We are so close here, this is the penultimate book in the Temeraire series! (Check out books one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven elsewhere on the blog.) This is definitely building up to a climax with Napoleon, and it satisfyingly has a decent amount about Laurence and Temeraire’s relationship as well. It does have some weird jumps in it though, and it unfortunately doesn’t seem as though we will be ending with the rest of Temeraire’s formation.
The book starts with Laurence washed up on shore. He’s lost all memory of the past eight years, meaning that he thinks he is still in the Navy and is the captain of a ship. As it turns out, he’s in Japan while the country is closed to foreigners, and so he is taken in by a nobleman but is effectively a prisoner. Eventually he escapes and starts to make his way across the countryside aided by a servant. Meanwhile Temeraire is going nuts trying to find Laurence and in the process they are irritating most of the Japanese officials since they aren’t supposed to be there. Hammond is being delightfully annoying trying to get Temeraire to forget it. Of course though, Laurence bursts out of the woods to only be confronted by this protective dragon and hilariously when Temeraire insists that he is a captain and a prince of China Laurence only responds with “like hell I am.” Very amusing.
From there we journey to China and this is where things get interesting. My favorite parts of the book are where Laurence is trying to remember, or remembering fragments of things, and is just trying to make sense of it while his whole crew dances around certain issues like how he’s a disgraced captain and all that. There’s a very amusing passage where he realizes that Emily Roland is a girl and reads a letter from his mother asking after her and puts two and two together and starts to wonder if Emily is his daughter! Which she isn’t, but there’s another layer where his mom thinks he is the father and it’s all very confusing and funny.
Once in China, there’s an abrupt transition to an assassination attempt on Laurence and the other prince. They manage to escape unharmed, but the Emperor decides to send Laurence into China to root out some rebels that are smuggling opium from the English. They get out there and find a destroyed town, but learn that it’s an inside job, the same assassins are also trying to sow discontent in China. As part of this they find Arkaday and Tharkey who have been trying to find Laurence and warn him that Napoleon is now in Russia. Things change drastically after that, they depose the Chinese general and then Laurence and Temeraire head to Russia with the Chinese forces while the rest of the formation returns to England.
There’s so little of the book left but also all of Russia. This is the first we see of the country, turns out that the dragons there are extremely large hoarders of treasure, and the rest are very tiny and treated like servants. The Russians don’t know how to control their dragons, fundamentally, so it’s either treasure or physical violence as the group learns that in the Russian breeding grounds dragons are chained and starved. This becomes strategy, Napoleon is losing until his forces set loose a ton of breeding ground dragons who are so hungry that they start eating Russians and then fleeing to join Napoleon. The book ends with Laurence anticipating another battle with much more evenly matched forces.
There was a lot that I really liked about this book, including the loss of memory plot. Yes it is a little of “this is late in the series and we need to be reminded of a few things” but it was also very entertaining and funny. Plus it doesn’t hurt to see Laurence grow to care more for Temeraire and less for his government again. I do wish that there was more of this though, as soon as we hit China we are pretty much done with talking about it and it’s mostly mentioned in passing.
There are also some really abrupt and weird transitions, to the point where it is hard to follow. This first happens with the assassination attempt in China, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be revealed as a drill or some other plot at play here. But it was all sincere. It happens again when they decide to go to Russia, suddenly we are in Russia talking to the generals there with no sense of how we got there. The nice thing about this series is that it is similar to George R. R. Martin where Novik includes how they get from place to place instead of teleporting them so I hope that this trend does not continue.
Beyond that, it was interesting to see Russia and another outlook on how dragons are treated and integrated into human life. And I do find it fascinating how Novik continually holds up China as the exemplar for how to treat dragons rather than the “more civilized” Europe as would have been believed at the time. It’s a nice shift in power in history and how we view it by deconstructing a little why we should have thought Asia to be an inferior society.
Looking forward to the last book, I do wish we were with more beloved characters from throughout the series. Maximus and Lily have returned to England and I doubt that they would make it back in time to defeat Napoleon. I hope that there will be a way to bring them all together, I adored their presence in this book and I would hate to leave it off on a sour note.
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