Claire is settling into life as an Engineer for Count Von
Zepplin and planning for marriage to Andrew
(or avoiding planning) though
neither is going quite so ideally or quite so well as she would have hoped. But
still, is she really willing to abandon her career, this opportunity and even
the man she loves for the sake of a friend who, it has to be said, she doesn’t
know that well
Gloria Astor-Merriweather has been kidnaped – but is
Claire willing to throw everything away to get her back?
I love Gloria. Not so much her character (which is still
very good) but the whole concept of her. Gloria Merriweather-Astor was
introduced as a very opposite to Claire. While Claire was newly desperately
impoverished. Claire was academic and scientific, Gloria was more interested
and fashion, society et al. And Gloria is the daughter of her arch-enemy and
the major antagonist in the series.
In any other book, Gloria would be evil. She would be the
spiteful, vapid mean girl who we were supposed to hate and loathe from the very
beginning. She could so easily have been a hollow demonised character.
But she isn’t – she’s clever and moral and capable. She
has her own life and her own problems even though her context and experience is
very different from Claire’s – and she’s a very loyal and caring friend who
regrets deeply any idea that she may have failed Claire in the last book. Even
more than her own freedom she worries that Claire may think she abandoned her
- even if they’re not such close
friends, it mattered to her that she was thought of hat way (of course, Claire,
marvellously free of the girl-hate that is so annoyingly pervasive, doesn’t
assume any such thing. Having experienced Gloria’s kindness she assumes far
more kinder interpretations of her behaviour).
So, even though I risk sounding like a broken record, I
have to repeat how excellent this series is with the female characters. Not
just because they’re good and capable and interesting but because they’re also
different. They have commonalities in different ways (Claire and Alice share an
interest and talent for Engineering, Gloria and Claire attended the same
school, Liz and Maggie are sisters) but they’re all still very different
people.
The plot itself wasn’t especially unique – we have
another rescue mission as our heroes ride to the rescue with cunning,
cleverness, a whole lot of courage and daring and ingenuity and a great deal of
determination. It’s not especially new, but it is great fun, well written,
nicely paced and any outing with these characters will make me smile.
I’m more intrigued with where the story will go from here
given the way the plot developed. We have a big confrontation with the big bad
who has dogged the series for so long (that big bad was also surprisingly
humanised) which will now put the series in a very different position going
forward
There was also Claire’s confrontations with both her fiancé
Andrew and her employer, the Count Von Zeppling (which I will come back to
since there are elements there I don’t like a great deal) which have put Claire
in an interesting position of questioning her priorities and where she actually
wants to go in life and how she wants to live.
Even while looking to the future with these elements, I liked the call
back to the very early books, back when she was the Lady of Devices running her
little rag-tag band of followers in a squat in the poor part of London. It was
nice to be reminded of where Claire came from, what she has achieved and where
everyone else still is.
There was also a nice look at Tigg who, in many ways, has
come at least as far as Claire. He has grown, he has a future, a plan and a
life and, like Claire, also has a nice look into his past in the form of his
estranged father. It’s a nice look at Tigg’s character, his development and his
own opinions, especialy with scenes from his own point of view, but I do think
the references to his father’s skin colour (Tigg’s father is Black and his
mother White) overly emphasised how dark and scary he was.
Now I’ve got to do the bit I try to avoid and the
fanpoodles (or fanchickens in this case) are demanding I silence - I have
criticisms.
This book opens with Claire faced with hard choices and
hard criticisms which make her very sad and very frustrated. They put her in a
very difficult positon and require her to look at herself, her life and decide
exactly what kind of person she is, where she should draw the lines and how she
should go forward in her life…
…and I kind of think she makes the wrong decisions. Or
makes the decisions in the wrong ways.
Like the idea that she has to start at the bottom in Von
Zepplin’s lab/factory… well, yes? She’s newly qualified? Isn’t that how it’s
supposed to go? I don’t know if this was to try and point out the sexism of her
superiors in the company being condescending to her… but I don’t think it
carried that. It came off as a brand new employee deciding she was the bestest
thing ever and demand to be catered to as someone special.
Or Andrew’s objection to Claire running off to the rescue
again? His objections are reasonable – she does keep putting her life – their
lives – on hold for the latest adventure. And in this case there really is no
reason why she shouldn’t leave it to the necessary authorities or Gloria’s
extremely rich and powerful father. She has no good reason why she should ride
to the rescue – and that kind of needed addressing.
And these could be reasonable flaws. After all, Claire has achieved some amazing things over these books, often in the face of men who have been condescending and belittling and tried to keep her in a box. It would be reasonable for her to automatically push back at men trying to limit her. It would even be reasonable for her to be, well, a tad arrogant. Doesn’t she have cause to be? She’s more than capable of rescuing every casual acquaintance she’s ever met from even the most disastrous of peril up to and including a Falling Skies marathon (peril indeed). She could probably run the zeppelin works far better than her bosses. So, arrogance would be a reasonable character trait which she could learn and grow from. Knee-jerk resistance of any male constraint, no matter how reasonable, would also be an understandable character trait.
But if they were then they’d be addressed – but both conflicts just seem to fizzle. Andrew and Claire reconcile – and it’s beautiful and touching and powerful, but doesn’t even remotely address his original complaint. He established that he cannot live without her and loves her a great deal but there’s no addressing her actions that are constantly causing him distress (reasonably so). Similarly she seems to make her peace with Count Von Zeppelin without really analysing the underlying issue – if this is a character trait of Claire’s then I would like to have seen it addressed. Even more analysis of Claire simply saying that she doesn’t like working in a hierarchy (a reasonable understanding given how much she’s used to living her own life and being in command) could have done with more analysis and development.
Of course, to some degree this could all change depending
on how this develops. After all, this story is in a very different place and
Claire is almost in limbo. We ended almost with Claire’s slate being wiped
clean – she could now go in any direction, she has few ties on her which opens
up the story a lot. Which includes a potential to develop these elements.
And hopefully, maybe, eventually introduce some LGBT
characters. There was, though, a very good depiction of PTSD with two of the
characters of the previous book who suffered so much there. It was a nice
reflection that such trauma does hurt people and how they do not always recover
quickly or easily. There’s a lot of nice conflict with their own guilt, shame
and denial over their symptoms as well.
In all, despite some issues, this is another excellent
book in this series that inspires fanchickening! More, because of where it
ended we could be going in a whole new direction with Claire and I can’t wait
to run along with her for the ride, loving every last minute of it
