It’s the kind of tale where you look up every chapter and think: “what crazy thing did I just read? That was a lot darker than I expected.” The Dragons of Babel recreates the same kind of droll fairy-tale village, and very much like that novel it “shifts unpredictably from drollery to menace to a high poignancy that sticks in the mind” as other reviewers have said. I think Swanwick takes a page from an old classic: Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926).
The malign influence of the dragon’s dark thoughts spreads into Will and the village. Swanwick solidly inverts the farm-boy-turned-hero trope. The dragon is still alive but can’t move, and chooses Will to be his lieutenant. A new main character, the young Will, has his life turned upside down when an iron dragon crashes in their little fairy village. The Dragons of Babel (2008) is a loose companion novel, written 15 years later, and can be read as a standalone. The explosion of inventive fantasy on every page was very satisfying, but what impressed me most of all was Swanwick’s powerful prose that made it a joy to read. This world combined the strangest opposites: fairy tale and cyberpunk, Harry Potter-like fantasy cuteness and the sudden violence and cruelty of old Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The weird faerie-cyber-elf-punk-Dickens world with telepathic robot dragons blew my mind. Earlier this year I read Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) and I was immensely impressed.
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