Hello! I’m Wolfwum, and welcome to Annotations, a column for book reviews. I’m writing this as a companion to The Bookshelf Revue, a book review show. There’s a lot to say about books that I don’t think a video series will be able to cover on its own; after all, it takes two hours to get through a whole movie or a few episodes of a TV series, but two hours spent on a book (especially irritating ones) can net you maybe two plot points and two dozen sticky notes.
So, in order to remedy the imbalance of story and technical coverage, I decided to dedicate part of my time to writing this. I figure the show will focus more on the overall story, characterization, and presentation, whereas this column will focus on the techniques that make or break it.
So, without further ado:
Warning: Spoilers
Leviathan, while operating on a solid premise and hook, baffles me to no end. How do you screw up genetically engineered animals and steampunk robots in World War I? Well, naturally, it’s a combination of ideas interacting with each other in unfortunate ways, but the problems plaguing Leviathan are more subtle than other disasters like, say, My Immortal. But let me clarify something: this book is not “bad.” Oh, it comes really close to the definition, but it manages to skip clear of it at the last second, like that slacker kid in your class who never has anything to say unless it’s about himself, doesn’t do his homework, but is still promoted because he got a D.
It’s still not a “good” book--far from it. However, instead of laying on its side to expose everything it thinks it’s doing right, Leviathan actually tries to be entertaining. In the end, it’s just a messy pile of “mediocre.”
The book follows the historical-fictional misadventures of Alek, son of the Archduke of Austria, and Deryn, a female masquerading as a male in the British Air Service. The whole story takes place at the beginning of World War I, in a world where “Darwinists” splice animals together and “Clankers” have steam-powered robot tanks.
Alek has to flee his home in the middle of the night in a steam-powered mech because the Germans want to find him and kill him just like his father. Deryn, meanwhile succeeds in getting onto the Leviathan, an organic, gene-spliced airship. After about 200 pages of traveling and four German attacks in a row, the two protagonists finally meet up in Switzerland. Suddenly, they’re forced to put aside their cultural differences and work together to escape before the Germans kill them all.
There’s also a subplot about transporting mysterious eggs to the Ottoman Empire that is supposed to be the setup for the sequel, and features amazing illustrations by Keith Thompson.
Major Problems:
This fantastical world is not fully realized.
The writing is so bland that I can’t visualize what the author wants me to. Since most of his target audience will likely never have been to England, Austria, Germany, or Switzerland, they’re not going to know what those places are like in this world. Add in the robots and wonky genetics, and it gets even more confusing. I read and write fantasy and sci-fi, so I know how important it is for writers to really embed readers into their new worlds immediately. Granted, infodumps are annoying, but getting the basics out of the way through tone, speech and imagery--like in Song Quest or A Clockwork Orange--isn’t that hard. Here, it’s like Westerfeld had an 8x10 image in his head of what his world was and what he wanted it to be, but he never shows the reader more than a 3x5 portion of it.
You can't tell what's going on.
It’s pretty, but the art doesn’t make up for the lack of good storytelling.
The cover is gorgeous! The illustrations are wonderful! The map is amazing! However, the story is illustrated. Period. Yeah, thanks to the pictures, I got the idea of what a hydrogen sniffer (a dog spider...) was, but that understanding should come first from a visual explanation through the text. Illustrations in prose novels not in the children’s section should be treated as accessories: things that enhance the reading experience, but don’t distract from it. The only picture that wasn’t there to replace imagery was the illustration of Alek’s father’s watch at the end of the chapter in which he shares the story of his parents’ courtship. I was surprised when I came across it because it didn’t feel forced or redundant. It just punctuated the chapter’s theme.
Granted, if this had been a graphic novel, I probably would have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Half of it is exposition.
And the other half is early rising action. This overlaps with the pacing issues and the bad characterization, but think about what the plot of this book is supposed to be. It’s about Alek and Deryn coping with the outbreak of war, meeting up, overcoming cultural differences, and escaping with the MacGuffin eggs. Coping is the over-arcing idea and Westerfeld had the entire book to develop it, so why take half the book to get to the meet-up? It’s a waste of time on a reader’s part to know what’s going to happen only for the inevitable to happen long after it was expected. Especially when the 200 pages you’re dedicating to extra exposition have more explosions than characterization or rules of the world combined.
It doesn’t end
It just kind of stops. Like most books in a series, it ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s a bad cliffhanger. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 or Back to the Future 2 bad. It doesn’t make me want to read on, it makes me have to read on in order to get the entire story. That wouldn’t be so bad if I’d come to enjoy the characters, tone, style, and organization, but Leviathan doesn’t get me invested in any of it.
Like I said before, the entire book is really just exposition and rising action, so there’s not even a clear climax for anything to resolve itself after. No loose ends get cleared up--there weren’t any. Nothing big is set up for the next book except for the eggs, but they aren’t even our central issue. We don’t even have any tension leading us into the next book; by the time our “heroes” are sailing off to the Ottoman Empire, the Great War is a footnote on everyone’s agenda!
With all that nothingness in mind, is it that surprising that the ending was more than a letdown?
The pacing is awful.
Having multiple points of view is just fine in a novel, but hopping back and forth between Alek and Deryn every two chapters is too frequent (and such a weird number, too). Most of the time, the reader is just getting re-settled into the current POV character when a new chapter suddenly starts. It’s even bad between same-character chapter breaks; the first Alek chapter ends with him, Volger and Klopp sneaking out of the estate, but the second opens right up to them arriving at the Stormwalker! Nothing about either scene suggested that such a huge pause was necessary. They just changed related scenes, something generally indicated by a page break.
One of the protagonists should be demoted.
Neither Deryn nor Alek get the appropriate amount of time they need for proper characterization. I’m going to pin a lot of the blame on the fact that there’s two of them, and both needed a lot of characterization because of the genre. And it didn’t work out.
Deryn is the more developed character only because the author really took his time to relay Deryn’s way of thinking to the point that it’s obvious which he prefers. Even though she’s a Mary-Sue, Westerfeld did a good job making sure that she’s only at the “Annoyingly proficient” end of the Sue-scale (the scale going from “Annoyingly proficient” to “God’s gift to everything with really awesome powers that can be learned ridiculously quickly, can excrete gold, make flowers grow just by looking at dirt, and all the animals freakin’ adore this person and you should, too, otherwise you’re just a horrible, horrible, less than human THING!”). However, if he’d given himself the entire book to work with her, she would have had all the right lead-up to her amazingness. Without Alek messing things up by not doing anything important, she could have been a respectable protagonist.
On the other hand, if Westerfeld had created the Leviathan series as a series of graphic novels, 1) think of how awesome it would look based on the artwork and 2) Deryn would have been able to get away with more Sueish qualities because we would’ve been shown what she had to go through.
An example of de-Sueifying across mediums
Ellipses... do not work that way.
I gave up on counting the number of misused ellipses, but I remember the last one I numbered was in the thirties. Thirties. I know it’s a small thing to harp on, but after the first five, I got the impression that Westerfeld was trying to create suspense... where there wasn’t any.
Steampunk really does not work that way.
The “Punk Punk” subgenres are popular, but fairly new territories. However, some precedents have been in place for decades that separate them from regular science fiction. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of--if not the--most influential books in cyberpunk solidified some basics that a -punk novel must contain. Typically, they’re set in a vaguely altered, somewhat darker version of our Earth. Cyberpunk is set twenty minutes into the future, and steampunk typically takes place around the turn of the century.
The second and most important part of -punk, however, is how the main character deals with his warped society. Repo! The Genetic Opera (biopunk) did this by telling the story of how a young girl found freedom in a perpetually indebted society. Neuromancer did it by showing how people may not be able to handle sadistic technology that’s smarter than they are. Although I think the literary world could benefit from having soft -punk novels, Leviathan doesn’t come close to exploring the ramifications of the different technologies. The closest it gets is the short “debate” between Alek and Deryn about their respective countries’ science preferences.
How do you housetrain these guys?
I’m convinced that Westerfeld, like so many these days, got caught up in the visual aesthetic of steampunk. This book looks like what you’d imagine a steampunk novel should be, he just forgot to add in the major principles behind the genre. As I already complained, visuals mean almost nothing to prose; an attractive cover and relevant typefaces are about the extent of how fancy books can graphically get.
It’s a real shame that Leviathan wasn’t given the proper TLC I think it deserved in editing. It could have been a great start to an impressive series, but I think they were banking more on Westerfeld’s name selling the book than the quality of the content. While I have not read the Uglies series yet, I’ve heard mixed reviews about it (that is was wonderful until Extras) and the premise interests me (I’m a sucker for dystopias). So, I’m not going to write Westerfeld off as a hack, but I am going to say that Leviathan was a huge disappointment to me.
