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The Digging Leviathan

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The Digging Leviathan

By: James P Blaylock
Narrated by: Christopher Ragland
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About this listen

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 Fantasy Fiction Submarine

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All stars
Most relevant  
This is the first Blaylock book I read and I have to admit that I am mightily impressed! It's a full on romp from the get go and has wonderful characterisation. The narration is spot on and really brings it to life. If you are a steam punk fan this has to be a must.

Ripping yarn

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Would you try another book written by James P Blaylock or narrated by Christopher Ragland?

I'm considering it, on the assurance of other reviewers that this is one of the less accessible books in the series.

What could James P Blaylock have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Hard to say. I just found it hard to keep up with what was going on and found I didn't really care very much about the characters or the plot.

What three words best describe Christopher Ragland’s performance?

Not bad considering.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Mostly boredom. I usually love my audiobook sessions as I walk to work, but I had to force myself to keep going with this.

Any additional comments?

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did.

Very hard to follow

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Having just finished this book, I find myself unable to really give you much of a summary. It it a very odd book, which seems to be set in cold war era USA, following the journey of a mentally unstable man on his journey to the centre of the earth. Whether anything is actually happening, or is all imagined is still a mystery. Even though the narrator is pretty good, I found myself switching off while listening and even when I was paying attention, I was not really following. The ending is also rather abrupt, but I found myself almost glad that it had finished, so I didn't have to listen anymore.

Very Odd

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Didn't enjoy this book as much as the others. It was overly wordy and not much seemed to happen and I had worked out who the villain was long before he was exposed!

Not up to his usual standard

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If you could sum up The Digging Leviathan in three words, what would they be?

confusing, imaginative, vivid

What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)

The ending left me unsatisfied. Although, please use my review with caution, as I listened to this audiobook over the course of several weeks and that might have added to the slightly confusing impression.

Any additional comments?

I found the narrator to be amazing. He really managed to make every character unique and rememberable.

Very good narrator, slightly confusing story

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I recently download the Aylesford Skull (book 4??) which I happened to enjoy, so I downloaded the additional books in the series. I believe this causes some of my confusion with the saga as a whole, and not to give too much away (and I'm aware there are another 2 books to catch up on) I'm still non-the-wiser over the key characters and period in time which this is set.



However, I struggled to finish this book. I found the concept interesting but the narration (a mix between Zapp Brannigan and the Godfather) distracting and eventually rather tedious.

I'm hoping the second book can restore my faith.

Slow and tedious...

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We love coca cola right? I mean as a species, generally we do. Is it the sugar? the taste? the bubbles? Probably a combination of all those things. Well, this book is so full of prose - I mean SOOO full of prose, that the actual story is lost. I couldn't follow it, I didn't enjoy it and I laboured just to listen. Can I judge it fully - no. I could only listen entirely to the first part of the download, and that took determination.

What world were they living in? Who were the people? No introductions, just a lot of over cleaver assumptions that at some point you would just get it. It took too long and I was just fed up.

So why cola at the beginning? Because prose are great in a story when used to enhance something already special, like bubbles make a coke fizzy, but a coke they do not make. This story is all bubbles. If the flavour is there, and I'm sure it is, I couldn't taste it.

pop

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The positives about this author are that he has a brilliant imagination and sense of imagery and the world he has created was interesting. For these reasons I really wanted to like this series and persevered through the whole of the first book. I should also say that there are probably plenty of people who will disagree with my opinion. However, I simply can not get on with this author. The simple reason for this is poor characterization. The characters are wooden and unrealized and there is a disconnectedness between them, despite ties of family or friendship. This makes it hard to become interested in the book because as a reader, I found it hard to believe in the characters or their motivations and therefore became uninterested in the plot.



The narrator was not my taste, I use this phrase because he was not bad at his job and I wouldn't want to criticize unfairly. What I mean by this is that, in my opinion, he did not create the feeling of being in the middle of a play, instead of simply being read to, that you get with the best narrators.

The Digging Leviathan: Narbondo, Book 1

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I found this rather a chore to get through. There is little in the way of actual plot, rather just a lot of disconnected ideas and characters who don't have much to do. I found it an uneasy mixture of science fiction, pseudo-science and magic with little internal logic.

The story (such as it is) is hard to follow and shambles along in disjointed episodes finally ending up in an abrupt and underwhelming conclusion. Possibly the book is just setting up lots of questions which will be answered in the remaining books in this series. However, getting to the end of this book was quite a relief and didn't leave me with any desire to read the remaining novels.

The narration was good however.

I kept hoping it would go somewhere...

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