Beth's Reviews > The Bookman

This novel, the first of three, takes the form of an adventure story with a young male protagonist named Orphan. It breaks out a bunch of the things you’d expect from an adventure story. Aliens, explosions, doppelgangers, globe-trotting, a giant spider, pirates, airships and automatons, and weird locales all have their part to play.

Each chapter starts with an epigram from a Victorian-era writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, and the story is peopled with lots of recognizable characters, themselves pulled from the worlds of fiction and non-fiction from the era. Even if you’re not terribly well-read in it, you’re bound to recognize a number of them, like Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, and Barnum’s circus. Some of the references were more resonant to me than others. It was nice to be able to nod sagely at them, but at times when the callbacks and adventure-story tropes (and even a modern-day conspiracy theory or two) were running especially thick, I wished Mr. Tidhar had gone further in doing his own thing with his story.

Our protagonist, Orphan, when it comes to being an adventure-story hero, is no Indiana Jones. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’s an amazingly passive character. He's shuffled about from place to place, meeting new strangers constantly, with no idea what his role in the story is aside from being explicitly told he's a pawn. And, as a pawn, he doesn't have an easy time of it. He's coshed and captured and tied up and beaten up and thrown in jail and punched and slapped and bits of him cut up, or even cut off, every chapter or two. Poor guy.

But another thing that separates him from the average adventure-story hero is his poetic nature and his sweetness. His love for his girlfriend, Lucy, might make him selfish in his motivations regarding the big plot, but since his love is expressed purely in how happy it makes him, it made me hope that things would work out for them. Since your typical type-A character is what you often get from this type of story, he was a nice change. Even if he does end up being a (view spoiler)[secret prince (hide spoiler)].

I enjoyed Mr. Tidhar’s depiction of London. I ended up printing out an online map of Victorian London and following Orphan’s footsteps along with the early parts of the story. A green-blue Thames with whales singing in it was a compelling image, one that made his imagined London feel colorful and strange. Bookshops and books have a large part to play, too--a setting in the latter chapter or two of the story will set a bibliophile a-drool. The automatons were all interesting, and my hope for future volumes of the series is to be able to meet more of them and learn more about their motivations. Things do seem poised for them to take a more central role....