The Rising


Today I devoured The Rising, Ian Tregillis’ second book about Dutch automata fighting French Canadians in an alternate 1920s setting. (Yes, it is slightly strange.) I enjoyed this more than the first novel, The Mechanical, perhaps because there’s less world-building going on this time and more action. (There is a bit too much action sometimes, but more of that later…)

There are three parallel plots that twist and intertwine with one another: Berenice, ex-spymaster, trying to escape the Dutch, while Jax, a fugitive automaton is also on the run from the Dutch, and Longchamps, a French captain under siege and therefore the only person not running away from the Dutch. It all ends up resolving a trifle too neatly in the final chapters, but the bonkers twists that occur before then give Tregillis a surplus of goodwill to trade on.

There are some great sequences: when Visser, the (literally) brainwashed priest mounts his attack I couldn’t tear myself away from the pages, and the various assaults on Longchamps are well-written, although the cumulative effect of them is just a bit too wearying. There are a few times when it lapses into undergraduate debates around free will and determinism, or identity, although less frequently than in The Mechanical, which helps. There are also what feel like one setback too many for Berenice as the book goes on; each chapter is a triumph for her, then defeat snatched from victory, then another solution, until it feels like she’s the protagonist of some slightly above average video game, and I would have liked Jax to spend more time with Queen Mab, but aside from these quibbles, it’s superior to its predecessor.

(Ot perhaps I was just unduly harsh on Thr Mechanical, given how much I liked the Milkweed Triptych.)

This is again the second part of a trilogy, and again, as with the Milkweed Triptych, it’s hard to see where to go from the apocalyptic end to the middle volume, given all the eviscerated, bruised, half blinded, larynx-crushed victims of this book, but it was certainly a pleasant four hours of my life that I spent today in Nre Amsterdam and beyond. I wonder what madness he’ll write when he’s finished this.


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