I would have got round to reading Goliath a bit sooner but I had an umpteenth redraft to finish and so this book sort of burnt its way into my head. It meant that I polished off the redraft really quickly, popped it in a drawer and then, eureka, I could get onto Goliath. Only, of course, then, I didn't actually have anything else I really needed to do and that led to me reading a couple of hundred pages before I knew it. So I forced myself to slow down, because, frankly, you don't want to read this too quickly and sweep past the exquisite little niceties of the plot and the superbly intricate illustrations.
Goliath finds Alek and Dylan back on board the Leviathan and off to pick up Nikola Tesla, a Russian inventor who has created a machine, Goliath, which he claims can destroy half the world but which he wants to use as a threat to stop the war. Now, if you haven't read the two earlier books in this trilogy (Leviathan and Behemoth), you won't have made much sense of that. So let me direct you to my reviews of those books and my interview with Scott, which, at the very least, might explain the steampunk alternative world in which this story is set.
As, I guess, we've all hoped for a while now, Alek finally discovers that Dylan is a girl. This isn't a spoiler. Anyone could realise it would happen soon enough, and anyway, it's not the fact of the discovery which is interesting so much as the way it happens, in particular the exquisite little hints given by Alek's deliciously named perspicacious loris, Bovril. Indeed, one of the more delightful aspects of this book is the role played by the lorises and the irony that meets their increasingly perspicacious comments. This could be really grown up stuff, but my perception is that it wouldn't pass over the head of an intelligent 12 year old and it will certainly introduce them to a very useful new word! Of course, once Alek has made his discovery, all manner of emotions ensue: confusion, anger and resentment at what he sees as a betrayal, mourning for a lost friendship, acceptance and, well, I wouldn't want to reveal the ending but if you've read the rest of the books you can probably guess it.
And all the while, the events unfolding around Alek and Dylan are becoming increasingly complex and threatening. In Leviathan, Westerfeld kept relatively close to First World War history. In Behemoth, events in the book started to part company with the historical record and in Goliath they part company pretty completely. Many of the characters are real historical people: Tesla, himself of course, but also William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Philip Francis and Francisco 'Pancho' Villa. Some are well know, others less so, and Westerfeld provides us with a neat little adendum at the end of the book which gives us brief bios of these characters and outlines where the book parts with reality. But had the real war followed the course here, many thousands of young men would not have died in the mud of Normandy.
Which leaves me to talk about the illustrations, because the strength of this series is as much in the illustrations as the writing and for me nothing sums up their power as the one entitled 'The Walker Shoots Deryn'. This single page sets the harsh intricacies of the Clanker walker against the almost lyrical sinuousness of Deryn's 'wings'; one a heavily shaded, metallic structure with detailed irregular shaped knobbly extrusions, the other depicted more by white space than line, and drawn with a sweeping light touch that makes the wings seem to shimmer against the background. I'd love to be able to share a copy of this with you, but I don't have that authority. So you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that one page is quite simply masterful.
So, this is the end of the trilogy. I can't imagine what Westerfeld will come up with next. I just hope that this isn't the last we've seen of his collaboration with Keith Thompson.
The lovely folk at Simon & Schuster sent me this review copy. If you want to get one for yourself pleae buy it via the link below and Amazon will make a small contribution to the maintenance of this blog.
