The Black Lung Captain

[sawyl]

Chris Wooding's second Ketty Jay novel, The Black Lung Captain, opens with a heist straight out of Firefly. With the crew destitute and down on their luck they decide to carry out an orphanage heist, reasoning that they are unlikely to face any serious opposition and that, because Captain Darian Frey is also an orphan, the whole thing is in some way morally defensible. Inevitably the whole caper goes horribly wrong and heavy resistance forces the crew to abandon the loot in favour of a night of heavy drinking at a near by port.

It is here, whilst sobering up from the night before, that Frey finds himself confronted with an extremely tempting offer. Harvin Grist, captain of the frigate Storm Dog, has located a downed airship supposedly carrying an ancient and extremely valuable treasure, hidden away behind an impassible daemon-locked door. Lacking the necessary resources to open the door himself, Grist offers to cut Frey in on the deal provided the Ketty Jay, and resident daemonlogist Grayther Crake, help him to get through the door. As should be obvious by now, the mission isn't the easy salvage job it initially appear to be and Frey soon finds himself caught up with the Awakener Sect, the Century Knights and his old rival, pirate queen Trinica Draken.

Although The Black Lung Captain follows on very closely from Retribution Falls — and makes no sense without it — the trajectory of the characters is slightly different: where, in the first book, Wooding concentrated on laying out the crews' problems and establishing their personalities, here he allows some of them to start to come to terms with their issues. Thus, Crake, who is trying to drown his guilt with booze gets pulled up short by the Malvery, the real alcoholic on the crew, who tells him that he should see his trauma as a turning point in his life: he can either pull his socks up and become the best daemonolist he possibly can, or he can spend the rest of his life looking through the bottom of a glass of spirits. Even Harkins, a man so frightened of everything that he allows himself to be bullied by the ship's cat, starts to come to terms with his fears after he realises that he has developed a crush on the ship's navigator and that she's hardly likely to take him seriously if he allows himself to be chased off the airship by a mere moggy.

The story generally works well and presses along at a rapid pace, with a couple of decent twists along the way and a handful of elements that might possibly be plot hooks for future adventures. I thought that the plot and character elements were more smoothly integrated than in Retribution Falls, where each character seemed to become the focus for a discrete block before moving into the background and allowing another character to take centre stage. I also enjoyed the way Trinica Draken was allowed to grow, moving from a gothic pirate queen stereotype to a complicated individual with serious issues. I particularly like the way that she bucked the trend of dread women commanders by not being terribly good at hand to hand combat — actually now that I think about it Draken isn't alone in this: the majority of the cast are enjoyable inept at real violence, surviving more through luck than ability.

While I habour a couple of doubts about some of the big revelations, which feel underpowered and lack the earth-shaking significance they probably ought to have, these are minor compared to the enjoyment I got out of the book. OK, so it's not the most profoundly intellectual read in the world, but it is good honest fun with decent characters, a fantastic setting, and more than a hint of the late lamented Firefly to spice things up.