Saturday, April 17, 2021

Paint Your Dragon - Tom Holt

   1996; 312 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Mythopoeic Fantasy; Humorous Fantasy; Satire.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Saint George and the Dragon.

 

    Everybody knows the legend.  On one hand we have the hero, clad in shining armor and wielding a gleaming sword.  On the other hand, we have the beast, covered in impregnable scales, sporting claws that can slash through anything, and breathing white-hot fire.  Sometimes there’s also a princess that needs rescuing, sometimes not.  Sometimes the dragon is hoarding ill-gotten jewels, sometimes not.

 

    It’s the classic case of Good vs. Evil, and in order to be a heroic saga, Evil must, at least on the surface, objectively be the heavy favorite.  It’s five times the size of our puny knight, and its weapons and body-plating should easily carry the day.

 

    But of course, it doesn’t.  Against all odds, the knight wins, not because he’s faster or more powerful than the dragon, but because he’s nobler and purer and whatnot.  In short, because he is the embodiment of Good.  So says the tale, and hey, the winners get to write the legends.

 

    But what if the dragon was actually the good guy …er… beast?  What if the knight wins because he cheats?  And what if that only comes to light centuries later?

 

    There’s only one thing to do:  Arrange a rematch.

 

What’s To Like...

    Paint Your Dragon is another cleverly-contrived mythopoeic novel by Tom Holt in which he blurs the Good-vs-Evil aspect from a famous historical myth and creates an entertaining reevaluation of the story.  Holt wrote about 20 of these in the 1987-2002 timespan, I’ve read about half of those, and I’ve yet to be disappointed by any of them.

 

    The tale has the usual structure for his books in this genre: we follow multiple and widely-disparate storylines which keep us wondering if and how he’s ever going to coherently tie them together.  Here the main storyline is of course St. George and the Dragon, but a talented sculptress is then added to liven things up.  Then other plotlines arise: a “time-marketer” in England who will sell you extra time at an exorbitant price; a busload of demons heading to Nashville for a much-needed vacation; sixteen statues in Italy (including Michelangelo’s “David”); and a speck of dust which somehow acts as the puppet-master in all the mayhem.

 

    The tale is set for the most part in England (Birmingham gets major billing), with brief excursions to Italy and Mongolia.  As always, there is an abundance of Tom Holt's wit and zaniness to keep you entertained.  Some of the characters die, but death here is a rather temporary thing.  Body-snatching abounds, of both the animate and inanimate kinds.  You’ll learn how to go forward and backward in time (Holt’s physics is easier to grasp than Quantum physics), how many angels can dance of the head of a pin (hint: it depends on what dance they’re doing), and why you don’t see dragons nowadays.

 

    The book is written in English, not American, so besides the usual spelling differences, you meet pillocks with holdalls; and keep shtum so you don’t get nutted.  People can be dozy or cozzy and things can be naff.  You’re expected to know who Alf Garnett is, greet others with “Wotcher!”, cry out “Strewth!” if you're surprised, and keep studying this strange language for yonks.

 

    The story has a typical Tom Holt ending: he somehow manages to deftly tie up all those plotlines, and wraps things up in an unpredictable manner.  Like the rest of Tom Holt’s mythopoeic tales, this is a standalone novel, with no sequel needed.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Meretricious (adj.) : apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.

Others: Parthenogenetically (adv.); Banjax (n.); Myrmidon (n.); and many others.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 20 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.76*/5, based on 615 ratings and 23 reviews.

 

Things that Sound Dirty but Aren’t…

    Please, can I put my clothes back on now, Miss Frobisher?  I’m going blue.” (loc. 3478)

 

Excerpts...

    He [Dragon George Cody] it was who first justified the clearances by saying that the knights stood for good and the dragons stood for evil, and, in his own terms, he was right.  The knights were, after all, soldiers of the Church, ultimately searching for the Grail, and the dragons were getting in the way and, by deviously getting killed and eaten by the locals, giving aid and comfort to the hostile tribesmen.  Besides, George pointed out, dragons burn towns and demand princesses as ransom.

    The dragons, referring to the Siege of Jerusalem, the Sack of Constantinople and a thousand years of dynastic marriages, said, Look who’s talking.  But rarely twice.  (loc. 866)

 

    There’s an urban folk-myth that says that every time a child says he doesn’t believe in dragons, somewhere a dragon dies.  This is unlikely, because if it was true, we’d spend half our lives shovelling thirty-foot corpses out of the highways with dumper trucks and the smell would be intolerable.  Slightly more credible is the quaint folk-theorem that says that the higher up and away you go, the less rigid and hidebound the rules become; it’s something to do with relativity, and it limps by for the simple reason that it’s far more trouble than it’s worth to disprove it.  (loc. 4984)

 

You can get paranoid, thinking too hard about coincidences.  (loc. 2472 )

    The quibbles are few and nitpicky.  There is some cussing - 16 instances in the first 20% - but a lot of time the made-up cussword “shopfloor” is substituted, as in “What the shopfloor!?”.

 

    Some reviewers complained that following all those plotlines got confusing.  There’s some merit to this, but if you've read any of Tom Holt's novels before, you're aware that this is his usual style, and you don’t open the book when you’re dead tired.

 

    Finally, if you were hoping for a tie-in to the musical and/or film, Paint Your Wagon, ANAICT, there is none.  Then again, I’ve never watched either version of PYW, so what do I know.

  

    8 StarsPaint Your Dragon is another great piece of story-retelling by Tom Holt.  It entertained me throughout and also raises some interesting questions about – beyond the telling of St. George and the Dragon – how blindly you should trust those "winners" in history who then purport to write an objective account of the matter.   More to follow concerning that in a bit, via a review of my first book by Noam Chomsky.

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