sawyl | The Tropic of Serpents (Reply)

As already mentioned, I've spent this week tucked up with Marie Brennan's delightful The Tropic of Serpents, the second in the series of Lady Trent's memoirs. Taking up the thread again three years after the end of the first volume, which covered Isabella Camherst's journey to Vystrana and the death of her husband Jacob, the second volume covers Isabella's expedition to Eriga to study the Erigan savannah snake and the Moulish swamp dragon. Once again, she is accompanied by Thomas Wilker, a fellow protege of the Earl of Hilford, and, for the first time, by Nathalie Oscott, the Earl's granddaughter.

Despite years of planning, the expedition does not get off to a good start. With a chance in government likely to interfere with their ability to obtain the right paperwork, Lord Hilford advances the timetable giving Isabella mere weeks to settle her affairs in Scirland; affairs that include the care of her young son for the duration of her absence, a difference of opinions with her mother as to propriety of young widows leaving their children to chase dragons in foreign parts, and an embarrassing dispute with Lord Denbow, Nathalie's father, who is determined to prevent his daughter from ruining her marriage prospects by dashing off to foreign parts. As if all this wasn't enough, Isabella's chemist has been burgled and some of his notes on the preservation of dragon bone — clues to which were obtained during the Vystrana expedition — have been stolen by someone who is probably more interested in money than the well-being of dragonkind.

Combined with Lady Trent's framing narrative, the opening section show just how constrained and unequal life in Scirland is. Despite their obvious abilities neither Isabella nor Tom Wilker are able to attend the Philosophers' Colloquium, the former because of her sex and the latter because of his class, and instead must rely on Lord Hilford to present their work for them — not entirely surprising, given that my grandmother had exactly the same experience in the 1930s, with her supervisor presenting her work to the Royal Society! Brennan is particularly good on the hypocrisy of a society that thinks nothing of a widower with a young son risking life and limb in pursuit of glory whilst condemning a widow who choses to go in search of knowledge. Isabella is not particularly maternal, for although she loves her son, she is not particularly interested in the everyday mechanics of his life and has partly distanced herself from him to escape the painful reminders of her husband's death — later on she recognises how intensely unfair the idea of the dead living on through a child is because it denies the child's autonomous personhood — although she eventually concludes that while her husband lives on through their joint work in Vystrana, Jacob Camherst the Younger lives and should be valued only for himself and not simply an echo of his father.

Upon arrival in sweltering tropical Eriga, the party receive a dockside invitation from the oba to stay in the palace. Here they find themselves cooling their heels, the oba apparently uninterested in them, until Isabella chances on the oba's sister in the aghban — an area set aside for women as part of the local menstruation taboo. Presented with the opportunity to enter the Swamp of Mouleen in exchange for a fulfilling a personal request from the oba, Isabella and Tom feel they have little choice but to agree despite not being fully aware of the consequences of their decision. Entering the swamp, known colloquially by outsiders as the Green Hell, they are taken up by a group of Mouleen. Despite their childish ineptitude at many of the tasks required for survival, the Scirlanders are largely accepted by the Mouleen. A run of bad luck — including Isabella's near-fatal bout of Yellow Fever — convinces the locals that their visitors have been cursed and they persuade their guests to go through a ceremony of confession and reconciliation to purge the witchcraft.

Eriga is a portrayed as a bustling and cosmopolitan place where many different peoples and cultures mix. Trapped between bellicose and expansionist neighbours, the oba has called on the assistance of Scirland to help defend his borders in exchange for various lucrative contracts. The culture of the Yembe, the rulers of Eriga, is very different from the peripatetic existence of the Mouleen where frequent migrations are the rule, where groups are constantly in flux with members arriving and departing as the fancy takes them, and where possessions are minimal and held in common. Life in the swamp is hard — but not harsh — and the Scirlanders, despite their best intentions, are often a burden to those around them because they simply don't have the necessary skills to survive.

Both the swamp itself and the Mouleen are well realised, largely because Tom, Isabella and Nathalie don't hold themselves apart from their hosts but immerse themselves in the local culture. Not only does this result in an unexpected scientific breakthrough, but it also gives rise to the great moment of catharsis in which Tom, Nathalie and Isabella speak openly about themselves, their mistakes and their desires in a way that they couldn't have done whilst under their conventional social restrictions. This unburdening is, I think, the heart of the book; it's the moment in which the three principal characters snap into complete focus as they talk about themselves and each other with a rare honesty unvarnished by social niceties and politenesses. It finally explains and resolves the root of Thomas Wilker's early animosity towards Isabella in A Natural History of Dragons — it's particularly heartbreaking to see just how aware Tom is of the thing that his holding him back, whilst at the same time recognising that he cannot abandon it without a much greater risk to himself — as well as explaining Nathalie's desire for an independent life as an unmarried woman in a way that defies social norms — ours and the Scirlanders both.

Isabella's account of the expedition finishes with a feat of derring-do, a rite of passage, and the discovery of an unexpected way to fulfil the oba's request. Despite getting herself in a terrible mess thanks to a combination of her political naivety and her tendency to privilege the natural world above human concerns, Isabella manages to arrive safe home where she is reunited with her son and learns that Lord Hilford has uncovered some interesting information about the theft of the preservation notes — something that surely promises to complicate matters in future.

As might be apparent, The Tropic of Serpents pushed all my buttons. It's a solid, semi-Victorian fantasy which imagines might have happened if Dorothea Brooke or Marion Halcombe had been able to pursue careers as natural historians or how things might have been had Charles Darwin been a determined young woman living in a world full of dragons. It features some excellent world-building, which Brennan neatly embeds into the narrative by having Isabella adopt an integrated, anthropological approach to living with the people she meets on her journey, and continues to raise some thorny moral quandaries particular as to when and whether the rights of people to make money or to survive trump the rights of animals.

I'm very much looking forward to the next book — as Brennan says in her promo for Tor, the five book series is the new trilogy, so we're not even halfway there yet...