Tongues of Serpents

[sawyl]

I can't remember whether I'm writing up Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels or not, but here are a few thoughts on the sixth, Tongues of Serpents. Set a few months after Victory of Eagles and Lawrence and Temeraire's sentence of transportation for treason, the book opens with the arrival of the dragons — Temeraire and Iskierka — and three dragon eggs in Sydney in the aftermath of the Rum Rebellion.

Initially caught up in the political machinations of Bligh and MacArthur, the de jure and de facto governors of New South Wales, the dragons undertake a mission to explore the interior of Australia after one of the eggs hatches, supplying Captain Rankin — the ranking officer and an old enemy of Lawrence's — with a delightfully supercilious young dragon who modestly decides to call himself Caesar. Trying to trace a route through the mountains, the group stumble on to a route that appears to be being used to smuggle Chinese goods cross-country from a port somewhere north of Sydney. When one of the eggs is stolen during the night, the group embark on a wild chase across the continent, frantically trying to catch up with the thieves all the time struggling to find food and water, beset by sudden storms and bush fires and bunyips.

Lacking the previous books' clear and persistent menaces — Napoleon, Lien etc — I felt that Tongues of Serpents lacked a certain narrative tension. However I suspect, from some of the hints surrounding the main thread, that this is intentional: that the book isn't really intended to standalone, but rather to set up plot elements for the next novel which, given the direction of the clues, might well involve the Americas.

But despite my doubts, I enjoyed the travelogue across the outback and I liked some of the new characters, especially the clever and rather lazy Caesar who, unlike Rankin's previously tractable and rather naive charge, seems able to manipulate his captain with considerable ease. As ever I enjoyed Novik's writing, particularly the way that she juxtaposes the 19th century speech patterns and behaviours of the characters with the more contemporary style used for the surrounding narrative and the descriptions, but I missed some of the more thoughtful bits about rights and slavery and morality that peppered the previous books — although Temeraire does at one point speculate about whether cows might be able to talk but might chose not to because they don't want to draw attention to quite how delicious they are...