The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Hadsome quite interesting ideas but went on a bit too long and the ending, while it was obviously gong to happen from quite a way through the story, was still a bit disappointing. ( )

This is one of those on my mental list of "books I ought to read" and I finally came across it in the library. It's really more a meditation on growing up that a story with a plot, which I find irritating, but it's well-done for what it is. Not a book I'm likely to come back to, but I'm glad I read it. ( )

What... the... hell. Most horrifying book that I read and have no idea why anyone would want to read. Got nothing out of it except misery. I was transfixed waiting for some kind of redeeming element that never came. ( )

An excellent book that I found hard to read at times. The prose is crystalline throughout, something which is lacking in most fantasy novels. But I am somewhat wary of pigeonholing this book as a ‘fantasy’, despite its inclusion in the Fantasy Masterworks series, because that might lead to a wrong impression of the book. In many ways, although not as sui generis as Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, or David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, this book resembles those works in being something that I cannot quite pinpoint. It is an anti-fantasy, in many ways, but that is also to limit the book’s scope. Because, in many ways, if Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are humorous anti-fantasies (and much more) then this book is a deadly serious commentary on the genre. It is postmodern in the best sense – not too pretentious, but willing to take risks that can seem pretentious.

As Swanwick has said, the book is both an homage to the genre, but also a response to the growing commercialism of the genre:
“… The recent slew of interchangeable Fantasy trilogies has hit me in much the same way that discovering that the woods I used to play in as a child have been cut down to make way for shoddy housing developments.”
If anything needed (and needs) a good kick up the wazoo, then it is commercial speculative fiction. There are few things that I personally despise as much as the carrion crows picking over Tolkien’s (and many, many others') legacy, although, to be honest, I have problems with most overly commercial writers. So I felt very happy with the premise of the novel.

As I said, I sometimes found the novel difficult to read. But that is not necessarily a bad sign. What made it difficult is Swanwick’s way of interpolating many different ideas into the smallest of narrative spaces. The text is full of references to Dickens, medieval Christian philosophy, fantasy tropes and more. Swanwick also has fondness for doppelgängers, which sometimes led to a temporary dissonance in reading the book, as I scratched my head wondering which character was actually being referred to. But this is definitely done on purpose – the main character, Jane, is a changeling, apparently abducted from our reality into a Dickensian nightmare of factory-enslavement, which also has fantasy elements. I advisedly say apparently because this novel is in the end concerned with interrogating appearances, and rejecting easy cop-outs. It deliberately subverts the easily digestible flow of commercial fantasy novels, and smashes one’s preconceptions of what a fantasy novel can, and should, do.

In many ways, it is a bleak book, harrowing and distressing. It has graphic depictions of sex and violence, but these never seem overly gratuitous. I was a little concerned when the narrative seemed to lose some steam during the middle parts (you know what Larkin says about a beginning, a muddle, and an end) but I think this was mostly due to my own preconceptions getting in the way. At the end, one can see that Swanwick had a clear idea of where he wanted to go with the narrative, and I feel that a reread is in order – sometime.

Oh, and don't be fooled by the Masterworks cover: this book is not like Hughes's The Iron Man, or the Brad Bird movie based on it. ( )

Jane is a changling whose coming of age in the world of fairies is a dark, deadly and demented ride.

If you're thinking of picking up this story for the dragon...don't. The dragon in the story is a reprehensible iron construct who contributes to the subversion of Jane, along with a lot of other reprehensible and grotesque creatures. There was a lot I didn't like about this story. Sexual perversion isn't something I typically read for entertainment purposes. However, the underlying theme behind the reincarnation of Jane's two "soul mates" (although the words are never used, I can't think of any better) was interesting to me. I usually like much lighter, quest based, themes in my fantasy and there is nothing at all light about this book. I'm quite glad I never tried to read this one when I originally got it through the sci-fi/fantasy book club back in high school. Sadly, after owning this novel for probably around 25 years I had hoped to like it better when I finally got around to reading it. At this point, in spite of the nostalgia I feel for the book itself, it is not a keeper. ( )