In addition to Arjun, we will focus on two other main sets of characters. (The book actually features scores of finely fleshed-out and fascinating players.)

There is the young lad named Jack Sheppard, later Jack Silk. Jack is trapped in a prison-cum-slaveshop and resolves to escape with the help of the Bird. He borrows some of the Bird's flying powers and vaults from a rooftop, attaining his freedom.

At the same time, the Countess Ilona, one of the reigning Estate powers in this precinct of Ararat, is using her pet scientist, Professor Holbach, to steal some of the Bird's magical virtues and lock them in the frame of a naval vessel, the Thunderer. Suddenly, she possesses the only flying military ship in the city, under the command of the noble yet tragic Captain Arlandes.

From this day forward, the paths of these characters will weave about each other as they struggle to master the city for their own ends, and as the semi-sentient city fights back. Holbach will pursue his secret master project, the Atlas, and come to employ Arjun. On a Holbach-sponsored mission to a strange fellow named Shay, Arjun will offend the river god Typhon and unleash plagues and murders. Jack Silk will form a group of anarchic street urchins calling themselves the Thunderers, who will fight the Estates and their cults. Captain Arlandes will become a terror of the skyways. And even love, in the form of a romance between Arjun and Holbach's lawyer, Olympia Autun, will have its day.

Topos is destiny

The moddish category of fiction labeled New Weird—under which heading Gilman's strong and entrancing debut novel definitely falls—is concerned above all else with urban places. This is not a necessary condition of New Weird fiction in its absolute sense, at least as I understand the category. There could certainly be arcadian or pastoral New Weird. But the success of such examples as the novels of Jeff VanderMeer (city of Ambergris) and China Miéville (city of New Crobuzon) have imprinted this setting/motif onto the nascent field. And perhaps also the fact that our globe is currently the most urbanized it's ever been in mankind's history makes such topoi more naturally appealing than otherwise.

In any case, pulling off a good novel in this manner involves two things: creating a really odd and bizarre city and populating it with citizens who are natural extensions of their milieu yet capable of evoking identification in the readers.

On both counts, Gilman carries the day with panache and boldness and ingenuity.

His city of Ararat is textured so richly and feelingly that its palpability is never in doubt from the very first page. His naming conventions mix older cognomens repurposed brilliantly with newer coinages. The economy and sociopolitical structures are thick and believable. The various strata of the city are given equal weight. The role of the gods is adumbrated subtly and with just the right amount of weirdness. And finally, the subtle clues about the multiversal nature of the place pique our interest. Ararat shares an ambiance with Ambergris and New Crobozun and other places "beyond the fields we know," but it remains its own construction.

Gilman's hand with his characters is equally admirable. Arjun's arc of development is the most dramatic (the book's ending finds him still questing, presaging a sequel), but that's because he's the most unformed at the start. Next comes Jack Silk, who goes from ragamuffin to savior/crusader figure. The other folks pretty much exhibit their mature consistency throughout, but that's perfectly fine, given their alluring natures to begin with.

Unlike Miéville's canvases, Gilman's novel focuses on a rather narrow geographic and chronological interval. We never get to penetrate much beyond the few core neighborhoods of the story, over the passage of about a year. But that reduced ambit does not seem a real lack. Also, Gilman's book, while featuring its own share of terror and chaos, is a much gentler book than any of Miéville's. I was reminded at times, in fact, of the whimsical flavor of Mark Helprin's great Winter's Tale (1983).

In any case, what Gilman has achieved here is something exotic and Borgesian, a novel that never stumbles or disappoints.