The Digging Leviathan

By: James P Blaylock

Narrated by: Christopher Ragland

Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

Southern California - sunny days, blue skies, neighbours on flying bicycles ... ghostly submarines ... mermen off the Catalina coast ... and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder ... and dark conspiracies.

A place rife with adventure - if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a wonderful set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? or destroy it in the process?

©2012 James P. Blaylock (P)2012 Audible Ltd

Boring, Boring, Boring

This was one of the more boring audiobooks I have purchased. I tried to like it, but I couldn't get more than 2 hours into the narration. I wasn't sure whether the author was attempting humor on purpose, but I did not find any of it funny. The characters were not interesting. Nothing much happened in two hours, and I had no reason to think it would get better if I could force myself to listen longer.

For the most part, the reader was OK. Perhaps I can't evaluate him fairly because I disliked the book so much, but some of the voices were as annoying as the book was boring.

Dreamy, peculiar, sweet

3.5 stars. Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.

The Digging Leviathan is the first book in James P. Blaylock’s LANGDON ST. IVES/NARBONDO series. I’ve been reading these out of order, which doesn’t seem to matter. The books have some overlapping characters, settings, and/or concepts, but each stands alone. The Digging Leviathan features two teenage boys, Jim Hastings and Giles Peach, who are living on the coast of Southern California during the mid-20th century. Each is a dreamer and each has his own “issues” involving his father.

Jim lives with his uncle Edward St. Ives (who, I’m assuming, is a direct descendant of Langdon St. Ives, the eccentric Victorian scientist who stars in several of the books in this series) because Jim’s mother is dead and his father is insane. (Or is he?) Most of the time Jim’s father lives in a mental hospital, but when he manages to escape (a regular occurrence), he comes home until Dr. Hilario Frosticus (one of Dr. Narbondo’s incarnations, I presume) manages to find him and take him away again. While at home, Jim’s dad oversees animal experiments which he hopes will support his peculiar theories about evolution and civilization. He’s also trying to get a short story published in Analog.

Giles’ father, on the other hand, has been missing for years. Giles, who has webbed fingers and a set of gills on his neck, suspects that his dad turned into a fish and swam down a subterranean aquatic tunnel which leads to the center of the earth. Desperately trying to find his father, Giles is building a tunneling machine called The Digging Leviathan. Jim doesn’t believe Giles, of course. He thinks Giles gets his bizarre ideas from all the Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne novels he reads. But, strangely, other men are interested in Giles’ plans. Some hope to use Giles’ machine to discover the secret to immortality. Some are afraid that Giles will destroy the earth. Do they have some reason to believe that Giles is on to something?

What I’ve described is the essential plot of The Digging Leviathan, but readers who are familiar with James P. Blaylock won’t be surprised to be told that it doesn’t seem like this book was written for the main purpose of telling a story about tunneling to the center of the earth. Instead, Blaylock uses the plot as an excuse to entertain us with the antics of his quirky but loveable characters and, perhaps, to touch our hearts as we watch two boys longing for a “normal” relationship with their fathers.

Blaylock’s funniest character is Jim’s father who seems like (but maybe isn’t) a paranoid schizophrenic. He believes that his neighbor — a little old lady in curlers and a bathrobe — is conspiring against him with the gardener. He imagines that every night they hoist her dog over the fence so it can defecate in the Hastings’ yard. He also suspects that the man who drives the ice cream truck is a spy. In the backyard shed, Jim’s father attempts to breed mice and axolotls, hoping he can get the mice to devolve into an aquatic species. He dresses them in doll clothes to test his Civilization Theory. Mr. Hastings’ ideas are funny to consider and Blaylock gets to send escaped dressed-up axolotls running through some of his scenes. Hilarious!

Creating and entertaining us with his neurotic characters is what Blaylock does best. As if they’re in a Monty Python sketch, they’re constantly (and I’m taking these verbs right out of the story) dashing, springing, jumping, cursing, tripping, lurching, falling, stumbling, spying, sneaking, creeping, lurking, and peering in windows. Readers who love John Cleese’s brand of humor will probably be delighted with The Digging Leviathan (and the other LANGDON ST. IVES books). Readers who don’t, probably won’t. I do love Blaylock’s sense of humor, though I have to say that the silliness goes on a little too long in several scenes of The Digging Leviathan.

There’s more to The Digging Leviathan than the quirkiness I’ve described. The story is also about familial love. It was the loss of Jim’s mother that probably sent his father over the edge. The bond that Jim and his father still have, and Giles’ desire to find his own father, is sweet and poignant.

I listened to Audible Studio’s version of The Digging Leviathan. It’s 10.5 hours long and performed by Christopher Ragland, who obviously gets Blaylock’s brand of humor. I enjoyed his performance, and I thought it got better and better as it went on.

Uneven but rewarding narrative

I've read this many times. I love Blaylock. This one is uneven in its pacing, but I love it. Blaylock is the king of whimsical.

Blaylock is a marvel

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

There is something wonderful, and wonderfully refreshing, about Blaylock's stories. I've read them since I first discovered The Elfin Ship, and always feel this innate sense of happiness when I find another.

He may not be for everyone; few authors are. But try him with an open mind and a sense of humor. There are people, events ideas, and things in his stories that are completely absurd (part of the charm), but they are fit for their tasks within the context of the tale.

Blaylock is himself and no one else, but like a good wine there are hints of this and that story-telling forebear. Hope Mirrlees (Lud-in-the-Mist and things that float down river), John Bellairs (especially The Face in the Frost), James Thurber (his stories about his life more than his fairy tales), and Bradbury (for the child in every adult, and the adult growing in every child); and then there's Beagle, Grahame, some Twain. But his voice is unique. If you taste memories of another author, it springs from his being immersed, and reveling, in the experiences and memories that shaped him. His voice reminds me also of different honeys, that have shades of this or that flower from the neighborhood.

The reason I haven't described the story itself is that it would be a pointless endeavor. The plot is good, the characters charming, the stakes high. But reading too many plot descriptions is like watching too many trailers for a movie. After a while, you lose the ability to be surprised and carried along by unfolding events. So stop reading descriptions and pick up the genuine article itself.

As for those who had difficulty listening to the story, don't approach it with preconceived expectations of one more Steampunk clone (although this is one of the originals). He uses (invented) the genre tropes, but uses them in service of the characters, not as gosh-wow ends in themselves.

And you can't read him with your nose in the air and an ego inflated with pretense . He'll just deflate the latter and use it as a whoopee-cushion in a daring scheme sure to confound Dr. Frosticos or one of the Narbondos.

What other book might you compare The Digging Leviathan to and why?

Lud-In-the-Mist, The Face in the Frost, The Thurber Carnival, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Wind in the Willows, A Fine and Private Place, among others

What about Chris Ragland’s performance did you like?

he gives each character an original flavor, with not just a distinctive voice, but their rhythms.

Incomprehensible and boring!

The story was all over the place and extremely hard to follow. There were occasional flashes or hints of something interesting, but they would inevitably be swamped by strange blathering! Unfortunately not worth the money or the effort...

Poor narration makes book hard to judge

I can't fault the narrator during passages that were not the characters speaking. The voices adopted for the various characters seemed very contrived. Though and difficult to sort through. There were variations on raspy old man and high pitched adolescent boy and little else. The story itself was convoluted and the voices only made sorting things out that much more difficult.

In addition to the odd character voices the narrator mispronounces several words. I always find these jarring and I have to use context to determine what the word should have been.

I ran across this book in a search for steampunk novels. It is not a steampunk novel despite the use of flying submarines, machines designed to burrow to Pelucidar and bathyscapes, although one would think..... I'm not sure if this was a problem with Audible.com search algorithm or a misclassification.

Things are not as they seem and I went from thinking every character was completely mad to figuring out what was happening before too long, so I don't know that the narration can take credit for all of my dissatisfaction with this book.

Waisted money.

What disappointed you about The Digging Leviathan?

The story was convoluted and seemed to wander without seeming to go anywhere. The narration was like listening to a bad old gangster movie. Don't wait your money.

What didn’t you like about Chris Ragland’s performance?

No.

Any additional comments?

This is the first time I stopped listening to any book I have purchased. I just couldn't stand listening to the narration any longer.