John, a recently-married Oxford scholar, returned to London in 1917 from the battlefields of France to recuperate from trench fever. While in
hospital, he receives a strange letter from his beloved mentor in archaic languages, Professor Sigurdsson, requesting a meeting about a mysterious
matter. When he arrives, he finds the professor has been brutally murdered. He also finds two other young Oxford men who turned up at Sigurdsson's
doorstep just as the police arrived. Charles is an editor, delivering manuscripts, and Jack was merely dropping off papers for a solicitor, but all
three men find themselves drawn into a most peculiar alliance. Shortly after meeting, a strange man arrives with an even stranger book: the
Imaginarium Geographica, maps of worlds beyond our own, worlds which, some would say, could only exist in the human imagination. The
professor's killers hot on their heels, the three Oxford men end up on board the magical ship Indigo Dragon and sailing beyond the edge of
reality, into wonders beyond telling and terrors beyond even the battlefields of the Great War in Europe.
Review
I was puzzled, at first, why this was in the Teen/Young Adult section. The men are adults, two are college educated, and one is even married; most
YA books star heroes closer to the target audience's age. As I read, though, I saw that, while the heroes may be physically adults, they acted like
teenagers much of the time. The book itself may ultimately have greater appeal to adults, though, as pretty much everything in the Archipelago of Dreams
- the lands mapped out in the Imaginarium Geographica - either comes from or inspired classic myths and stories, and clearly influences future
classics written after the first World War in our world. (Most book reviews spill the beans on the identities of John, Charles, and Jack, and the basis
of the book itself should be a strong hint as to who at least two of them are. If you can't figure it out as you read, you must not read enough fantasy.)
I know I didn't catch more than a fraction of references, but I could tell they were there. Even the illustrations, by Owens, hearken back to classic
pen-and-ink illustrations from older books. With rare exceptions, though, the book rises above merely being a piecemeal concoction of other people's
dreams, past, present, or future. It moves at a fair clip, and weaves together the many story elements nicely. It lost a point for some obvious plot
turns, and because, at some point, featuring real people from our world in a fantasty adventure puts a strain on the suspension of disbelief. Of course,
you can't call a book "The Chronicles Of..." and have it wrap up in a single volume. The second is already out in hardcover, and I'm willing to bet that
more are on the way. I expect I'll be reading through at least the next book.
Nine years ago, three English men were brought together by fate and bound by a common secret. John, Charles, and Jack found themselves entrusted as
Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica, an atlas of the Archipelago of Dreams, where myths and stories and magic are real. With the book
comes responsibilities, to protect the worlds it maps from those who would destroy and exploit it. Since then, they have avoided contact with each other,
lest their unusual fellowship be suspected... but now Jack has broken the silence and summoned his brothers-in-Caretaking. All three, it seems, have been
having terrible nightmares about danger in the Archipelago - and trouble is soon confirmed by a most unusual visitor, a girl with a pair of artificial
wings sent across the Frontier from the imaginary lands. Some dark force has stolen all the children and destroyed the ships, cutting off the islands of
the land. It's up to the three Caretakers, plus their old friend Bert (a former Caretaker himself), to unravel the mystery and save the world... both
worlds, for, as they learned previously, danger in one world often reflects danger in the other.
Review
I thought about it and thought about it, and though I wanted to stick it with four stars I wound up dropping it to three. Once again, we have three
well-educated men - two of whom, we learned last time (if we hadn't already heard it from the mass media), go on to become perhaps the most influential
fantasy writers of the genre, while the third was well known in his own lifetime - acting, speaking, and reasoning more like overgrown children than the
husbands and fathers and veteran soldiers that they are. I think the whole series would've worked better if John, Charles, and Jack actually had been
children (or at most teens, before college) when they met, and had their famed and educated adulthoods to look forward to, rather than having them already
grown up. Granted, the timelines wouldn't have lined up, and granted that one of the themes of this book is the difference between growing up and growing
old, but it also points out fundamental shifts in one's thought process that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, and at several points the
three Caretakers seem to be on the wrong side of those shifts. Besides, time seems mutable in the Archipelago, so they could've managed to all be older
children/teenagers on the far side of the Frontier, then returned to their respective ages/places when they came back to our world. I also found the tangle
of names and histories a bit ovewhelming and the identity of the villain trite, setting up a trend which I seriously hope doesn't last much longer. Then
there's the cliché introduction of a “dark conspiracy” in our world, hell-bent on exposing the secret of the Archipelago of Dreams for exploitation by the
world of Men. And while I'm nitpicking, Owen ought to do himself a favor and buy a nice dictionary of names; he has a disproportionate number of "J" names
in this book, which for some strange reason started to irritate me. Still, for all its faults, it remains reasonably imaginative, and the plot (usually)
kept me interested, though it lost me when it kept trying to weave in fragments of just one more story. My suspension of disbelief in this series is already
hitting enough turbulence to make me reconsider whether or not I'll follow it through any more books.
