Customer Reviews

Thunderer

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When the god he worships, Voice, vanishes from Gad, Arjun comes up with the idea of searching for Voice in the great city, Ararat. In Ararat, gods are abundant and it would be easy, he reasons, to for one more god to lose his way in that city. After traveling for months, he arrives in time to see evidence of those gods--a huge flame that continually lights the city, and a bird flying overhead that showers its powers down on the inhabitants of Ararat, temporarily gifting a few of them with the ability to fly.

Jack Sheppard has waited for the arrival of the bird and uses its passage to speed his own escape from a workhouse. Once free, he joins up with a group of other feral children and schemes to free more. Ararat teems with workhouses and prisons, and Jack embarks on a quest to free everyone. While the power the bird gave most of Ararat fades, in Jack, it seems to grow.

Scientist Holbach has predicted the return of the bird and convinced one of the city's nobles, the Countess Ilona, to invest in a balloon that will, Holbach believes, permanently capture a bit of the bird's power that would otherwise disperse into nothing. The experiment is a success, but at a cost, and the balloon, named Thunderer, becomes a part of the Countess's arsenal. While Holbach dreamed of using it to continue his vast survey and Atlas of the seemingly limitless city, the Countess plans it to be a weapon, allowing her to threaten her rivals without fear of retribution.

Author Felix Gilman shows huge promise in a fascinating and complex world where gods walk the streets, continually transforming the city behind them, where a few humans seem to have abilities that defy explanation, and where disease and corruption never lies far beneath the surface. The city of Ararat is really the primary character in this story, with Jack, Holbach, Arjun and the others serving mostly as opportunities to peer into other parts of the city, to see new sights and new dangers.

THUNDERER is Gilman's first novel and, despite its promise, it's not without flaws. The Thunderer itself never really plays an important role in the unfolding plot. The mysterious spider god shows incredible potential (and a number of pages are dedicated to this god) but soon fades and never really plays a role in the plot, either. As several people point out to Jack, his plan to spring workers and prisoners from their workshops and prisons is clearly doomed--if the escapes are successful, the newly freed prisoners have nothing to do, no money, no food--yet he seems incapable of doing anything else. Even Arjun seems to wander through the city rather. Only in the last fifty pages or so, when Gilman wraps things up, does Arjun develop goals and start to plan rather than react.

The best fantasy develops wonderful worlds that somehow reflect and shine lights into our own universe. But Gilman, in THUNDERER, seems to forget that it's necessary to have compelling characters and plot as well. There's a lot to like in this book and Gilman certainly shows huge promise. But that promise is only partially filled in this first novel.

Yes, someone gave this book a bad review, but don't listen to him -- he's someone who apparently doesn't know the difference between "bazaar" and "bizarre". This book is a delight, and the author is both a good storyteller and a good writer.

I completely disagree with the previous reviewer's critique that the book has no character or plot development; I found the characters to have both depth and charm (and yes, they do learn and grow and change during the course of their travels), and the plot is creatively based upon what happens to the these characters as they seek to find, follow, trap, defy, profit from, or divine the patterns of the many gods within the seemingly infinite city of Ararat. This city is NOT, as the critical reviewer has written, "devoid of cause and effect and logic," but instead is vividly written and fascinating. The gods of Ararat regularly remake its streets in the wake of their passing, and the citizens who believe in these gods (and who among them would dare NOT believe, when their presence is so frequently seen and felt) range from the blasé to the devout to the fanatical.

The summaries of this book focus on the naive traveler Arjun and his search for the Voice, but there is also another main character, Jack (it's not too much of a spoiler to say that he's the one featured on the cover, is it?), a boy of the streets whose own search is equally engaging. Indeed, they are contending with forces greater than themselves, yet they have their own skills and wisdom to draw upon as they make their stand.

The secondary characters also have depth, and skills, and flaws of their own to wrestle with, and as you read you will be certain that even though not every detail has revealed to you, the author, at least, knows everything about both his gods and his mortals, making both the setting and the story of his novel very believable and wonderfully exciting.

I'll be saving my 5-star rating for when Gilman's second book goes to press.

This novel took a little bit to get it's engine going, but I found it excellent. There are three main characters. The first two are Jack and Arjun and the plot follows the two of them in their separate stories until they intersect. The last is the city, an area that is as much theological as geographical. The city rearranges itself and is infested by gods that are unknowable but impossible to ignore. The book lags at the beginning because the author has to layer on plots and characters and background to let the readers ( and the characters) discover how the city really works.
A satisfying chew.

Horror fantasy is an close description, but it's not so much that as quixotic; all of Gilman's characters are attempting to contend with forces far beyond their control, their intertwining goals shifting like the city itself as the gods pass them by. Their reach exceeds their grasp, but that's what makes them so intriguing to read about.

As for the city itself - for those familiar with the Planescape setting, imagine the Cage without the Lady of Pain, at the mercy of, and reshaped by, any power or demiurge that passes through its portals. The citizens live in shifting districts, ruled by this or that noble house, often claimed by several at once, and all the time hoping for and dreading the touch of the gods who might change anything.

Arjun the composer leaves his home city Gad on a quest to find the intangible Voice. His journey takes him to the strange city of Ararat where streets change location and direction seemingly on a whim. He finds the place loaded with Gods, who enjoy making the city in their image. Then there is the enigmatic Bird who apparently has powerful influence on the townsfolk and Arjun wonders if the Gods do too.

As Arjun struggles to adjust to the ever changing environs, he continues his search for the Voice. He also ponders why so many Gods reside here and whether they compete to shape the landscape and the people in their image of the moment.

Readers who appreciate something radically different will want to peruse this complex horror fantasy as we accompany Arjun on his quest inside a city in which the visit yesterday to a locale might have been Renaissance Italy but today is late nineteenth century San Francisco and tomorrow only the Gods know. Try being Mapquest providing direction under those ever changing conditions. The convoluted story line never explains why the Gods constantly perform urban renewal; still Arjun and the audience get a first hand look at a theological system in which apparently the Gods Must be Crazy.

Harriet Klausner

A lot of books have come out where setting plays a large role as character: Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris, China Miéville's New Crobuzon, Gregory Frost's Shadowbridge, and Jay Lake's Mainspring. Books that haven't simply created a new world but whose world itself is an integral part of story, rather than just the physical part the story moves across.
Felix Gilman's Thunderer certainly falls into that category--more successfully than some and less so than others. The setting is the city of Ararat--seemingly infinite in size and "peopled" by a plethora of gods. The opening scene, in fact, is the return of one of those gods, the Great Bird, whose swooping flight over the city sets in motion much of the events to come. Though typical of Ararat's gods, the Bird itself seems utterly unaware and/or indifferent to the results of its fabled return.
One of the witnesses to the Bird's flight is Arjun, a young man who has traveled to Ararat from far away in search of his people's lost God (The Voice), believing that it, like so many other gods, has been drawn to Ararat. Another young man, Jack, imprisoned in a Dickensian workhouse for most of his short life, uses the magic left in the Bird's wake to escape. Also making use of the Bird's magical leavings, is the Countess, ruler of this small section of the city. Her advisor Professor Holbach has used the Bird's magic to lift one of her warships--the Thunderer--so it becomes an airship. Captained by the tragically grieving Captain Arlandes (his fiancée was killed in the Bird's passage), the Thunderer becomes a one-of-a-kind weapon that other rulers cannot defend against.
A lot happens in that opening scene, maybe too much, though the chaotic sweep was exhilarating. The book soon settles down as the characters move into their respective roles. Arjun tries to find his way in this city beyond comprehension and accidentally falls foul of one of its newly awakened to sentience gods. His attempt to avoid its murderous intent is one major plot. Jack frees other boys and girls and grows into a crusading leader of a band of freedom fighters, though more in a trickster/mischief-maker/Peter Pan role than as any true political rebel. And the Countess begins a systematic pummeling of her rivals into submission via the Thunderer, to the dismay of Holbach who had hoped to use the airship as his tool to map the city for the Atlas--a subversive piece of work that threatens the political landscape and is also considered heresy by many. As one might assume, eventually the three strands of plot intersect.
Thunderer is a rich mix of styles and technologies and magics--guns and potions and telescopes and trains, Lovecraft and Dickens and Mieville and Wells. There are some wonderfully mythic images, such as the flame god's pillar rising up from one of the city squares. The shifting point of views and the characters' evolution, especially Jack's, are strengths. And of course there is the city itself--whose every corner seems to offer up something else to fascinate.
But while there is a lot to like, the book felt curiously flat whenever it stuck to plot and character. As if all the plot events and the multitude of characters and allusions ended up diluting their individual effect. I found myself wanting to spend much more time on the throwaways, such as the iron machine on rails, the brief descriptions of gods, the descriptions of the city, than on what was happening with the characters. It was as if Gilman had created this wonderfully evocative haunted house with nooks and crannies and then put a few accountants on the porch and left us there with them. That's an exaggeration, but it did seem that the characters paled in interest compared to the setting and that the plot tried to make up for that with a lot of action that never really felt gathered into purpose. The Countess' war, for instance, felt completely abstract. And its consequences didn't seem to matter in a city that we were constantly being told was "infinite".
Too much of that infinity was left unexplored, especially given that tool of the airship. Though perhaps that's coming. The ending of the book resolves much--it certainly stands on its own as a full story. But it also clearly leaves room for a sequel. Or more than one. I'd certainly love to see more of Ararat, if not of its people. Thunderer is a solid debut book that could have actually been improved by less plot and more atmosphere/setting. The plot, while not particularly compelling, will hold your attention, but don't be surprised if you wish a character had continued just a little bit farther down an alley or round a corner. Which is partially a criticism, but more a compliment and testament to the originality and potential of the city Gilman has built. Here's hoping we can spend more time in it next novel.

Thunderer is easily the best speculative fiction novel I've read this year. The story is fantastically surreal, with magic and science butting heads in an endless labyrinthine city where gods walk the streets. I truly don't have the words to describe how much I enjoyed this book. Felix Gilman shows remarkable promise as a writer, with a style that reminds me in places of the great 20th century Germans: Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. Buy this book, you won't regret it.

"In his mind he was composing a letter to his mothers and fathers: here we begin at last. The city is a puzzle box to be cracked open. Let me describe it for you...But he wasn't sure how, yet."

Felix Gilman's Thunderer begins as the Bird, god of flight and freedom, returns to fly over the city of Ararat. Ships collide in the harbor as the crews stare at the sky, people across the city pick this moment to escape both prison and circumstance, and the faithful leap from the roofs on multicolored wings, eager to fly in the wake of their god. Ararat seems immeasurably vast, incomprehensibly wonderful, and impossibly strange in these opening moments, and the reader no doubt assumes that the book's power will come from ever-increasing knowledge of the city, like a child given a marvelous, complex present and slowly figuring out how to make it work. This is not the case.

In an interview ([...]), Gilman said:

"There are different kinds of world building. There's the kind that focuses on making the physical details real, and the texture of the culture the characters inhabit. That's something I want to do, and I think it's really interesting trying to create textured worlds in that sense -- which is very different from the huge architectural level of deciding, 'This goes here and this goes here; this is the continent with the elves, and this is what dragons do."

The quote goes a long way to summing up Thunderer's world building. The world feels vibrant and alive; you can imagine the people milling around you, and you can hear the recitations of the poets and smell the dark waters of the river as you walk along behind Arjun or Jack. That being said, you never really get an idea for what Ararat is. It's a bit like trying some new delicacy. You savor the taste while eating it, but, if asked afterwards, to describe it, all you can say are meaningless words like textured, interesting, etc.

Early on, the reader learns that the city is so vast that, after showing an appreciable portion of whatever area they live in, mapmakers just draw a question mark to show that they don't know what lies beyond the city (or if it even ends at all). Gilman's city is unknowable in more ways than just the geographic. Despite its immersive nature, Gilman's city is difficult to ever really comprehend. As we follow the characters, we experience it as if we were there. Take even a step off the road, though, and everything replaced by that massive question mark. It's the difference between admiring a work of art and understanding it; the reader is only allowed through the gate when they're shown by the hand.

This style of world building is obviously, both in its advantages and its flaws, a conscious choice by Gilman. In an earlier quote from the interview, Gilman says:

"The things that interest me in world building are the entertainment or culture of the world, or the academy, or the newspapers: what are they like? Or the politics in the sense of the day-to-day ideas and ideologies and unexamined notions and slogans people carry around in their heads. And to develop these things through contrasts, through things knocking and rubbing against each other. The denser and more knotted the more interesting."

The unknowable nature of the city is itself a major part of the novel and ties into one of its most interesting elements: Atlas, a group of mapmakers and encyclopedia-ists that seek to document all of Ararat. Their attempts, and the city as a whole, are not the plot focus of Thunderer, but the two influence almost everything that transpires.

The reader is grounded in Ararat through the characters. Of the three leads, all are well drawn but only one manages to fully live up to his potential. Arjun, arguably the main protagonist, is obsessed with searching for the Voice, a deity that shows itself through audio perfection. A calm, melodic symphony of wind and earth heard from atop an isolated tower. Arjun goes to Ararat to try and find his god, but it's never totally clear if his real goal is to search for the Voice or to escape its absence. Once in the city, he discovers that the Voice - if it is even there - is lost amidst literally hundreds of other gods, and his personal quest is drowned out and steered by the demands of the city and the people within it. He can be quite self centered, he's prone to fixations and obsessions, he's a bit naïve, maybe just a tad cowardly, and somewhere in the midst of all that Arjun comes alive on the page.

Jack is only one of many to gain their freedom on the day of the Bird's return, but he becomes unique when the Bird's gift and drive do not depart. He turns a group of outcasts into his own freedom fighters and plans to bring liberty to everyone in Ararat. For a time, his arc is the most fascinating part of the book. Jack's righteous drive clashes with the practical survivor-mentality of Fiss, and Jack's most ardent devotee, Namdi, seems headed for disaster. As Fiss and Aiden, the original leaders of the group, point out: Jack's plan simply cannot work. Unfortunately, this arc is weakened when, at the last moment, Gilman pulls back and denies the characters the climax that their actions necessitated.

"Arlandes woke from a dream of Lucia, dancing. In all of his dreams she was either dancing or falling, or sometimes both."

Arlandes steals the spotlight for the first third or so of Thunderer. Arjun's characterization is excellent, but he is more of a cumulative experience than one defining moment, and Jack doesn't come into his own for some time, leaving the initial promise of Arlandes's storyline to reign unchallenged. He is the captain of the countess's new super weapon: the floating warship, Thunderer. As the ship was raised, Lucia, Arlandes's love, was killed. Throughout the countess's domain, Arlandes becomes a tragic hero. He is the star of countless plays and poems, standing in black and tormented by loss. Arlandes himself scoffs at all of these cheap imitations. His life is composed of misery, and his only solace comes when firing the Thunderer's mighty guns at some helpless, grounded target. Sounds like the start of a fascinating narrative, no? Unfortunately, a start is all it is. After the groundwork is set, Arlandes merely regresses to a state of depressed near-incompetence. Yeah, I suppose that's a bit more realistic than, say, homicidal rage, but it's a bit of an anticlimax to have the most intriguing character fade into a mopey absence after the first bit.

The plotting is fairly uneven. At its best, it's character driven and surprising. At its worst, it's meandering and a bit bewildering. Despite that, things come together very well for the ending, and Gilman finishes the book by pushing the Weird Level up to about a hundred and five, leaving the reader with a nice mixture of amazement and satisfaction.

Throughout the novel, Gilman's prose is excellent:

"Some days he felt like he was beginning again; that, after many mistakes and wrong turns, he had found himself back at the start of thing, unencumbered, full of promise. Some days he felt that he was at the end of things; past the end, that all the orchestra's lively and noisy themes were finished, for better or worse, and the he was a mere coda, a single note repeating quietly, in measured isolation, soon to be stilled."

I expected the book's style to be divisive, of course. It's filled with oddities and is very much Gilman's own. All the same, I'll admit I was a bit shocked when I discovered that Rob (of sffworld) not only disliked the prose, but considered it a deal breaker...and then quoted a passage that I had thought excellent to prove his point:

"Sometimes Arjun went down to the waterways. He never had to walk too far in any direction before coming to a canal, a reservoir, one of the ornamental lakes of Faugére, or on of the shallow marshy ponds that formed on condemned ground north of Fourth Ward -- and the River itself, had he ever been brave enough to face it, would have been only a few hours' walk to the east."

Rob goes on to say in his review ([...]): "There was no real cadence to the narrative because it seemed every statement was interrupted by a comma or a hyphen, changing the flow of the sentence with varying degrees of bluntness." It's odd, because I can't really disagree with the statement. In fact, it's a pretty good description of why I found Gilman's prose interesting. Picture a river, flowing, serene. Then, imagine that it changes course, flowing down an unexpected channel, but doesn't lose any of its natural grace. That's something like how Gilman seems to construct his passages, sliding into and then back out of our expectations. I think that the reader's enjoyment will really come down to whether they consider these course changes intrusive or not.

Brandon Sanderson summed up Thunderer best, I think: "Recommended for any who want to sit back for a spell and just dream." Thunderer is a novel with flaws, yes, but one that I feel more than makes up for them. I can't guarantee you'll love Thunderer, or even tolerate it, but I think it's something you need to try for yourself anyway.

After Samuel Delany's Bellona, China Mieville's New Crubuzon (and, now, Beszel-Ul Qoma), and Scott Lynch's Camoor, it's fair to say that, with the arrival of Felix Gilman's Ararat, as described in his wonderful first novel "Thunderer," "the city as character" novel has reached the status of subgenre. Mr. Gilman's creation, while following the conventions of the subgenre, adds another panel to the atlas. Ararat is an every-changing city in which competing gods fall in and out of fashion, while a bunch of intellectuals and scientists attempt to harness its magical energy and/or map the chimerical city. (I doubt that the lack of the customary map in the frontmatter is an oversight.)

The tale--which seems influenced as much by Dickens and Borges as contemporary fantasy/magic realism--is told from three points of view for the most part. Arjun comes to the city to try to find the "Voice," the god of his people. Jack escapes from a workhouse and becomes a flying artful dodger. And Captain Arlandes, faithful servant of the Countess Ilona, commands a seagoing vessel that, thanks to the scientist Holbach, can now take to the air. When it does . . . well, let's just say that is when the trouble starts.

These characters eventually meet, of course, and then the tale rushes to a stunning conclusion as Arjun and the others try to soothe an insane and angry river god. The novel's complete in itself, but a sequel has recently been released. I hope it's as good as this tale.

I agree that this book is a slow read, something I usually don't do well with. However, this slow read happens to be a thoroughly interesting and refreshing one. I don't think I would want it to go by any faster! Gilman has created one of the most unique and complex cities I have ever encountered in a book. It's fascinating to read about the gods and oddities and customs of Ararat and I don't find it annoying at all when I come to more "infodump." I actually look forward to it in this book! In fact, I find myself craving more information about Ararat and its inhabitants.

I wrote this review right after reading the book and have developed an upgraded outlook on it as I have had more time to dwell on it. I always felt that though a great novel, it was missing something, or something which I couldn't place my finger on was wrong with it. I now understand that the issue at hand wasn't that something was wrong with Thunderer, rather my expectations. With a passion for world-building, I naturally saw every mention of a god or custom or strange geographical feature as a chance for an epic plot mark. But Gilman didn't create Ararat to take you on a tour, wonderful though it may have been, he instead tackles the effects of this chaotic city on its inhabitants and how they are molded by it. He examines their psychology and social trends in response to the menagerie of elements being thrown at them. His true masterpiece is defining Ararat through their eyes and experiences, and leaving you just as curious, yet ignorant, to the same exact things as his characters. The feeling that I had while reading this book wasn't one of something missing, but the purely overwhelmed and uneducated feeling that each citizen of Ararat must harbor. Just like Arjun, I was exposed to amazing and numerous oddities at every corner, and it resulted in myself developing just as much as Gilman's multi-dimensional characters.

I think this could have been a great trilogy, which would have allowed more room for all the intricacies. I think then, that it might be more appreciated. However, Gilman managed to get all the wonderful information into one novel, which accounts for the slow, but enjoyable read. On top of that, he has introduced a new art form within fantasy that I (and I expect most of the readers) have never before encountered. I hope that they can recognize the genius of Gilman's writing as I eventually did. I say go for it!