sawyl | The Court of the Air

When I mentioned to

doctor_squale that I was reading a steampunk novel, Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air, I found my tastes criticised. But, having had time to reflect, I think both I and Hunt have been traduced: the book is actually deeply knowing, rather clever, and highly readable.

The story is set in a sprawling world of magic and steam and zeppelins, where wizards can channel leylines, where coke-fired automata have established their own state and where changeling children can be created by exposure to the Feymist. The Kingdom of Jackels, where events unfold, is a kingdom in name only; ruled by the elected House of Guardians, the king is a mutilated figurehead immured by an elite group of changeling soldiers who, in turn, are confined by magical torcs controlled by the country's wizards.

The two main characters, workhouse girl Molly Temple and Fey changeling Oliver Brooke, are both orphans who are forced on the run by the deaths of their respective protectors. Molly, who finds herself the focus of a group of professional assassins, descends into the underworld with a steamman called Slowcogs before eventually uncovering the reason for contract on her life. Oliver, meanwhile, flees with a dubious character called Harry Stave when his uncle is murdered.

Events start to heat up when Jackels' avaricious neighbour Quatérshift, an revolutionary state where aristocrats and anti-socials are cheerfully run through a murderous machine called a Gideon's Collar, decides to invade its bitter enemy. Assisted by a crazed Jackelian revolutionary leader, whose obsession with equality leads him to force his followers into identical mechanical bodies. In the resulting chaos, Molly and Oliver meet briefly before separating to play their own roles in the denouement.

The book is a sly combination of action adventure, whistle-stop world tour, and knowing literary and pop culture references. Some of the influences are obvious. It is impossible to read the sections about people being turned into machines without thinking of the Doctor Who episode The Rise of the Cybermen. Equally, the characters are named with a distinctly Dickensian flare, with some of the names, such as Peggotty and Nickleby, being direct lifts. The roots of the mythologies of the various different groups are also pretty clear: the loas of the steammen owning a lot to voodoo; the sacrificial religion of the Chimecans with its Aztec roots; and the Buddhism of the Jackelian Circlism.

I also found the political allusions rather enjoyable. Debates in the Jackelian House of Guardians feature the rowdiness of Prime Minister's Questions pushed to absurdity: the parties are kept separate by whips whose job it is to bludgeon members who get carried away with the excitement; while debates over policy are settled with clubs — debating sticks — with each of the debaters trying to club his rival into unconsciousness.

I also enjoyed the subplot involving the radical political thinker Benjamin Carl, author of Community and the Commons and obvious stand-in for Karl Marx, which plainly mirrors the split between the orthodox and classical in Marxism. The various Carlist factions, including the aristocrat-murdering Quatérshiftians and the crazed equalisationists, are obviously intended to be analogous with the political systems based on orthodox Marxism, Leninism etc. While Carl's original, classical, views have, Carl argues, been appropriated and misrepresented by monsters. As Carl might say, but doesn't: I am not a Carlist.

For all its fun, though, the novel does have weak points. The sheer speed with which events flah through means that a lot of the characters don't really get a chance to develop properly. Molly is packed full of determination, but generally light on everything else. Oliver fairs slightly better, thanks to a series of dream dialogues, but its still hard to get a handle on what motivates him. Of the other characters, the self-pitying Jared Black is good fun, the steammen are universally charming — I particularly like their habits of addressing humans as "softbody" and "my dear mammal" — and I found myself looking forward to the next appearances of the intensely narcissistic James Wildrake who, thanks to a bizarre drug called shine, is utterly obsessed with body building and sees everyone else as imperfect flabby specimens.

But of all the characters, the one I thought got the best treatment was Captain Flare, the head of the Special Guard, granted stupendous strength and near invulnerability by the feymist. Forced against his will to guard the people from the royal family, Flare has developed a sympathy for the crown prince and a distaste for his role in the ritual humiliation of the king. Not for nothing is he known behind his back as the Shepherd. Driving by his growing dissatisfaction Flare makes a series of bad decisions, albeit for the best of reasons, and finds himself deeply compromised before, as is traditional, finding a last chance to redeem himself.

I'm definitely going to try and slot The Kingdom Beyond the Waves into the next gap in my reading schedule.