Timeless by Gail Carriger

In reviewing Timeless, the 5th and final book of Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate I felt it best to hand the reins over to a friend this once. Ladies and gentleman I present to you Mavis Tedlington-Bumbecrack (Mrs) and her review of Timeless.

We ladies of the colonies are so indebted to Lady Alexia Maccon for keeping us up to date with what is happening in the dear motherland and goings on of the ton.

I admire Lady Maccon, as she has overcome being half Italian (on her father’s side) and lack of a soul to become the closest confidante of London’s best dressed vampire Lord Akeldama, and marry the most desirable werewolf in Her Majesty’s Empire Lord Conall Maccon.

In recent times Lady Maccon has given birth to a delightful child with the unfortunate name of Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama. Prudence is a highly unusual infant. Being the natural offspring of a werewolf and a soulless woman like Lady Maccon she has the enviable ability to leech supernatural talents by touching a vampire or werewolf, to date the most convenient way of removing her enhancements is by being touched by her mother, who shuts off the connection to the supernatural in the same way that she nullifies vampires or werewolves.

In her most recent journal of adventures Lady Maccon finds it necessary to travel to Egypt with her very good friend, the excellent actress and wearer of the most fashionable hats in the Empire; Ivy Tunstell. Meanwhile back in England Lord Akeldama; Lady Maccon’s friend and adoptive father of Prudence, holds the fort with his former drone and now werewolf of the Woolsey pack; Mr Rabiffano (I do so prefer his full name to the truncated Biffy that most people refer to him by), with help from Lord Maccon’s ever so polite beta Professor Randolph Lyall.

We readers are treated to a description of life aboard a cruise ship, and I know that if I ever get the opportunity to travel back to the motherland I ensure that I am accompanied by an acting troupe, they seem to liven the journey up considerably. Of course things were also complicated by Lady Maccon falling overboard at one point and having to be rescued by her terribly brave husband.

In Egypt Lady Maccon and her daughter were summoned to the Vampire Queen of the Alexandria Hive; Matakara. Unfortunately some dastard stole Mrs Tunstell’s daughter Primrose in the mistaken belief she was Prudence. Lord and Lady Maccon, their daughter, Mr and Mrs Tunstell and their entire acting troupe go in pursuit of the kidnapped infant. Lady Maccon’s faithful and highly competent butler; Floote, is exposed as something other than anyone ever thought and the delightful Mrs Tunstell undergoes a shocking transformation.

Sadly Lady Maccon has elected to retire from her life of adventuring and settle down with her husband, daughter and friendly vampires. She will be missed by those of us adrift in the colonies, but our lives have been enriched immeasurably by her efforts and her journals.

Lady Maccon’s chronicler; Miss Carriger assures her readers that next year she will be making available new adventures, but these are about a younger set and take place some years earlier. Your correspondent is eager to see this.

Blameless

Blameless is the 3rd book in Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series.

When readers last saw the soulless heroine Alexia Maccon at the end of Changeless she had just discovered she was pregnant and been cast out by her werewolf husband Lord Conall Maccon on the grounds that being for all intensive purposes dead werewolves cannot reproduce, so therefore the child that Alexia is carrying (dubbed the ‘infant inconvenience’ by Alexia) is not his.

This idiotic action by her equally idiotic husband forces Alexia to move back in with her family. This wouldn’t be so bad if the Loontwill’s, excepting the hen pecked patriarch Squire Loontwill, had a brain between them, but they don’t. Alexia’s half sisters; Felicity and Evylin are insufferably silly, and her mother is totally witless. They can’t bare to live with the scandal that Alexia brings with her, in fact Evylin blames the cessation of her engagement with Captain Featherstonehaugh on Alexia’s predicament. There’s no mention of the fact that Captain Featherstonehaugh also broke off an engagement with Alexia’s friend Miss Ivy Hisselpenny (this didn’t really bother Ivy, because it left her free to marry Conall Maccon’s former claviger Tunstell and become Mrs Ivy Tunstell), by the end of the book the fickle Captain Featherstonehaugh was engaged to the younger Miss Wibley (I’m betting he’ll have another fiancé by the start of book 4; Heartless). The Loontwill’s also toss Alexia out. The scandal has made it’s way through the ton like wildfire and poor Alexia can’t even take refuge in a teashop.

She goes to the one person who the scandal won’t bother; in fact it may even make her more attractive to him, the flamboyant vampire Lord Akeldama. The only problem with this is that Akeldama is not in residence, neither he or his army of dandified drones are anywhere to be seen. Something is most definitely not right. Then when Alexia is attacked by a horde of mechanised ladybugs en route to Madame Lefoux’s hat shop, she knows that she has to leave England.

With Conall indisposed, he’s managed to get himself horrendously drunk on the formaldehyde his Beta; Professor Lyall, keeps his sheep embryo specimens in (Maccon actually thought they were a ‘crunchy pickled snack’) Madame Lefoux elects to accompany Alexia to the continent, leaving Ivy (there was no one else) in charge of her shop. Ivy advises against Alexia visiting Italy as that is where they ‘keep’ all the Italians, she does however make Alexia a going away present of a box of tea. Heaven forbid she should have to drink coffee!

What follows is a madcap dash through France and Italy to Florence where Alexia, Madame Lefoux and Alexia’s butler/bodyguard Floote, are attacked nearly every step of the way. Floote showed surprising depth and resourcefulness during this adventure. Before he’d just been a frighteningly efficient butler, he’s also a frighteningly efficient bodyguard, managing to handily despatch pursuers without getting a speck of mud in his highly polished shoes or neatly pressed trousers.

While Alexia is trying to escape assassination attempts by vampire drones and imprisonment by the Templars in Florence, Lyall and Maccon are trying to discover what happened to Lord Akeldama and who murdered the Crown’s former vampire potentate and tried to do the same to Akeldama’s favourite drone; Biffy. Maccon does come to his senses and realises that Alexia has not been unfaithful to him and perhaps her soulless state has to do with her ability to conceive, when they’re touching he’s not a werewolf, and therefore alive. Readers know Conall can produce children, because we met his many times great granddaughter in Changeless.

Soulless and Changeless were fun, but Miss Carriger kicks it up a notch in Blameless. It’s great fun seeing Maccon make a drunken fool of himself and having Lyall take charge, he’s also the first one to realise that there’s more to Ivy Tunstell than the front she shows to the world at large. Seeing the alternate steampunk world that Gail Carriger has created in more depth with the trip to the continent was also fantastic. It’s not really that much different to our world, if you can ignore the vampires, werewolves and ghosts, not to mention that the Templars are still running around in Florence late in the 19th century! I like Akeldama, so his absence for a large part of the book was a bit of a blow, but more than made up with for SuperFloote, the very rude German inventor Lange-Wilsdorf and his ill fated, bad tempered little dog Pouche, and Alexia’s experiences with new things like pesto.

Alexia herself best sums up Blameless with this quote late in the book: ‘You mean while I’ve been running across Europe pregnant, escaping ladybugs, flying in ornithopters, landing in mud, and drinking coffee, you have been inebriated?’

The maglc Gail Carriger can perform with words simply needs to be read. I can’t wait to see how Alexia deals with pregnancy in Heartless.

Changeless

When readers left the soulless Alexia Tarabotti at the end of the last book she was about to be married to man...uhhh...werewolf of her dreams and had accepted an appointment as a supernatural liaison from none other than Queen Victoria herself.

Changeless finds the former Miss Tarabotti now known as Lady Maccon and married to Lord Conall Maccon, the dashing Scottish werewolf, she's also being ravished on a regular basis and despite her protestations to the contrary, one gets the impression she rather enjoys her husband's attention.

The life of wedded bliss is interrupted by all manner of things. Something is disrupting supernatural activity; werewolves are unable to change, vampires have lost their bite and large numbers of ghosts have been exorcised. Her Majesty is not amused and exactly what is Alexia going to do about it. Connal's pack has returned from active duty overseas and set up camp on Alexia's front lawn, it's terribly inconvenient and the odious Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings telling her that they've always done it, does not make situation any more bearable. Most importantly Alexia's best friend Miss Ivy Hisselpenny, she of the horrid hats, has become engaged!

Without warning Connal takes off on urgent pack business to the wilds of Scotland and Alexia has no option, but to jump on a dirigible with her annoying younger half sister Miss Felicity Loontwill and Ivy in tow, being mooned after by Connal's claviger (a potential werewolf, the vampire version is called a drone) Tunstell, she's also shadowed by a possible French spy, Madame Lefoux, who runs a hat shop, invents things and affects masculine dress, and go to Scotland.

Alexia will discover more about her husband, her mysterious father, Madame Lefoux and her servant Angelique and get to the bottom of the supernatural disruption. Will she do so in time to avert disaster, though?

The style of the Parasol Protectorate books is absolutely delightful, and Alexia is one of the more entertaining heroines I have ever encountered. Her insistence on remaining polite in the face of the most extraordinary situations is endearing and incredibly British.

The steampunk influence is far more in evidence in Changeless than it was in Soulless, and some of the more complex descriptions of the technology could have been excised without affecting the story. It was rather unfortunate that those passages tended to involve the urbane, flamboyant vampire Lord Akeldama, because his italic laden appearances were one of the highlights of Soulless and they were affected in this one, although it is fun seeing just how many completely inappropriate names he can come up with for Alexia.

One thing that I really loved about Changeless was that we got to see a lot more of Miss Hisselpenny. I like Ivy, she comes across as totally clueless, her comment about the range of bang on hunting rifles was priceless, as was her lack of assistance to Alexia when she was literally hanging by a thread on the side of the dirigible. The talk of her hats and how horrible they are becomes a little tiresome, but her habit of fainting whenever there's a loud noise or the mention of blood is very funny.

It may have been authentic, but I also found the regular references between Alexia and Connal to each other as 'husband' and 'wife' a little jarring. They did this even in private, yet it was apparent that they are both deeply in love, so I thought they would have used each other's first names or some sort of endearment more often.

That minor criticism aside Changeless was a hoot and the cliffhanger ending makes me very eager to read the third book in the series; Blameless.

Soulless

My recent interest in steampunk continues with Gail Carriger's Soulless, the first book in her Parasol Protectorate.

My wife first discovered Ms Carriger at the 2010 Worldcon and ripped through her books (she had 3 out at the time). I'd been meaning to read them and when they were listed as a recommendation for people who liked Phoenix Rising - Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, I decided to try them out.

Alexia Tarabotti suffers from a few disadavantages in life. She's half Italian on her father's side, at the age of 26 she is still unmarried and she doesn't have a soul.

One night at a party she retires to the library to get something to eat (treacle tart), and encounters a vampire, who attempts to bite her, being preternatural (the term for one without a soul) she neutralises vampires and werewolves on contact, but it is rather bothersome and in despatching him he sat on the tart she had her heart and stomach set on.

Because Alexia kills the vampire there has to be an investigation and it appears that someone is creating rogue vampires. Alexia unwittingly becomes a part of a much bigger scheme and is thrown together with the dashing werewolf about town Lord Connal Maccon. This wouldn't be so bad, except Maccon is very attractive and also Scottish, so socially unacceptable to Alexia's pretentious family.

Soulless is what Jane Austen would have written if she'd included vampires and werewolves in her comedies of manners, and I think a great deal of inspiration was drawn from the popular Victorian writer.

Although there are currently 4 books in the Parasol Protectorate, with at least one more to come, Soulless has everything tied up in a neat bow with a happy ending. If you weren't minded to read on, you don't have to, although I had so much fun reading Soulless that I'll soon be picking up Changeless as well.