[books 2008] The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

[inulro]

19. The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist

This book was thrust upon me by techbint last time I was at her place. It's the story of Miss Temple, an heiress from the Caribbean, who is jilted by her fiancé and wants to know why, so she follows him and ends up in the middle of a major conspiracy, where she falls in with a mercenary nicknamed Cardinal Chang (my favourite character in the book) and Doctor Svenson, the minder of a German prince.

The unnamed city where the book is set is fictional - it could be London, but it might not even be in England. Some of the names (of places and people) seem English, some Dutch or German. Other real European cities and countries are referred to. The period is Victorian.

An alchemist has discovered a "Process" by which thoughts and memories can be distilled from a person into blue glass and a cabal is using this to manipulate captains of industry and people in power. And for porn. Miss Temple stumbles upon this after she follows her ex to what she thinks is a masked ball at a big country house. People who go through the Process go over to the side of the cabal, but they also use the technology to steal the dreams and memories of people who are associated with those they wish to blackmail to gain inside information.

This book is quite wonderful. I stayed up far too late reading it more than once. The technology surrounding the Process is very steampunk, there are some interesting characters in the Cabal, and there is a zeppelin. The scale is enormous, as is the book, and it is very fast-paced, so I did occasionally find myself wondering "how did they get there again?"

Very highly recommended.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

By bizarre coincidence, I finished reading this just last weekend

It's a vast Steampunk Doorstep of a book - getting on for 800 pages. You open it up, read a chapter and you're hooked.

It has pretty much everything:

Bizarre Science not known to our present Arts	✔
Newly-discovered geological minerals for which the World Is Not Yet Ready	✔
Brass Goggles	✔
Padded leather gauntlets	✔
Rubber Goggles	✔
Masked Balls	✔
Crazed Scientists	✔
Bitter Assistants to the above	✔
Metaphysical Conceptual Art	✔
A Panopticon	✔
Long Flappy Coats	✔
Sword Canes	✔
Sword Cane Emporia	✔
Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman fight to the death! Probably with Jet Li too!	✔
Entirely gratuitous and plot-irrelevant Airships powered by something implausible but blue and glowy(™The Golden Compass)	✓
Armoured Bears	✘
Dianetics	✔
Corsets	✔
The cheapest and very tackiest of soft-porn	Hmmm.... Will he just stop it with that split-crotch silk thing?

So why did it annoy me so much?

The Amazon reviews have it spot on:

"take Dahlquist's own prose to describe what the book is all about. On page 416 - 'Miss Temple...felt as if she had become marooned in a ridiculous play made up of one rambling conversation after another' "

This is a good 400 page novel in dire need of an editor. Probably a creative writing course too. As it stands, it's just sloppy work. There is no reason whatsoever to justify it being so damned long. It's not as if the author does anything with that space. Also it's a novel of three allied characters who dislike each other so much they can't even bear to be in the same chapters as each other. An anabasis of one chapter is a cute literary device, doing it repeatedly because you can't handle dialogue any more sophisticated than, "No Mr Bond, I expect you to die! (but I'm squeamish and won't watch, allowing you to re-appear in the next chapter)" is a basic inability to write.

There are maybe 3 sequels to this bloated wumpus of a novel (hopefully two are just renames for the Americans who couldn't understand a seven word long title). Heavens preserve us 8-(

[trizia.livejournal.com]

I read that a few weeks ago and loved it, especially all the ads at the back of the book. There's a sequel out soon, I think.