Subject: review: The Iron Dragon's Daughter

From: [email-masked] (Mark Diller)
Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 16:53:26 GMT

Swanwick, Michael
                 The Iron Dragon's Daughter
                    review by Mark Diller

This is a book which might be termed "realist fantasy", oxymoronic though
that might seem.  Like Orson Scott Card's _Wyrms_, _The Iron Dragon's
Daughter_ is a book which freely mixes fantasy elements with grim and gritty
details of some of the less pleasant aspects of everyday life.  Where Card's
work was set in a medieval period, though, Swanwick writes about a modernist
environment in which automobiles have lively personalities, red dwarves hang
out at the mall, and a young changeling's greatest concern is whether she
can get a date with a cute elf named Peter.

Jane, the changeling, is at the center of the narrative and she is a full
and complex character, well-drawn and sympathetic.  So too the "iron dragon"
of the title, a mechanical construction endowed with self-knowledge and
purposes of its own, is an effective and interesting player on Swanwick's
stage.  Any good writer can tell you that quality fiction is
character-driven, and this book has very strong characters.  So why did I
find it so boring?

Ultimately Swanwick's work serves as a necessary corrective for the
guideline noted above: good fiction is based on strong characters, but
characterization cannot be an end in itself.  Though Jane is a compelling
protagonist, her story proceeds at such a plodding tempo that I found myself
flipping forward to see how many more pages I would have to read before
something finally happened.  When the book opens Jane is toiling in a child-
labor sweatshop, and we have no trouble immediately identifying with her and
hoping that she escapes her situation.  There follows a necessary build-up
to her escape attempt, in league with the iron dragon, a brief flurry of
activity, and then the chapter ends and we find ourselves mired in another
long, long period of inactivity.  I liked Jane, and I wanted her to come out
well, but reading this book was like watching paint dry.

I think that maybe this book was mistakenly labelled a work of fantasy/SF.
It would be far more appropriately shelved in the young adult fiction area;
a bored, alienated, lonely 15-year-old girl may well find in Jane a
character she can identify with and learn from in a way that I could not.
Unfortunately, lacking this identification I found little else to enjoy in
the book.  It is skillfully executed, but in the final analysis just not a
very good story.

%A      Swanwick, Michael
%T      The Iron Dragon's Daughter
%I      William Morrow
%C      New York
%D      1994
%G      ISBN 0-688-13174-3
%O      hardcover, US$23.00 [1995]
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