The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
424 pages
Published 1994
Read from December 19 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Here's a curious reaction: I feel this could have been the best fantasy book I'd ever read -- if I had been someone else.
This book has power. It has ambition. It has a young woman riding a dragon into the center of creation, screaming rage and defiance at existence and fate, to destroy the universe. It leers in uncomfortable ways and then unfolds a delicate trick of imagery and wording to leave you stunned.
It also, for an unfortunate amount of its length, left me utterly bored.
I just don't get into "young and dissipated protagonist snorts drugs and fights with friends and goes to parties and snorts drugs" storylines, no matter how dressed up with magic and creatures from folklore. I had the same problem with the middle passage of Lev Grossman's The Magicians: wizards having sex and getting trashed in loft apartments is no more interesting to me than any other white yuppies doing the same thing in any number of numbingly identical literary novels. Long stretches of The Iron Dragon's Daughter are reskinned transcriptions of some platonic ideal of the disaffected-yet-affluent '90s joint, substituting a magical or fantastical word for the appurtenances of dreary realism, a point-for-point allegory so thorough it tends to lose any sense of magic or fantasy altogether. If I were a different person, the sort of person who might adore dreary realism and find pleasure in finding it so archly recast, I could enjoy those segments as well as the rest of the novel. But I'm not that person, and Jane's college adventures left me cold.
There is so much terrific stuff here, I'm almost tempted to bump my rating up despite all that, but whatever, ratings are meaningless, and my brain is wheezing along barely able to put a sentence together, so I'll stop.
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