The Tropic of Serpents (2014)
A fantasy about a dragon scholar that I found annoyingly self-aware.
This book is a first-person account of an expedition to study foreign dragons by the fictional Lady Trent, a naturalist in Victorian England. We chose to read the second book in the series for book club, presumably because one of Lady Trent’s traveling companions is ace. (Unfortunately I missed the discussion, so I don’t know for sure.)
The plot starts slow, but picks up in the second half. She has a slow voyage to a foreign country, then travels deep into a thick forest where dragons are found, embedding herself in the Moulish culture, a group of people who live there. After a string of incidents and bad luck, she performs a ritual to dispel her curse, and is then shown how dragons are protected and raised in the forest. They’re waterborne creatures, and some of the Moulish distribute their eggs among the forest’s waterways to help them hatch. As part of proving that she’s worthy to handle the eggs, she discovers foreign soldiers attempting an attack on the forest.
Unfortunately, I found the narrator quite irritating. There are lots of references to other adventures and published works, and I felt like I was missing out by not having read the first book – even though the plot and characters seem like they should work as a standalone. It reminded me that of No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding, whose narrator was similarly grating and self-aware.
The narrator was also keen to remind us how much they know, and to explain every aspect of the world. It felt quite different to Birds Without Wings, which I just read, and which trusts the reader much more to work things out from context. Part of that is that the narrator is a naturalist studying the cultures she visits, but it was just a bit too much exposition for me. (And surprisingly little of the exposition is about dragons!)
There’s also a distinctly racialised aspect of “these native tribes are more sophisticated than you think, actually” that rubbed me the wrong way. The author is a white woman travelling in a land of Black people, treating them like strange animals to be studied. Ick.
I finished this book for the sake of book club, but I don’t want to read other books by this author.
Quotes and highlights
I like this passage on the importance of friendships:
When people speak of the tragedies in my life, they ordinarily mean the deaths: not only Jacob, but all those around me who have perished, whether in direct consequence of danger or simple misfortune and the passage of time after our friendship has formed. At times, though, I think these partings should be accounted as highly, if only in the ledger of my own sorrow. Akinimanbi did not die on a Labane spear, but I never saw her again after leaving for the Great Cataract; in that sense I lost her as thoroughly as if she had died. So it was with Yeyuama as well. I only saw Faj Rawango once more, years later, and although Galinke corresponded with me, we could not be friends the way we might have been had we dwelt in the same land. So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.
But the only way for me to avoid such losses would be to stay home, to never journey beyond the range of easy visitation. As my life will attest, that is not a measure I am willing to take; nor would I forgo the pleasures of my transient friendships if I could.