If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Some people are not born to write. This is something I've been thinking about while I read Scott Westerfield's latest ham, Leviathan. He's got the ideas, and certainly the structure, that a decent young adult's novel should have. But like so much of today's media (film, video games, birthday cards), the world of literature is infected with a disease of stamp-em-out, factory-like, competently written novels. This book is one of them. It does not sing, though it has ideas that are worthy of much better authors.

I really wanted to like this book. This was, for me, Scott Westerfield's chance to redeem himself after the lackluster Midnighters series. That was another series of competently written books, that hung on because of some readers' penchants for teens with powers. Even with bad description, cardboard characters, and laughable plot, there can be good parts (for some) if people are levitating or reading minds. Still, I could barely get through the first book, and what I read of it was unsatisfying.

And such a missed opportunity! Midnighters is about a series of kids who have to live through a twenty-fifth hour every day. There are beasties that try to attack the main characters, there's some all-right backstory about how midnight creatures are from the Stone Age and don't grow old as quickly... but the book was clunky. And weak.

So, Leviathan. Take a deep breath, because this will take a minute to explain. It's an alternate version of World War I (the "Great War", if you will). Germany and Austria-Hungary have developed an enormously mechanized army, with two-legged walkers worth of George Lucas, James Cameron, or Hayao Miyazaki. Britain and the rest, meanwhile, base their military and means of transport around Darwinian creatures, fabricated from bits of other creatures. The Leviathan, for example, is an airship that is (literally) a whale. In the midst of all this, we meet Alek, the son of a Serbian duke who is murdered to begin the war, and Deryn, a young female posing as a male in order to work on airships, her dream.

It took me a paragraph to explain the premise. Westerfield does not have a weak idea, folks. But Westerfield never figures out how to introduce his world in a way that is organic. He clunks down paragraphs of description, or provides it in truly unoriginal ways (such as during a fencing match between master and pupil). He finds no way to keep the discovery of new things interesting, in contrast to Philip Pullman with The Golden Compass. And after a while, Westerfield's new ideas dry up, and we're left with a boring novel where a war hasn't really begun yet.

I'd keep going if I felt like there'd be payoff in battle scenes, but we've already had at least one by the point I stopped and it was unexciting. There is one new thing about this prose, though: I've never seen anyone use the word "cilia" as much as Westerfield. It must have been on his word-of-the-day calendar or something.

Look: maybe I'm not the kind of person who'd like Westerfield's prose. He's got plenty of ideas. I did, however, find the writing uninspired, even after the introduction of the premise. There's some mild debate as to whether Darwinism is heretical or not, but it's only alluded to. Mostly this is accepted as a fact of life. No character ever tries to really understand these creatures that have been fabricated. The mechanized army is also boring, even if they do have zeppelins or whatnot. The art by Keith Thompson almost saves it. However, it is sometimes hard to tell what's going on because of the stylized brush strokes.

It is, in short, a very boring book, and one in which Scott Westefield once again fails in my eyes. Ignore this author as long as you can, because there's plenty better out there.