By Scott Westerfeld
Prince Aleksander, would-be heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne is woken in the middle of the night by his fencing master and the Master of Mechaniks who sneak him away in a walker, a mechanised, two-legged, tank. Discovering his parents assassinated and his country at war he realises that his title is all but worthless but, more importantly, his own people are after him in a plot to ensure he will never grow up to claim the crown usurped from him.
At the same time a young girl, Deryn Sharp, posing as Dylan Sharp, is enlisting in the British Air Service. Despite being a brilliant airman – brash and foul-mouthed as the best of them – she risks losing everything she’s ever dreamt of, if her true sex is discovered.
A chance accident on her first day puts Deryn on the crew of the airship fortress Leviathan, escorting a prominent scientist and a valuable cargo to the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile the young prince and his protectors are making their way into neutral Switzerland to wait out the war in a specially prepared shelter. As the British are dragged into the war an aerial battle sees the Leviathan crash-landing in the Swiss mountains where, rather than ignore their plight, Aleksander goes to them to try and help. Despite initial mistrust, the two parties must work together to repair the Leviathan and get her airborne again before common enemies strike and all of them are left for dead.
Part alternate history, part steampunk novel, part sci-fi fantasy Leviathan is a bit of a mish-mash, but it is so superbly put together that it works like a charm. The main conceit is that Darwin’s research has been worked practically to perfection and it’s influence permeates all aspects of British life, chiefly for us though in The Leviathan, a monster-sized hydrogen-powered airship that is actually a living, breathing ecosystem, housing birds and plants necessary to help it produce its own hydrogen. Additionally the weapons and communications systems are hybrid creations, flechette bats, tigeresques and talking lizards for passing messages up and down ropes. On the other side of the technological divide to the ‘Darwinists’ are the ‘Clankers’, masters of the mechanical, who power a range of hugely capable walking and flying machines with massive fire-power using ordinary fuel, clever hydraulics and skilled piloting.
Okay, sure, it’s maybe a little obvious that one of our protagonists is a boy prince, rich and cultured the other a girl, a commoner and brash and that she is a Darwinist, in thrall to the technological marvels she sees while he is a Clanker, a Walker pilot and appreciative of the human skill in what he does but the YA audience this book is pitched at won’t care a jot, and what Scott Westerfeld has done brilliantly by pitching our two young protagonists on different sides of the fence is point out their similarities rather than their obvious differences.
The story starts fast, wastes no time getting going and is truly exciting, with gripping action sequences and real edge-of-your-seat thrills. The prose is easy and fluid and so descriptive that it puts you in right the scene and Westerfeld doesn’t flinch from talking about the political machinations that surround the story, highlighting the absurdity of the xenophobia that pitches countries against each other for no good reason than their governments tell them to – as Nietzsche said “A good war, makes sacred, any cause”.
Beautifully illustrated in black and white by Keith Thompson, Leviathan is a rollicking good yarn, packed to the gunnels with action, adventure and invention. If I have any complaint at all it’s that this is part one of a trilogy and that means having to wait for part two but I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a very long time and I would urge you to invest in a copy, whatever your age.
Leviathan is published by Simon & Schuster and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.
Scott Westerfeld has a website