My own self

The chains were very strong.

- Joshua York


We're in America, by the Mississippi, close before the Civil War. We're taken there through the eyes of Abner Marsh, steamboat cap'n, a damned ugly man whose appetite is only dwarfed by his integrity, and Sour Billy, the skinny overseer of the slaves at the Julian Plantation who is as clever as he is mean. Both these men are formidable - or, as Marsh would fondly pronounce the word, for-mid-a-bul - and interesting in their own right, but what George R. R. Martin's fantasy novel Fevre Dream is showing us through their eyes is more for-mid-a-bul still.

Fevre Dream is the story of Abner Marsh's dream of owning and piloting a steamboat so beautiful and grand that it would beat out even the famous boat Eclipse in a race, and of his new, mysterious business partner Joshua York's dream of - well, that'd be spoiling the surprise wouldn't it? Suffice to say that he, too, has a fond desire to put something beautiful into the world, and that something is the magnificent sidewheeler steamboat Fevre Dream.

Everything seems bright and wondrous for Cap'n Marsh as his lifelong dream begins its maiden voyage along the Mississippi, but isn't it damned odd how the polite and likable Joshua York insists on keeping the strangest hours, never coming out in the day, and how Marsh had to promise asking no questions about his strange behaviour in return for the funding?

At the Julian plant, a couple of run-away slaves is brought back into the hands of Sour Billy by a slave-catcher and his son. The terrified slaves have told odd tales along the way, but slave-talk is not worth listening to, and Sour Billy agrees. Still, it's somewhat strange that there's no-one but Billy to see at the plantation, and that they'll have to wait until nightfall before the owner will arrive to pay them for the service.

George R. R. Martin is my hands-down favourite fantasy-author with his ever-ongoing A Song of Ice and Fire, but I have never taken the time to read anything he's written outside of his vast epic. Mostly, it seems, he's written outside the fantasy-genre, but this particular book is an exception to that. And Martin does certainly not disappoint.

While in my respects a history-buff, I will freely admit that the 1860's is too recent for my tastes, and steamboats has never really tickled my fancy. The closest I've ever gotten to care about steamboats in my life was while reading chapter two of Keno Don Rosa's graphic novel The Life and Times of $crooge McDuck, but even there in-between gorgeous illustrations and exciting characters did not the concept of the riverboat-captains of the mid-1800's and their steamboats come to life as much as here.

What intrigued me most about this book, I think, was the characterisations - several secondary characters stick almost as well to the memory as the more central ones, and the main villain was in many ways as charismatic and interesting as the nicer people of the story. This relatively short book, ending at well beneath 400 pages, opens up a wide new world for me as a reader, a world I'd be very interested in seeing more of. (Alas, not likely to happen.) The book holds tragedy, but it's also got great displays of loyalty, trust, and honour - and even at times a little comedy. Strength in defeat, weakness in triumph, pathetically valiant and admiringly greedy, there is a lot of these things to be seen in Fevre Dream, and while Martin has here written a story far more clearly distinguishing between good and evil than the morally grey areas-loving Ice and Fire he still shows us characteristically complex characters dealing with characteristically complex moral issues. All the while neatly covered in what on the surface would seem to be a straight-forward conflict between right and wrong.

I must say I truly enjoyed this book. While never as singularly awesome as A Song of Ice and Fire, Fevre Dream grabbed me from the very first page of it I read and kept me going eagerly. And when I got there, the end did not disappoint.