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Nov. 29th, 2010 10:23 pmThe battle was epic and took several weeks but I finally finished The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist. I would hesitate to describe it as good, it doesn't have one of those annoying authorial voices that mars so many books these days (The White Tiger, The Book Thief, I'm looking at you), choosing instead to hover close by the thoughts of each of it's three main protagonists and they are well and richly drawn, but the book is, at 750 pages, overlong by about two hundred pages and I would be lying if I didn't admit that my eyes glazed over for the third quarter of the book and most of the third stringers, military men and society women, are an indistinct bunch of shop-window dummies.
Vaguely placed in terms of location and time, but we must assume late-Victorian or Georgian and Germany/Belgium, Miss Celeste Temple's attempts to discover why her fiancée Roger has broken off their engagement pulls her into some strange unearthly goings on in a country house and a conspiracy of worrying intent. Thrown together with street-mercenary 'Cardinal' Chang and a foreign military Doctor Svenson who believes he has discovered a conspiracy to kill the Prince he works for and overthrow his Royal family she finds her life under threat and must find out how these disparate elements come together before it's too late for her.
Each chapter is around seventy pages long, except the last which is double-sized, especially for us. Each chapter follows a different member of the triumvirate and they don't meet up, and the story start to take a sensible shape, until we're about two hundred pages in. Once there things do start to pick up speed and rarely stop but the huge chapters mean that there is a fair amount of tiresome jumping around in time and backtracking. Dahlquist needed an editor to restrain him as it all comes apart in his hands from about page 500 and he's left making ever more frantic running repairs to his great contraption in the hopes it will last to the end of the story.
Vaguely placed in terms of location and time, but we must assume late-Victorian or Georgian and Germany/Belgium, Miss Celeste Temple's attempts to discover why her fiancée Roger has broken off their engagement pulls her into some strange unearthly goings on in a country house and a conspiracy of worrying intent. Thrown together with street-mercenary 'Cardinal' Chang and a foreign military Doctor Svenson who believes he has discovered a conspiracy to kill the Prince he works for and overthrow his Royal family she finds her life under threat and must find out how these disparate elements come together before it's too late for her.
Each chapter is around seventy pages long, except the last which is double-sized, especially for us. Each chapter follows a different member of the triumvirate and they don't meet up, and the story start to take a sensible shape, until we're about two hundred pages in. Once there things do start to pick up speed and rarely stop but the huge chapters mean that there is a fair amount of tiresome jumping around in time and backtracking. Dahlquist needed an editor to restrain him as it all comes apart in his hands from about page 500 and he's left making ever more frantic running repairs to his great contraption in the hopes it will last to the end of the story.