Author: Richard Harland
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
Liberator is the sequel to Worldshaker and it’s really the same title since the name of the ship in the first volume was Worldshaker, but it has now changed to Liberator. I love that for some reason! This novel is set three months after the initial story, and whereas the original novel ended on an upbeat and happy tune, this one hits the ground running on a really sour note. I was a bit disheartened to find that sour note pervades the whole story.
The "Filthies" are now completely in charge of the Liberator, and they're spitting on the dreams of volume one, whereby everyone would live in harmony - even as they proclaim that as their goal. We’re now in a diametrically opposed position whereby it’s the Filthies who are dominant and antagonistic towards the "Swanks" - the upper deck clueless Victorians (note that this is Queen Victoria 2, and she's no longer queen, having been deposed, but she still lives aboard the ship as an ordinary citizen, along with her husband, Albert - and she's pregnant). But the real problem is sabotage; someone is quietly trying to wreck machinery on the ship, and this culminates as the story Liberator launches, with the death of one of the Filthies. It's a brutal death by means of a wrench applied repeatedly to a skull.
This Filthy was a council member (the ruling body of the Filthies, no Swanks allowed), and his loss is great. Col's sister, Gillabeth volunteers to investigate the murder, but no one is interested in having a Swank involved. Council member Shiv volunteers, promoting his admiring friend Lye to his old position, and also onto the council, which means that Riff is no longer the dominant council member, and Shiv is very powerful. Shiv then loads scores of people onto his investigative team, which he renames 'security team', all of whom wear red armbands There are two things I derived from this.
The first of these is that it’s Shiv himself who is the saboteur, and his sabotage is aimed at fomenting a surge of hatred towards the Swanks, and inciting a pogrom. Either that or it’s Lye all along, and she's using Shiv as a means to an end. The second thing this brought to mind is the French Revolution. I can see parallels between that, and how this take-over is sliding into place aboard Liberator. So here Harland has achieved the basis of a sequel - make it the same as the original but different! That is, it needs to be sufficiently like the original to maintain the audience you won from that, but it has to be different (or warped, or twisted, however you want to view it) enough that it presents a new story. So Harland began cultivating this, perhaps, in the best way (having the positions reversed from the first novel vis-à-vis the Swanks vs. the Filthies, but from that point on, he really just let it go to seed.
Aside from pure speculation, there are also several facts which we must hold in mind about this situation aboard the Liberator. An important one of these is that Lye, for reasons unknown, thoroughly hates Col, and now she is in a position of power. A second fact is that Col's status has diminished to nothing, despite the fact that he quite literally saved Riff's life and thereby enabled her to save the ship. Without his help, the revolution was going nowhere, yet he's given no credit for this whatsoever. A third, and very disturbing fact is that Riff herself is not giving Col a fair shake. She treats him like a problem rather than a partner, and this is what frankly incensed me the most!
What happened to Riff's independence, courage, and feistiness from the first novel? Here she's muted and constrained. She will not stand by Col, yet she asks that he trust her. How he can put up with her demonstrated lack of regard for him is as much a mystery as it is an annoyance. Col never was very good at being assertive, and that hasn’t improved.
Since Liberator is running low on fuel, the ship has to dock at Botany Bay in Australia to re-coal. The only thing they have to trade is valuable artifacts, ornaments and furniture from the empty rooms of those Swanks who disembarked Liberator immediately after the revolution. And they need Victoria and Albert's support to engage with the coal supplier because they apparently would not do business with the Filthies. This does lend the Swanks a certain amount of power.
One more disturbing development: the Filthies consider the library books to be artifacts and three of them, including Riff's brother, Padder, come to the library to take the books. Col and Septimus, his lower-ranking friend from book one, fend them off, but it’s clear that Padder hates Col as much as Lye does (for reasons inexplicable in this case), and the former warns the latter off of involvement with his sister. They way Col is treated it seems he would be better off jumping ship! But given the huge mess Harland has presented us with here, I must admit I am very curious about how he intends to clean it up - assuming he can and does!
But to pursue this jumping ship motif: one thing which made no sense to me at all is why any of these people, Swanks or Filthies, would even want to remain on Liberator. What do they have to gain? Harland does not even attempt to answer this, he just takes it as a given. And given how disgusted Col was with the damage which Liberator does to the environment as it tears up the land beneath it, this problem is let go as well - it's just never addressed. The answer to my question above is that the occupants of liberator have absolutely nothing to gain by staying on board and continuing to run and maintain it. Why did they not simply park it somewhere where food supplies were bountiful, disable it, and start living off the land and sea?
As long as I'm complaining(!),I have to say that the publishers really screwed-up with Patrick Reilly's end paper illustrations. These were drawn for the first book, Worldshaker (and even at that had the number of decks wrong!), but at the end of that novel, a host of Swanks left the ship, yet we're still expected to believe, according to the unadjusted illustration, that there is over ten thousand swanks and over 2,000 Filthies. Clearly, someone didn’t think, and I have to hold Harland, as the author, responsible for not setting them straight on the changes that needed to be made.
I also have to add that by about 160 pages in, I stopped really liking this story. At that point I was merely tolerating it to see if I could manage to stay on board long enough to find out where Harland was sailing with this, and the answer to that question I can now reveal is: the middle of nowhere! I honestly don't know what he thought he was doing, but Col was already quite enough of a limp rag in volume one. Harland has turned him into a big fat nothing in volume two. Why Col even stays on board is a really good question since Riff treats him like dirt! She has almost no respect for him and even less love, yet Col puts up with it all. I can't believe it's love. Infatuation maybe, but not love. Love hasn't had a chance to sprout, let alone blossom.
They screw-up badly at Botany Bay and end up in a battle with the local soldiers. The saboteur left a note pinned on a door announcing the raid, and the Filthies were in serious trouble. They win, but only because Col lets out the convicts from the prison there, who then run riot. The next thing Col knows, the convicts are in Shiv's security squad and they're carrying rifles. The security people are systematically victimizing the Swanks, and no one seems even remotely bothered by this. The revolution has come full circle, with the Filthies treating the swanks exactly like the Swanks had treated the Filthies, and because of the hand-written note which warned the Botany Bay people of the Filthies' attack, they now have even more reason to think that the saboteur is a Swank, since none of the Filthies can write (so we’re told!). At this point I'd also been forced to the conclusion that it’s Lye who's behind all of this sabotage, etc, and her motive is pure malice towards the Swanks, since she feels they have been so brutal towards her.
What the Swanks should do now is disembark right there at Botany Bay and leave the Filthies to it, yet not a one of them even thinks about this let alone suggests it as a possibility. This really tested my suspension of disbelief to breaking point. Meanwhile, the Liberator's telegraph office has been sabotaged, and the other ships: the equivalents of Liberator captained by other nations - are vectoring in on Botany Bay, alerted to the mutiny, and dedicated to taking back the Liberator. The Russians have the Romanov, The Turks have the Battle of Something-Or-Other. I forget! Sorry! The French have the Marseilleuse. Why the other nations would support the re-taking of the Liberator, given the evident rivalry between them, is yet another unsolved mystery on this voyage. The other ships are all better-armed than is Liberator. Col passes on this information to Riff, but Lye talks over him and Col eventually gives up and leaves - that is, leaves their company, not the ship.
The professor and Septimus have discovered (from reading various books in their precious library), what exactly was done to the Menials, but they're prevented from properly examining those people to see if they could perhaps help, by the callous bullying of the security forces. This means that Riff's parents could be freed, and I guessed that this would be what really gets Col and Riff back together, but at this point, I was hardly even rooting for Col, much less Riff. She's turned out to be a complete jerk, so Harland killed my interest in this romance.
I liked Riff in the first novel. I tolerated Col. I found the latter hardly more tolerable in this second volume, and I found Riff to be completely obnoxious. She treated Col quite literally like dirt and at one point "viciously" slapped him across the face; then suddenly the two of them are professing their love for each other and when Col says he loves her but he's still married to Sephaltina, Riff suddenly gives him the cold shoulder? No. I'm sorry but no sale. My spell-checker wants to change Sephaltina to 'Asphalting'! LOL! Let this be a lesson to us writers to make sure our characters names don't sound like crap to a spell-checker!
Back on track here! This entire 'romance' lacked credibility in Liberator. It was a joke, and on that note, here's a choice quote from p187: "Now he was thinking about Riff and himself…. Would it ever come good between them? How could it ever come good? It seemed like the ultimate cruelty that finally he knew he loved her, finally he knew she loved him, and still they couldn’t come together." I'll leave that for you to make of it what you will, but I very nearly laughed out loud at Harland's unintentional (I assume it was unintentional!) double-entendre!
On a much more serious note, the quote above was Col's own thoughts. This was a boy who had been raised in the highest echelons of Victorian society, and he's using a phrase like "come good"? Someone from the backwoods of North America might credibly employ a phrase like that, but no one in Victorian England of his breeding would ever use a phrase like that, much less think it. Again with the suspension of disbelief!
I've wavered back and forth between really disliking this novel, and finding it just about readable, and it's because of that, that I'm going to rate it as a 'warty'. It just did not do enough to win me back over from the dark side. At one point I almost dropped the thing and abandoned it altogether (that was right after the Riff-slaps-Col imbroglio). The story-telling was a bit too fond of deus ex machina for my taste, but the worst problem was that I found it ever harder to buy this love between Riff and Col the more I read, particularly given that her behavior towards him throughout the first half of the novel was totally unacceptable and betrayed any pretense of love. I kept on reading solely because I was curious to learn if Harland could dig himself out of this hole and he really couldn’t, although he did try, but I don’t award points for trying - not in this game! Write or write not. There is no try.
