[Book review] Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

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This review contains minor spoilers.

I have a love/hate relationship with steampunk.  I never fell head-over-heels in love with the genre the way some people have.  At best, I’ve tolerated its presence on the shelves.  Recently, I’ve read some steampunk that I thought was good, but I still don’t consider myself to be an aficionado.  Therefore, I tend to approach any novel with steampunk elements with a bit of trepidation.  Phoenix Rising does indeed fit the bill of steampunk, but contains many other story elements as well.

Wellington Books, Archivist for England’s Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, finds himself in a most uncomfortable position: captive by the House of Usher.  But his salvation comes in the peculiar form of Eliza Braun, field agent for the Ministry and someone overly fond of explosives.

As a result of the dramatic rescue, Braun is reassigned to the Archives with Books.  Although initially not to her taste, the apparently boring job gains intensity when the two begin investigating a dead case—the one that landed Braun’s previous partner in Bedlam.  What they find is a conspiracy that threatens the very foundations of the monarchy.

I have the same mixed feelings about this novel that I have about the steampunk genre in general.  With steampunk, I often feel that some of the setting elements have been thrown in simply to pad the idea that it is, in fact, steampunk.  With this novel, I felt that something similar was happening.  The Archives have machinery in them that definitely fits in a steampunk universe, but it’s mostly background set dressing.  There’s also mention of dirigibles (another classic steampunk item), clockwork automatons, and steam boilers.  I think this tale could have worked just as well without those trappings—minus the automatons, which do play a significant part later in the book, but those don’t necessarily have to be steampunk elements.

In the same vein, there are several throwaway references to people and things from classic eighteenth century science fiction: the House of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe) is one of the main antagonists; Braun apparently at one point destroyed the plans for the Nautilus (Jules Verne); and some items in the Archives briefly allude to other stories as well.  I didn’t see a compelling reason for this version of England to include fictional characters as “real” to them, but perhaps that’s something that will be clarified in later books.

The overall sense that I get from the first half of the book is that of a universe cobbled together from other sources.  The Syfy cable television series “Warehouse 13” comes to mind, as does the series of Librarian movies and the recent Parasol Protectorate novels by Gail Carriger.  But about halfway through the book, the authors seem to stop trying to make this book into something that it’s not and start making it into its own unique tale.  And that’s when it gets interesting.

Up to that point, the characters were established with fairly broad strokes—Books pontificates a lot about the function of the Archives and the Ministry and is painfully proper, while Braun tosses off little verbal zingers and acts as irresponsibly as she can.  But an undercover situation puts each in the position of having to act contrary to their natures, and that’s when the novel really takes on a life of its own.

From a shaky beginning, the story becomes something unexpected and interesting.  And yes, it includes automatons.  But in this scenario, the mechanized beings fit the setting, rather than feeling like they were thrown in as a method of making the novel as steampunk-ish as possible.  Readers should stick with the novel and get through the first several chapters, because I was pleasantly surprised at how the authors turned around what could have been a fairly run-of-the-mill tale.

In the end, I was pleased with Phoenix Rising.  Once it finds its own footing, it takes off and creates a fast-paced tale of mystery and mayhem.  Fans of Carriger’s novels will enjoy this one.

This book was provided by the publisher as an e-ARC.