![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeFirst, I have to confess that I was a bit "Hmmm" when I got to the end of Victory of Eagles and realised the next book was going to be set in Australia. Because, dammit, that's our colonial and genocidal history, and surely it should be the job of an Australian to add dragons to it? That was kind of like salt in the wound, though, because I didn't really care for VoE all that much to start with, as its characters blundered through war and politics. And the conclusion, that Laurence and Temeraire were to be transported to Australia, also served to conveniently isolate all the adult female characters on the other side of the world.
It's been two years since VoE came out, and (not that I've been thinking about it non-stop, because I'm not that fannish about the series) I've had time to think, "Well, it's not like any Australian authors are adding dragons to our colonial landscape, and Temeraire isn't exactly a series noted for giving massive roles to its female characters. Put them in positions of power and responsibility and deploy them rarely, etc." Which is the reason I haven't been all that fannish about the series, despite my love for the first book.
So that's the first disclaimer. The second is that, as some people will know from locked entries and my epic whinging on Twitter, I'm currently in the middle of a massive arthritic flare-up. Centred in my hands, because it's not like I use them in my job or anything. Anyway, this is my first attempt at extended typing since I went home early on Friday morning - as I'm going back to work tomorrow, it seemed necessary - but the simplest of activities are leaving me very tired, including holding a hardcover book. So it's possible that I missed things, or misinterpreted things, purely because I didn't have the energy to properly absorb what I was reading. (On the other hand, I also reread Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and finally figured out how Harry became master of the Elder Wand. GO TEAM 2007!)
All disclaimers aside: I really detested Tongues of Serpents. There's nothing more bitter than finding that a series you loved has taken a turn for the mediocre, right?
Firstly, I had trouble with the writing. This may just be a factor of my exhaustion, but it seemed like Novik would bring the audience in at point A, then skip back a few days to the conversations that set that moment up, and then skip along a bit further. That was mostly in the early scenes, but it was frustrating and distracting. Also: confusing to my delicate brain.
Secondly, I just didn't enjoy the story. I enjoy a good Simpson Desert travelogue as much as anyone, but even with the addition of a chase narrative -- a dragon egg has been stolen, and the aviators and their motley crew of convicts have to chase after it. Also, there are smugglers subverting the East India Company's monopoly -- the whole desert crossing sequence was overlong and dull. Whole chapters would go by before particular characters had dialogue -- I honestly forgot that Tharkay was with them most of the time. Tension comes from the raising of a deformed dragonet by one of Temeraire's crew, an African boy determined to raise the dragon in the face of aviator tradition. And then there are the bunyips, native carnivores who lay extensive subterranean traps with which to pick off the interlopers. Having grown up with a healthy childhood fear of bunyips, these sequences were a wee bit terrifying. Unfortunately, they sort of drizzled to an unsatisfactory conclusion, with the aviators placating them with food.
Bunyips bring me to the big, major problem with ToS: its depiction of colonial Australia. The sequences in Sydney are straight out of a primary school reader, if you went to primary school in 1960: soldiers are drunk, convicts are white, male and working class (except for a few Irish political transportees), transportation is a sentence of pointless labour with no hope of reprieve, Bligh is a pathetic coward, Macarthur is a lovable rogue, the Indigenous Australians of New South Wales are conveniently dead.
So let's break that down:
- The New South Wales Corps earned its nickname of "the Rum Corps" for good reason: with the lack of physical money, New South Wales operated on a barter system, and under the NSW Corps, this evolved into a rum-based economy. It is true that the regiments were made up of the dregs of the British Army, and were noted for being heavy drinkers with a taste for violence, but it was more complex than that.
Additionally, "rum" at the time referred to a wide range of alcohols, so there's no need for Novik's characters to come over all snobbish about whether or not the Corps can tell the difference between Jamaica rum and any other. Although that might have been Macarthur. Either way.
- 20% of the convicts transported in the Second Fleet were women. Most were transported for prostitution, although in many cases, that was defined as "being Irish and female". A number of convicts were people of colour; Australia's first bushranger was from ... hmm, I think the Caribbean, but don't quote me on that.
- There's specific reference in ToS to convict labour being "pointless," and tickets of leave being known only in theory. These puzzle me, as this was the era when convict labour was used to build Sydney's infrastructure, and tickets of leave -- which conditionally pardoned convicts, being essentially like a parole that enabled them to seek employment and even bring their families out to Australia -- were being granted, although not at the same rate as under previous governors.
- Honestly, whole books could and have been writing about Bligh and Macarthur's characters, the Rum Rebellion and the fight to govern Australia. Novik doesn't fall into the trap of putting Macarthur wholly in the right, but her portrayal of Bligh is straight out of Rum Corps propaganda. Part of the reason Bligh was deposed was that he was seeking to improve the status of working class free men, in the face of Macarthur's burgeoning squatocracy. Not that he was a hero of the working classes by any stretch of the imagination, but as with so much of Australia's history, it's More Complicated Than That.
- Which brings me to the Indigenous Problem. And this is what makes me the angriest, because we as a nation have struggled with a history of genocide and erasure of Indigenous people, and now we have an American author coming in and doing exactly the wrong thing.
So. Firstly, ToS is set in 1808 or '09. It's only a few years since Pemulwuy, leader of an alliance of Aboriginal tribes in a guerilla war against the invaders, was killed. Sydney was still subject to raids. A character makes an offhand remark about how all the Aborigines of the area are dead of smallpox, which I imagine would come as a surprise to the descendants of those 10% who survived.
I said in a locked post yesterday that all ToS needed was a friendly native guide, and it would have ticked all the colonialised cliche boxes. But I realised, at the end, that that was silly, because that would have involved having an actual Aboriginal character. Of the dozen or so Indigenous people who appear throughout the book, only a couple have dialogue, and only two have names. The great myth of the Empty Australian Centre, Populated Only By Monsters, is alive and well. The characters visit Lake Eyre, an area of considerable significance to many central Australian tribes, twice, and not once do they see a single Indigenous person. Aborigines, in Novik's book, are mysterious and unknowable; they leave traces upon the landscape and their distant songs may be heard, but they are not people.
At the end, Laurence and his people find a Chinese settlement in northern Australia, approximately where Darwin is today. Here, traders from half a dozen countries live in harmony with their trading partners, the Larrakia Nation. This is very nice, and I was curious to see how the Larrakia were magically immune from the diseases carried by the traders. (Trade did exist between northern Indigenous tribes and overseas nations, and artefacts from this commerce have indeed been found as far south as Victoria, but it's generally believed that they came via Indonesia, or Java, as it was then known.) It is in this settlement that we have our two named Indigenous characters, but don't go thinking they play major roles or anything, because that would be silly.
My hands, they hurt, so let me wrap up: Tongues of Serpents relies on a lot of old and ugly myths about Australia's past, and participates in the erasure of Indigenous people from our history. On the one hand, I'm glad it's not written by an Australian; on the other, it is depressing to have an American come in and write a novel which is firmly on the Howard-Windschuttle side of the history wars, especially in a series with widespread international popularity. I'm disappointed in Novik and the series, and angry, and ashamed to be part of a society that still facilitates such racist erasures.
