So...the Temeraire series...
Feb. 11th, 2011 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkI'd been hearing for ages about how the Temeraire series is a must-read. Realistic dragons (or so I'm told) plus Britain during the Napoleonic Wars should be instant win...right?
But man, reading the book is such a chore. The paragraphs are stuffed with exposition. Yes, I get that the book is trying to incorporate nineteenth-century British prose, but the result is hard to read. What's worse, the dialogue sounds very stilted and at times implausible. When I started flipping through the book, it was really jarring to hear Laurence refer to Temeraire (a male dragon, by the way) as "my dear." Umm...what? I've read Austen (and like her novels, and even had to imitate her prose once for class), so I have a sense of what British prose from the eighteenth-nineteenth century sounds like, and the writing of His Majesty's Dragon was really hard to swallow.
It doesn't really help matters that Laurence, the protagonist and POV character, is pretty darn wooden and hard to like. Furthermore, I kept expecting the "realistic" depiction of Temeraire--and Temeraire can speak fluent, perfectly proper British English as soon as he hatches. There was a line early on about Temeraire having to be "groomed and petted back into temper" and I thought, what, is he a giant housecat or something?
(And, of course, Temeraire has to be the ultra-special, ultra-rare Chinese Celestial dragon...which makes me cringe a little, since Eastern dragons don't have wings.)
I keep wondering if there are any books out there that don't treat dragons as humans in dragon skin, but rather as a wild, untamed animal species that happens to possess intelligence. Actually, wait, I believe Robin McKinley did pull it off convincingly in Dragonhaven. (K.J. Taylor also did it extremely well with her portrayal of griffins.)
But man, reading the book is such a chore. The paragraphs are stuffed with exposition. Yes, I get that the book is trying to incorporate nineteenth-century British prose, but the result is hard to read. What's worse, the dialogue sounds very stilted and at times implausible. When I started flipping through the book, it was really jarring to hear Laurence refer to Temeraire (a male dragon, by the way) as "my dear." Umm...what? I've read Austen (and like her novels, and even had to imitate her prose once for class), so I have a sense of what British prose from the eighteenth-nineteenth century sounds like, and the writing of His Majesty's Dragon was really hard to swallow.
It doesn't really help matters that Laurence, the protagonist and POV character, is pretty darn wooden and hard to like. Furthermore, I kept expecting the "realistic" depiction of Temeraire--and Temeraire can speak fluent, perfectly proper British English as soon as he hatches. There was a line early on about Temeraire having to be "groomed and petted back into temper" and I thought, what, is he a giant housecat or something?
(And, of course, Temeraire has to be the ultra-special, ultra-rare Chinese Celestial dragon...which makes me cringe a little, since Eastern dragons don't have wings.)
I keep wondering if there are any books out there that don't treat dragons as humans in dragon skin, but rather as a wild, untamed animal species that happens to possess intelligence. Actually, wait, I believe Robin McKinley did pull it off convincingly in Dragonhaven. (K.J. Taylor also did it extremely well with her portrayal of griffins.)
