Napoleonic Wars AND Dragons?

It’s always nice when the first line of a book is something like “The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood.” That’s the kind of opening that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, because it means that action and historical adventure are both to come.

I don’t generally read much fantasy, not because of any sort of aversion to the genre as much as the fact that I just haven’t gotten around to much of it yet. But the idea a fantasy series set during the Napoleonic Wars, as opposed to the run of the mill unspecific medievally influenced time, appealed a great deal to me, for obvious reasons. That Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series, is also married to Charles Ardai is a sort of bonus. Between the two of them, that couple seems to cover most of my favorite exciting genres.

The general conceit of the Temeraire series is that it gives us the Napoleonic Wars told through the lens of a world history that sees dragons as a very real addition to our animal kingdom. By the early 19th century, any military worth its salt has a version of the Aerial Corps (as they’re called in Britain) who train and ride dragons, thereby bringing air combat into the mix. It’s a fun idea, and very thoroughly thought out here.

The first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, could be accused of moving slowly, as the action doesn’t even kick in until fairly near the end, but it’s all quite fascinating in that world-building sense, and the characters and tensions bandied about are more than interesting enough to carry it along, for me anyway. At the end, when we finally do get aerial combat, it’s very well done, and actually gave me something of a feeling of vertigo.

But the characters are the real meat of this book, and the major criticism that I’ve heard lobbed against the series is that, while the dragons are incredibly well characterized, the humans are less so to the point of coming across as stiff and wooden. Now, I do agree that the human characters are stiff and wooden–but they are 19th century English people, after all. Seems damn fitting to me. Such repressed human characters also work very well as a contrast with the sort of intelligent adult/naive child/loyal dog mixtures that make up the personalities of our lead dragon Temeraire and many of his compatriots. He is the titular character of the series, after all, so it doesn’t seem terribly odd for him to be the best drawn one of the lot.

All in all, a fun first book that definitely does a good job of setting up a world for future installments to play in. The characters stuck with me after I put it down and the action scenes kinda made me want to puke (in a good way). Really, I’d prefer it if more authors would combine historical detail and fantastical elements like this, especially while using time periods after the middle ages. My only hope is that some of the interesting ethical dilemmas involved in the concept that began to twirl in my head (like raising sentient and intelligent creatures to be instruments of war) will be thoroughly explored in future novels.