Imperial Purple

Garth Nix
Illustrated by Sholto Walker
One Beastly Beast
Allen and Unwin 2008

One Beastly Beast is a collection of four children’s stories by Australian author Garth Nix. Only one (The Princess and the Beastly Beast) is actually new, the others being first published in 1998 to 2000 but since I have never read any of them before this is not an issue for me. Nix fans who already have the stories in their libraries may feel differently.

The first story is about Captain Blackbread (sic) and his gang of scurvy pirates who have stolen young Peter’s DVDs. Fortunately Captain Erasmus Rattus of His Majesty’s Royal Ratship Tumblewheel arrives and takes Peter to Neverworld where, with the help of a giant cheese, they defeat Blackbread and get the DVDs back.

The second story (containing the eponymous Beastly Beast) is of Princess Chlorinda who is bored in a castle where nothing ever happens. She sets out to search for adventure but without success. As she is trudging home in the dark she suddenly encounters a very strange monster.

Bill the Inventor is a young orphan in the O’Squealin Home for Lost Children. Bill is an inventor and his inventions (and some friendly mice) help to save him from being adopted by (in order) pirates, a wizard and a witch and aliens. The fourth set of potential adopters are a much better proposition.

Serena and the Sea Serpent is about a little girl who is very, very clever due to an unfortunately accident with a super-computer and a bolt of lightning when she was a baby. A sea serpent has been menacing the coast and sinking local shipping. The only way to keep it away seems to be sacrificing a young girl to it. Serena volunteers and uses her bulging brains to sort things out.

I’m something of a fan of Nix although it has mostly been his work for older children and young adults that I have read. These stories for younger readers are lots of fun and well up to standard. Walker’s illustrations are excellent and he is particularly good at rats and mice. Murex junior is still too young but when he is eight or nine I shall bring the book out again and I’m sure he will enjoy it.

Naomi Novik
Empire of Ivory
Harper Voyager 2007

Earlier this year, I reviewed Black Powder War - the book before this one in the Temeraire series. I had reservations about it and gave it three stars. This one is better although not perfect.

Temeraire and Laurence have returned to England with the precious fire-breathing dragon. Unfortunately, while they were away a dragon plague has struck and the great creatures and dying in droves. With Napoleon camped across the channel with a hundred dragons, desperate for a chance to invade, the situation is serious.

They are dispatched to Africa where, by slightly tenuous logic, they believe a cure might be found. A few sick dragons are sent with them as test cases. It is Britain’s last hope - a cure must be found before Napoleon realises how thin the aerial defenses are.

But Africa is not called the Dark Continent for nothing. With slave traders, hostile natives and wild dragons the hunt for the cure is anything but simple and things go very, very wrong for the British adventurers.

The book ends with Laurence having to make the most difficult moral choices of his career where duty and humanity are in direct conflict. The book ends with the consequences of his choices left hanging - we must await the next installment.

There were a couple of practical difficulties I had problems with. I had difficulty believing that an almost complete absence of aerial defense could be kept secret from Napoleon for the better part of a year. He would surely have had spies working like industrious train-spotters, plotting the movements of the British squadrons. I also wasn’t convinced that the African savannah eco-system could sustain as many voracious dragons as it apparently did.

These are mostly quibbles I guess. The other problem Novik has is that there are only so many ways that you can describe an aerial combat and in this, the fourth book, she is running out of them. I tend to flick through these combats pretty rapidly because I know what they are going to say.

As I said, this book is superior to its predecessor. It confronts some difficult moral choices and reminds us that abhorrence of the slave trade was by no means universal in the early 19th century. Indeed more than fifty years after this book a bloody civil war was fought over the matter in the United States of America.

I am looking forward to the next one which promises a difficult time for Laurence, Temeraire and the people and dragons of Britain. It has become pretty clear that Britain treats its dragons worse than just about any other nation. It is a state of affairs which cannot endure and I am keen to see what the resolution will be.