The engravings by John Lawrence that illustrate this book may have been my favorite part: I was charmed from the tiny first-page illustration of a descending balloon on. Look at the one below: the snowy sky, those smoking chimneys, the windows and their shutters, the lantern on the corner: I love it all:
Not that the story is bad, but I didn’t love it. It probably would have helped if I’d read Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy more recently: this book is set in that world, and gives the backstory of the friendship between aeronaut Lee Scoresby and armored bear Iorek Byrnison. But more than my distance from the world/characters of the story, my problem with this book was in the pacing and emphasis. The introduction of the characters and the book’s dilemmas works for me—we see Lee with his balloon, we hear about a mayoral election in the town of Novy Odense and one candidate who’s running on an anti-bear platform (but is also clearly in bed with a big mining company), and we meet Captain van Breda, who’s being prevented from taking his cargo from a warehouse to his ship, supposedly because of a fee or duty he hasn’t paid, but actually because the mining company want to get their hands on it. We meet Iorek, who tells Lee that the Captain’s enemies are his enemies as well. Lee makes a plan to get the Captain his cargo, with Iorek’s help. And then comes a long and involved gunfight scene. The Wild-West-meets-Frozen-North aesthetic is probably not my cup of tea to begin with, but my main problem with the gunfight scene was how much detail there was about the logistics of it: the warehouse looks like this, with this many columns, and piles of stuff here and here, and the other gunman must be hiding in this spot, so if Lee can make it behind this column, etc. etc. etc.
So, right, those illustrations. Here’s my other favorite, boats by the quay:
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