Arm of the Sphinx
The Books of Babel series, Book 2
Josiah Bancroft
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: One year ago, mild-mannered small town schoolteacher Thomas Senlin arrived at the legendary Tower of Babel, bound for a honeymoon with his young wife Marya... only to lose her in the crowds before even setting foot in the tower itself. Bearing his trusty guide, The Everyman's Guide to the Tower of Babel, and his book-smarts, Thomas thought he'd be ready for anything the Tower threw at him - only to find out the hard way, like so many other visitors, just how easy it is to be broken by the place, and how hard it is to rise again. And yet, despite all the setbacks, despite the cruelties and corruption he both bore witness to and found himself forced to participate in, Thomas never gave up his goal of finding his abducted wife while holding onto some shred of his former ethics and dignity.
Now, the one-time schoolteacher is the ersatz captain of a stolen airship, the Stone Cloud, and a mismatched skeleton crew who have turned to piracy more for survival than out of any particular aptitude for the trade. Despite the odds against them - they are still being hunted by the lord of the third ringdom, and have been turned away from almost every port in the Tower - they've managed to endure, if not thrive, but unless something changes soon those odds are going to catch up with them. Worse, of late Thomas finds himself haunted by a ghostly vision of Marya, a figure far more malicious and cruel than his missing wife ever was in reality. An act of desperation leads him to the doorstep of Luc Marat, a dangerous revolutionary recruiting hods - Tower slaves - for his own inscrutable purposes, and eventually to the legendary figure known as the Sphinx. His first mate, Edith, knows firsthand just how cruel and manipulative the Sphinx can be: he is the one who replaced her missing arm with a mechanical marvel, but at a cost she wouldn't wish on anyone. He is also the man responsible for the Red Hand, the notorious assassin who nearly ended Thomas before their escape aboard the Stone Cloud. Any bargain made with the Sphinx is less an agreement and more glorified slavery. But neither Thomas nor the rest of their crew have much choice anymore if they mean to escape their growing list of enemies and survive the brewing troubles that threaten to shake the whole of the Tower to its foundations.
REVIEW: Arm of the Sphinx takes up the story of Thomas Senlin (or "Thomas Mud", a pseudonym that does little to hide his identity from his enemies) some months after the first book, expanding the scope to include more of his companions of circumstance. The story itself also widens from Thomas's search for his wife to encompass the greater mysteries of the Tower's origins and purpose, as well as the growing inter-ringdom tensions and power struggles that seem poised to spark into all-out war (and not for the first time).
The former schoolteacher is ill-suited to the life of piracy that has been thrust upon him, but he is not at all the same man he was at the start of his adventures, and what he lacks in ruthlessness he makes up for in cleverness. Though he still pursues his missing wife, last known to have been abducted by a wifemonger and presented to a nobleman in the affluent ringdom of Pelphia, the chase has, even to him, taken on a certain ephemeral quality, not helped by his persistent hallucinated version of Marya (which hints at another, telegraphed complication for the captain). It seems less and less likely he'll ever return to the life he had before coming to the Tower, or that Marya will be by his side if he ever does manage to escape the place; his new friends and responsibilities are more real, pressing concerns, and it becomes harder and harder for Thomas to remember the man he was when he committed to this quixotic quest. His crew, likewise, are all loyal to him for their own reasons, all of them changed in some way by being in his company, but even they realize that they can't go on like this, rarely more than half a step away from disaster. And yet, as before, every glimmer of hope they find turns out not to be a guiding star but a will o' the wisp at best, leading them astray, or an outright pit of hellfire at worst, ready to devour them. A revolutionary freeing the hods from their bondage sounds like a possible ally... until Thomas meets the man and catches a glimpse of what's going on at his hidden camp. After that failure, the Sphinx seems like their next, possibly last, hope, but this encounter, too, ends up costing all of them far more than they anticipate.
There are times here, as in the previous volume, where characters can feel a bit too naive given what they've already been through - even those who have been in the Tower much longer than Thomas - or behave in plot-convenient ways. Thomas also remains stubbornly blockheaded on occasion to further the story. Overall, though, the story moves fairly well and presents more wondrous, surreal mind's eye candy, delving deeper into the secrets of the Tower and some of the clues Thomas picked up in the first volume (such as the meaning of the painting that he went to such lengths to "acquire" in the third ringdom, and why everyone is so determined to get it back, even over his dead body). The other characters also generally grow and change in interesting ways, and Thomas himself starts to realize that, even if he reunites with Marya, their futures may not lie together anymore. After all, if the year has changed Thomas Senlin from straight-laced schoolteacher to veteran airship pirate, Marya can hardly be unchanged herself. I'm looking forward to slotting the third installment of the series into my reading queue (or listening queue, as this was another library-borrowed audiobook via Libby).
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