of the dragons on the mainland. Both Laurence and Temeraire are appalled at that, and they steal some mushrooms to bring to the French. The book ends with Laurence heading back to England to face his punishment for committing treason.
Alright so many things happen in this book, and a lot of it has to do with Africa at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Slavery has been previously been mentioned, with it being clear that Laurence is against the practice, although he doesn’t do much. In this book he takes a stronger stance, propelled along by Temeraire who has learned enough to see the whole thing as awful. The book deals with this rather well, Laurence does not get away from the native tribe by insisting that he is not part of the practice of slavery as his whole country clearly is.
The one issue that I did have with the portrayal of the Africans is that they immediately kill the missionary. It is revealed that the missionary is from a tribe that they are currently at war with, but it felt very cruel to have him slain instantly when he clearly was not with the rest of his tribe, and had not for years.
It was also quite interesting seeing a new perspective on dragons. To the Africans, dragons are their ancestors reborn. The characters witness a sort of ceremony/celebration where they are talking to an egg as an old friend, and see the dragons treated with reverence and as leaders in the tribe.
I was skeptical of the disease at first as Temeraire clearly was sick earlier, so I assumed Novik was going back and changing the disease after coming up with a better idea for it. The addition of the cure was quite creative, and allowed us to actually revisit these characters that I loved so much from the first book finally. I was thrilled that we got to see Maximus and Lily again as well as their captains.
I am excited for the next book and how they deal with Laurence’s treason, personally I am hoping for us to spend a little time in England without expanding the world too much. But we shall see!
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