Author: Richard Harland
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!
Worldshaker is a steam-punk novel, part of a dilogy about the education of Colbert Porpentine, grandson of the master of Worldshaker, Sir Marmus Porpentine. Worldshaker is a massive ship, two and a half miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide, well over a thousand feet high, home to ten thousand people, and two thousand "filthies" - people who live below decks and unaccountably have within their control the power plant of this the city on rollers (when it's on the ground) or city of the air.
Col wakes up one night because of a ruckus in the hallway outside his room. One of the Filthies, who was brought up top to be turned into a Menial (a servant of the ruling classes), has escaped and is now running loose on the upper decks! The guards visit him and then depart and it's only after this that Col realizes that it wasn't the ruckus which disturbed him, it was something before that. He looks under his bed and there's a filthy hiding there. When she comes out, she turns out to be disturbingly attractive despite the dirt, and she can even speak, something which quite astounds Col. Her name is Riff and when he calls out to the guards in surprise, she runs and hides in his closet!
But Col doesn't betray Riff. The guards do not arrive, so he locks her in his closet. The next morning, his sister Gillabeth bursts into his room complaining that he needs to get ready - there's an important breakfast with his grandfather. She immediately goes to his closet and his heart almost stops as she wrenches it open, but Riff is no longer there!
The great announcement which grandpa makes that morning is that Col is to be his successor; he will be groomed to take charge of the ship. He is to go to school. Col's mom takes him on a shopping trip to gather school supplies. She's so worn out by this effort that she has to repair to Col's room to sit out an attack of the wilts and the vapors. It's while she's sitting on his bed that Col realizes the filthy is back! Riff is under his bed at that very moment. He hastily bundles his recovering mother out of the room and confronts Riff. She looks clean. It's a new Riff in many respects, and Col is finding it harder and harder to dismiss her from his thoughts or to see her as a filthy. She tries to smuggle out one of his books - on volcanoes (I wonder why?!) - as she leaves, and she tells him she'll be back.
Col is just about having a fit over her. Everything in his life was looking up, except that she's now in it. However, he sees a solution. All Riff wants, is to return to the below world with her fellow filthies. On his tour of the ship with his grandfather, Col learns that food is sent to the filthies via a chute, and so the next time Riff shows up, he escorts her to the nearest food chute (which is a long way from his room) and sends her down it. Now everything is coming up roses. So he thinks.
Col is a good hero. He is not very wise to the ways of the world - especially given that he's been sheltered from it and lied to all his life - but he isn’t dumb, and he's not afraid to question things and to take risks when he deems it important. He's not all powerful, and he has no magical or super-human powers. All he has going for him (aside from his privileged birth) is his smarts, his willingness to put himself into the position of others, and his good nature and sense of morality. Unfortunately, for all this, he does seem to have an ability to dig himself deeper.
When he first arrives at school, he allies himself with Trant, without realizing that Trant is of a much lower social status than he. Col is soon corrected by the upper status kids, who draw him into their circle. Given that these elite kids detest Col and wish for their families to usurp his family's eminent position, it’s hard to understand why they're so accommodating, unless they're working from the 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer' principle, but they don’t seem that smart!
Harland excels himself when describing the school master, Gibber. His name pretty much says it all. Gibber is a gibbering idiot. He has the most hilariously warped ideas imaginable about academic subjects. In geometry, he detests obtuse angles because they’re so open. He much prefers acute angles because they're so sharp, but even they pale against the insurmountable rectitude of a right angle. Gibber makes his class draw right-angles for the rest of the period! Geography fares no better: it turns out that concave coastlines are an abomination. He can scarcely bring himself to even talk about the Great Australian Bight, for example. The coastline of Great Britain, contrarily, is magnificent because it has so many proud promontories! This is inspired and hilarious. Harland had me laughing out loud.
Col would have had it made were it not for Riff showing up in his life and his inability to jettison all thought of her once he'd fed her back down the chute to "the underworld". He makes the mistake, when he's in a good mood, of wrapping up the book which Riff had tried to steal, and sending it down the chute to her as a gift. The elite kids tail him down there, sad to say, and discover him. He gets into a fight with the bruiser of the group (indeed he was only in the group because he was a bruiser) and Col ends up being dropped down the chute himself. He almost comes to grief down there, but is rescued by none other than riff, who is a leader down below. She quite literally rescues him, because the filthies are about to drop him into the bilge and let him die for no reason other than he's from "up there". Riff has to fight a bigger guy to assert her authority, which she does without raising a sweat. She is fast and deadly. And she's secretly thrilled that Col sent her the gift, but she says he has to go before the council - the senior "filthies" - most of whom are no older than Riff.
Col's "sentence" is to aid a filthy to go topside as a spy, and the one who is chosen is, of course, Riff. Col is to return by having the officers upstairs lift him out by means of a grasping hook - the same way they capture the filthies they wish to turn into menials. But his return from the underworld isn’t greeted with great joy. He's now despised almost as much as the filthies are, because he's been contaminated by being amongst them. He's shunned and his family finds its elevated and privileged status being undermined by Sir Marmus's rivals. Seeing an advantage now, the elite boys at school reject him, and even Gibber increasingly disses him. Col ignores them all until he discovers they're planning on beating him up before the school term is over.
When he considers how he might be able to fight back, he suddenly realizes there is someone who can help him learn to fight, and it's someone he made a promise to not four days ago. Col remembers his promise to get Riff topside, and so he lowers a rope, as agreed, down the food chute for her to climb up. When she arrives, he's so excited by her arrival that he expects a joyful reunion with hugs and kisses, but she pretty much tells him goodbye and disappears.
Later he's amazed to discover that she's very successfully disguised herself as a menial and now roams Worldshaker with complete impunity! He tells her of his predicament, and she agrees to teach him to fight if he will teach her to read. Of course you all know where this is going. They spend much time together, and she learns to read, and he learns to fight and takes down ten opponents when the Squellinghams try to beat him up at school. What he didn’t expect was that these very villains would tell him that his sister Gillabeth was behind the attack! But things are about to get worse.
In order to salvage the family reputation and position of power, Sir Marmus negotiates a marriage between the Porpentine and the Turbots, namely that of Col to Sephaltina Turbot, which Col blindly goes along with since he feels bad about bringing the family down, and he thinks Riff is partnered with one of the filthies anyway, and even if she were not, she certainly wouldn’t be interested in someone like him. He doesn’t expect her to show up at his wedding, very effectively disguised as a privileged upper deck person, nor does he expect his reaction to her to precipitate a revolution. It all started with the jelly....
Original, brilliantly written, endlessly entertaining, and thoroughly engrossing, this is a novel I cannot help but highly recommend. Even on my second reading it was still as appealing as it was on the first. Now that I'm back up to speed on volume one, I'm very much looking forward to embarking upon the Liberator. Full steam ahead!
