Author: Felix Gilman
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Publishing Date: January 2008
Binding: Hardcover
Cover Artist: Stephen Youll
In December I received a review copy of Felix Gilman’s Gears of the City, one of the big releases of early 2009. From what I have read of it the book certainly looks appealing. Unfortunately I had not yet read Gilman’s début novel Thunderer yet, so instead of delivering a timely review of Gears of the City I set out to remedy that first. Thunderer is certainly one of the more interesting books I have read in quite a while. With it’s highly imaginative, sprawling urban setting it reminded me a lot of Mieville’s New Corbuzon. In more ways than the setting in fact. Like Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Thunderer seems to lack a sense of direction sometimes.
Thunderer is set in the enormous city of Ararat. In fact, it is so large not many people seem to know where the city ends. It is the home of countless divine power, constantly shaping, changing and reorganizing the huge city. One of these powers, the Bird, manifests itself again at the opening of the book. The novel follows thee people who’s lives are impacted by the bird’s return.
Arjun, musician and linguist of a small monastic order is just entering the city when the bird makes his appearance. He is on a quest to find the divine voice that haunted his monastery until recently. For unknown reasons their god chose to depart, without it’s presence the order is doomed. What better place to look for a missing god than the city where divine intervention is a daily occurrence?
A divine city is may be, it is far from a paradise for Jack. Lock up in a factory run by a religious order Jack is plotting his escape. The power of the Bird is just what he needs to win his freedom. When he does manage to escape he is forced to face the question of what to do with his newly won liberty.
For some the arrival of the Bird is not only a religious event but also an opportunity. In an experiment to harness the Bird’s power, the ship of Captain Arlandes, an officer in the service of the Countess Ilona, one of the city’s many rulers, is lifted into the skies and remains there. A new weapon that will help the countess to bully her neighbours. For Arlandes success comes at too high a price though.
The Bird inspires other too, a small group of intellectuals, heretics and scientists dreams of mapping the unmappable, ever-changing expanse of the city. The Bird, the ship, the Atlas, all elements that could spark violence in the turbulent city. While on the surface these might indeed seem like the causes of the chain of events begun by the Bird’s arrival, other, less visible, powers are at work as well.
This book has a lot of things going for it. Gilman’s style is interesting, it took me a couple of chapters to get into it, but once I did I found a number of engaging characters. Arjun in particular is well developed. The flashbacks to his life at the monastery and his journey to Ararat give us a good insight into his motivations. Something that Jack lacks to some extend. Gilman let’s his fantasy run wild in the city of Ararat, with strange cults, odd architecture and new rulers around every corner. Not until the later part of the book does it really dawn on the reader just how big this city is. The setting of his story is one of the big attractions of the novel but it also gets Gilman in trouble. The story is literally all over the place, characters shoot off in various detections on side plot, they do eventually get back on track but at several points in the novel I couldn’t suppress a will-you-get-to-the-point sigh.
Good characterization, a great setting and beautiful prose make Thunderer a fine début novel. The only thing that keeps it from being a brilliant novel in my opinion is the way he looses track of the story on a couple of occasions. Some story lines are left dangling or are not fully developed. The story line he does resolve doesn’t show up until somewhere halfway in the book and then gets ignored for the most part until the final chapters. With a little more attention to the structure of the book I think Gears of the City could be very good indeed. Thunderer however, did not quite live up to my expectation. I’ll be having a look at Gears of the City sometime next month.
