The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar

The delights of The Bookman are by and large the same as those of any Steampunk novel - the depiction of an alternate Britain where the technological advances of Charles Babbage have propelled it into an exciting, dark and dangerous new world that Victorian society is perhaps not yet ready to embrace - a society where fictional and real-life characters co-exist, Sherlock Holmes rubbing shoulders not only with Moriarty and Irene Adler, but also Jack the Ripper, Oscar Wilde and Jules Verne. Lavie Tidhar clearly revels in the opportunities afforded the richness of such a setting, bringing in a few additional references from The Phantom of the Opera (although that's been done by Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes adventure The Canary Trainer) through to Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner. 

Here we have a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen drawn from as diverse a bunch as Karl Marx, Mrs Beeton, Nevil Maskelyne, Tom Thumb and a book-seller named Jack who operate from his shop off St. Martin's Lane, producing seditious pamphlets that denounce the rule of Les Lézards, a monarchy of lizard people that holds dominion over the British Isles (echoing Kim Newman's Vampire monarchy in the seminal Anno Dracula). Also involved, but initially only to a pranksterish degree, is a poet known only as Orphan. His involvement in the dark affairs of the lizard monarchy becomes more serious however when his fiancée Lucy is killed by a mysterious and deadly assassin known only as the Bookman while attending the launch of a Martian probe. Orphan's belief that she can however be revived takes him to the Caribbean and Caliban's Island, a place that holds the key to several mysteries. 

With so many historical and literary references to drawn on, and even some bibliophile fetishism for additional thrills, The Bookman would seem to have everything in place, yet inevitably - as is often the case with Steampunk - it often seems like pastiche, drawing particularly heavily here from H.G. Welles and Jules Verne (with a little bit of a more modern spin of Tim Powers' pirate adventure On Stranger Tides). While Lavie Tidhar goes through the motions of the genre well, there just doesn't seem to be anything fresh or original here to distinguish The Bookman from better work of this type (The Difference Engine, Morlock Night, Homunculus, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but this is nonetheless an entertaining, literary adventure of the classic kind.