Excessive Candour
Peril Peril Peril

The first 64 pages of Gordon Dahlquist's first novel are the first 64 pages of a big book. The remaining 696 pages of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters are the remaining 696 pages of a very long one. Fun is had by all—indeed the fun is unremitting—but it is not the thrill we had expected as we traversed the first 35,000 words or so of this immense tale: the thrill of the unfolding of a world: the constant estranging thrill of reading further into the entrails of an imagined world which is always more than we could have guessed. Sadly, in the end, Glass Books turns out to be exactly what we only slowly began to fear it might turn out to be: a vast Perils of Pauline.

Or, more accurately, perhaps: a vast Perils of Susanna. If there was one underlying difficulty that balked the reading of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), it was that powerfully good novel's utterly implacable refusal to allow itself to hasten a single whit. Its first 200 pages reside within a pacelessness of daunting calm, vastly distant from any cliff to hang from: as though Clarke somehow knew that what she was doing was so good we would all wait happily until she started, and almost all of us did. Strange & Norrell is so good that we abide its refusal to begin, until it does. But we do have to abide. The initial thrill of Glass Books is of beginning a tale whose estrangement from cliche seems as palpable as Strange & Norrell's—both are set in lands subtly and aromatically disjunct from the default history of Europe—but in this case a tale whose author can't wait to tell it. Glass Books has all the Perils Susanna did not give us.

For a few pages, both books could be set in the same London, but it does not in fact take very long to figure some significant differences. London is in fact never named in Glass Books, nor is England (though various European countries and capitals are mentioned), and the tale clearly takes place some time after 1850 and before 1900, a half century on from Strange & Norrell, well into steampunk territory. If we persist for a few pages in thinking of the two venues as similar, it may well be because Dahlquist's capital comes to us mostly through the perceptions of his main protagonist, Miss Temple, who has been jilted in the first paragraph of the novel, three months after her arrival. Her response to this shock is superficially decorous and conveyed by Dahlquist in language that aspires to a similar decorousness, but her good manners are stirred by undertows of oddity also subtly reminiscent of Clarke's slow infusion of magic into her own tale:

Her world had been changed—as she was willing to admit (she had a young lady's classical education) did happen in life—but it hardly meant she was obliged to be docile, for Miss Temple was only docile on the most extraordinary occasions. Indeed, she was considered by some a provincial savage if not an outright little monster, for she was not large, and was by inclination merciless. She had grown up on an island, bright and hot, in the shadow of slaves, and as she was a sensitive girl, it had marked her like a whip—though part of that marking was how very immune from whips she was, and would, she trusted, remain.

And almost immediately, Miss Temple decides to do something about her unfaithful suitor. She traces his movements over a period of hours, and follows him on a train bound into a desolate hinterland station near the sea, whence he and a bevy of suggestive females make their way to a vast ex-prison transformed into a grotesquely enormous residence called Harschmort Manor (it is not, perhaps, an entirely good sign that Dahlquist gives this edifice, where dire things are surely about to happen, a name equivalent to Tough Death). Miss Temple follows them. She is mistaken for one of the ladies who are there apparently as whores. She is forced to change her clothes, doing so impassively but somehow avidly, gazing at her naked torso in a mirror which turns out to be two-way, through which she is gloatingly observed: and we find we are no longer in Susanna Clarke's world (we never go back there, either, except for flashes when dark matters are referred to "decorously"); because we are now in the Story of O. But we do not remain there, exactly. After scarifying adventures, Miss Temple gets back to the capital the next day. She has had to kill the two retainers who had been delegated to rape and murder her, but she gets back to her posh hotel, tears off her bloody rags and sleeps for 16 hours.

A much-discovered country

Miss Temple has encountered Dahlquist's second protagonist fleetingly on the train back, and the next chapter follows him—he is nicknamed Cardinal Chang—through his own quest, which interlaces enticingly with Miss Temple's, for the true murderer of an army officer he himself had been commissioned to dispatch at Harschmort. His chapter, as chock-full of events as any similar (but much shorter) swashbuckle chapter by Rafael Sabatini, takes us to page 128; he has fleetingly met Dahlquist's third protagonist, Doctor Abelard Svenson, who is also on a quest, through many of the same twisting corridors, for his charge, a useless epicene princeling from a European principality, and we find ourselves reminded of yet another kind of tale, the Ruritanian romance.

And at about this point we realize that indeed the social structure, and the architecture, and a cast list exclusively restricted to "members of society," all add up to a very peculiar portrait of London, if indeed we were supposed to think that Dahlquist was expecting us to identify his capital as the same venue variously evoked in Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) and sequels, or William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (1990), or China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (2000), or Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages (2003) or Richard Calder's various London novels, including Babylon (2006). And if we were not meant to think of Glass Books as following honorably upon models like these (lots of others could be mentioned), what were we meant to think?

Certainly Dahlquist's three protagonists—who finally meet over the course of Chapter 4 (pp. 196-264) but then insanely separate and start all over again—have discovered a plot at the heart of the empire that fully justifies the monolithic claustrophobia of the architecture and the social order he has been describing, though it is here, in the unpacking of some sort of reason for all these hundreds of pages of questing and fisticuffs and stuff, that the ultimate tininess of Glass Books begins to thin the air. Even the flameout high points of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000) give some clue that progress is being made and understanding is growing. What Dahlquist's threesome discovers is a conspiracy to subvert the crowned heads of the land through exposure to the Blue Books of the title.

These are devices—whose manufacture is described in terms that shift from steampunk to alchemy and back—that somehow abstract the full sensorium of experience from victims who are exposed to them (there are lots of slightly coy bondage scenes involving women about to have their memories stripped), making that sensorium available to others for their vicarious (but highly intoxicated) pleasure. But the victims lose those memories—as in Brian W. Aldiss' Somewhere East of Life (1994)—and behave after their treatment as though they had been Born Again, though without any evident enthusiasm.

The indomitable dominated

The problem is that Glass Books carries the idea no further than that, and the tale begins to shrink into repetitions of its spoof swashbuckling default: We see nothing of the kind of world that might evolve; we inhabit none of the victims' tortured psyches; we learn nothing of any justification anyone in the novel might have for gaining absolute power via soul theft.

What we get instead is a plethora of ultimately harmless Perils. Miss Temple gives the game away on page 436, where—after immersion in one of the dangerously addictive books, experiencing orgies and tortures and orgasms and aesthetic rapture and stuff—she pulls herself free and wonders, "with a dull irony," "if she had become the most thoroughly debauched virgin in all of history." The answer, of course, is yes. Over the four or so days of the novel, Miss Temple has had the most astonishingly rousing set of adventures any heroine in any 19th-century melodrama could have ever dreamed of, and she is still intact. Clearly Dahlquist meant to do that, or he wouldn't have allowed her to realize what was (and was not) happening to his protagonist. And, in the sense that she is as much a voyeur of Glass Books as we are, there is, one supposes, a modest ethico-aesthetical point being made here. But it's not 760 pages worth of point.

And by the end of things we have lost Miss Temple, who seems initially as indomitable (and as fruitfully estranged from normal folk) as Mattie Ross, the protagonist of Charles Portis' brillliant True Grit (1968)—the movie's good, too. Miss Temple was the oxygen of the tale as it began, but Dahlquist could think of nothing to do with her interestingness as it continued, and the book asphyxiates from that dearth. It's as though Mattie Ross grows up to be Debbie Reynolds. In the end, Glass Books is as dumb as that.