I just finished reading Guns of the Dawn, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This book was buried on my Kindle for…probably a year or more. When I bought it, I’d just read another book by Tchaikovsky, and wanted to pick up another, and then for some reason I can no longer remember I never got around to actually reading Guns. On a recent flight across the country I was looking through my tablet for something to read on the plane, and stumbled across this old purchase.
Guns of the Dawn is a genrebending war story and Victorian romance, and it is very, very good. It’s set in a fantasy kingdom that’s at about the same level of technology as the American Civil War, with a mix of muzzleloading muskets and trains that doesn’t quite attach itself to any specific era in real life. The people of a neighboring country have overthrown their king and established a parliament, and now the good people of the monarchy next door must rise up and fight off these degenerate republicans. Except the war goes badly, very badly, and eventually reaches the point where a royal decree ends up drafting women to fight alongside the men, causing genteel lady of leisure Emily Marshwic to take up arms to defend her country, and along the way learn that war is hell.
This book is what happens when a modern war novel intrudes on a Victorian romance. It’s written superbly, I loved all the characters, the war had genuine texture and detail to it, and the societies that were colliding both felt like actual civilizations. It’s got that attention to detail that I love in all my favorite fantasy novels. The draft of women wasn’t just handwaved in order to start the story, it was built up to, so you could see why it happened and why it was so dramatic and drastic for these people.
The book does have a few flaws, to be sure. For example, it opens with a dramatic action scene and then cuts back in time to a very long time beforehand, and then works its way back to that scene, which is a storytelling technique that annoys me more and more with every book that forces me to endure it. Here, it’s frankly unforgivable. It’s my opinion that the book would have been markedly improved by being told in straight chronological order. The way it’s written now does let us in on the dramatic irony of knowing where these characters we’re reading about are going to end up, and lends a lot of tragedy to a certain character’s introduction since we know that they’re doomed to die later on, but all of that is completely undercut by the fact that all I felt I was doing during the time until we caught up to that opening scene was just that–catching up, waiting for the story to get back to the point that we’d started at so that I could get the rest of the real story, the one that had been so rudely interrupted. There’s a constant feeling of come on, let’s get on with it, get back to what we were doing for fuck’s sake none of this matters I already know what’s going to happen!
Fortunately, the story rejoins itself about a third of the way through, and proceeds from there in blessedly chronological order. Its only other flaw is one shared by the Victorian romances that were an obvious inspiration, which is that one of the main character’s love interests is disturbingly old for her, and said to have been a close friend of her father’s. It’s very much an odd relationship.
That aside, I did still really enjoy the romance plot of the book as much as the war plot, which is unusual for me. It helped that they intertwined so much, and so often, and in such clever ways. Don’t let me ranting about story structure dissuade you here–this really is an excellent novel, and I encourage you to read it as soon as possible.