Behemoth

Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld

Rating: Three and a Half out of Five Covers

Behemoth continues the adventures of Prince Aleksander and Deryn/Dylan Sharpe.  The Leviathan, now a Darwinist sky whale with Clanker engines, continues its mission to the Ottoman Empire to try and convince them to join the Darwinist in the war.  This is complicated by the fact that the English have refused to give the Ottoman’s their latest superweapon, the Behemoth, despite already paying for it (one of the several elements inspired by real history).

Shifting the action to the Ottoman Empire allows the author to continue his excellent world building, showing a city divided between Clanker and Darwinist technology.  But this also shifts the action to the periphery of the Great War, making the overall mission slightly less immediate in importance.  Because the story dictates it to continue the drama, Alek and Deryn must be separated.  Alek escapes into the city and ends up with a band of rebels trying to overthrow the government; Deryn, despite being the most junior of personnel on the ship, is placed in charge of a special mission.  Naturally they end up together again for the rousing finale.

The action continues to be the highlight of the story.  More derring-do takes place outside the giant armor or animals, effectively heightening the tension and danger.  The rebels’ use of a printing press to show the power of the written word is handled cannily.  And traveling to the Ottoman Empire, a place readers may not be familiar with, adds an element of the exotic.

But the familiar nature of the story structure starts to show through as coincidences and improbabilities pile up. Deryn’s infatuation with Alek is a dictate of the story rather than growing naturally out of their friendship.  Westerfeld describes Istanbul as a multicultural city, but only shows conflict between the rebels and the empire as a two-sided confrontation.  The use of “spice bombs,” just local spices used to drive out the soldiers out of Clanker automatons, seems both a bit juvenile and avoids any discussion of the ethics of chemical warfare which was used to devastatingly in the real war.  And one of the most frustrating things for me was that a key element, a new Darwinist creation called the perspicacious loris, is declared a failure without any explanation as to why or what it was supposed to do.

My specificity may make these points seem small, but they compound throughout the narrative and strain what should be a purely entertaining story.