A Natural History of Dragons

[sawyl]

Last weekend I zipped through Marie Brennan's excellent A Natural History of Dragons, which takes the form of an autobiographical account of the early life of the eminent naturalist and explorer Isabella, Lady Trent. The central story is surrounded by a framing structure that makes it clear that Isabella is looking back at her life from great age and success, smoothing the way for knowing interjects and snarky side comments about the events of history, science, and literature that go a long way to building a convincing world.

The book opens with Isabella in her mid-teens. Obsessed with biology in general and dragons in particular, she gets herself into a series of unladylike scrapes culminating in a serious injury when she tags along on a wolf-drake hunt. Compelled to take up more suitable pursuits, Isabella spends a couple of years practicing life drawing and studying horses as as a substitute for dragons. Upon coming of age at sixteen, she travels to Falchester to launch herself on society where she plans to snag herself an acceptable husband. Thanks to an unfortunate social gaffe, she comes to the attention of Jacob Camherst and the pair soon decide to marry.

The first part of the book goes a long way to establish Isabella's character and to sketch out the nature of her world, which seems to be somewhat similar to late Regency England. The names smack of English counties, from Falchester to Gostershire, Isabella's father seems the very acme of an enlightened country squire with his books and his hunting, while her off-stage best friend, Amanda Lewis, is positively obsessed with their world's equivalent of Mrs Radcliffe. The social scene, too, is somewhat Austenian with the women trying to find themselves a husband as quickly as possible while eligible men swan around waiting to be snagged.

The scene then shifts forward a few years to find Isabella rekindling her interest in natural history to try to remedy the terrible depression brought on by a recent miscarriage. So when she learns that Lord Hilford is planning an expedition to Vystrana to study rock-wyrms, she does everything in her power to get Jacob a position in the company and, once this is secure, promptly persuades the men to allow her to accompany them.

Discreetly skipping over the travel, save only for a dramatic dragon attack, Isabella picks up her account with the party's arrival in the village of Drustanev deep in interior of Vystrana. Here she finds the conditions primitive, the conditions cold, and the locals rather less welcoming than expected. Added to this the boyar's local representative who was to have been the party's point of contact seems to have vanished, shortly after getting cold feet about the entire visit. With the surrounding hills teeming with smugglers and the local dragons on the warpath, the circumstances aren't exactly ideal for a spot of field biology even before the party visit a set of ancient ruins complete with a very real curse.

With the start of the expedition proper, Isabella finds herself able to shake off the worst of society's rules and to revert to something like her teenage self. She cheerfully talks Jacob into allowing her to accompany him on some of the field trips, slips out in her nightgown to pursue mysterious strangers seen lurking around the village, and uncovers some key facts about dragon biology. All of which goes a long way to show Isabella in her best light — clever and insightful but also reckless and impulsive. Jacob, too, comes across well as an enlightened and liberal man who loves his wife — rather against the odds of their first meeting — and who is willing to allow her the freedom to do what she loves, albeit with a certain amount of reluctance given Isabella's talent for getting herself into scrapes.

The other two principals, Lord Hilford and his assistant Mr Wilker, are slighter characters but provide important support for the rest of the story. Hilford is older than the others and more willing to take Isabella's behaviour in his stride. Tom Wilker, in contrast, disproves very strongly of Isabella's conduct, partly because he is acutely aware of having had to work his way up to his current position from his working-class roots — something that may have left him more sensitive to propriety than the effortless aristocracy of the others — and partly, I suspect, because he believes that Isabella Camherst's position on the expedition is owes more to her husband's coattails than it does to merit.

In a particularly telling moment Lord Hilford, fed up with his fellow travellers' bickering, ticks off Tom for quibbling over a point of science just because it has been raised by Isabella and slaps down Isabella for being a snob, saying "Mrs Camherst, Tom Wilker's birth may be below your own, but he has raised himself up by his own brilliance and effort, which is something I should expect you of all people to respect." Causing the narrator, the older Isabella, to remark:

Lord Hilford was, of course, correct; but his insight did not go far enough. I envied Mr. Wilker, for the simple fact that our society made it easier to transcend class than sex. Which was not only unfair of me, but some respects inaccurate: there is sometimes a greater willingness to make an exception for a woman than a man, so long as her breeding is good enough. But at the tender age of nineteen, I had not yet seen enough of the world to understand that.

Brennan, M., (2014), A Natural History of Dragons, Titan, 261

The clever use of an older, more experienced narrator also helps a great deal with the world building, making it possible to insert throwaway comments about books, places, people and events that the reader of Lady Trent's autobiography might be expected to understand implicitly but which, to a fantasy reader, serve to add layers of convincing detail. Thus at the outset of her description of the expedition to Vystrana, the narrator begs the reader's indulgence and tells them to ignore anything they might read in her early account about Vystrana being, "...a land of wailing fiddles, flashing-eyed women, and sweet, strong wine", immediately establishing and popping the cliched description of the place.

Highly recommended.