The White Dragon was Anne McCaffrey’s first novel to hit the Best Sellers list. I’m convinced that it was due entirely to that spectacular cover! Well, maybe just mostly due. It is a dang good book after all.
Once again McCaffrey changes up the format and uses a different plot structure than either of the two preceding volumes. The White Dragon is a straight up Bildungsroman (or Coming of Age story since I need to get in the obligatory tvtropes.org link (and the Death by Newbery Medal page linked there is a hoot, too!)). There’s no overarching quest that Jaxom must accomplish although he does manage to single-handedly avert a war between two factions of dragonriders. This novel simply follows the young Lord Holder as he navigates the treacherous path from adolescence to adulthood.
My copy is 467 pages long so I’m not even going to try to recap it to the same level of detail as I did the first two books but I would hope that for this one I really shouldn’t have to. [NOTE from final proofreading: I totally failed miserably.] Being a textbook example of a Coming of Age story doesn’t mean that it’s cliched or bad– quite the contrary!
Jaxom is the young Lord Holder of Ruatha Hold who unwittingly Impressed the runt-ish white dragon Ruth back in Dragonquest. Any teen would face additional stresses while growing up if they were a hereditary ruler or if they had to take care of and live with and grow with a creature to whom they’re strongly bonded both mentally and emotionally. Jaxom is both.
On the political side he’s been the Lord of Ruatha since moments after his birth when F’lar killed his father Fax in a duel (at the beginning of Dragonflight). It may be a position of privilege but even as he’s groomed for it he finds the requirements and duties and expectations suffocating. Those expectations lay heaviest because his guardian, the Lord Warder Lytol is an extremely competent administrator of the Hold, is respected by every other Hold, Hall, and Weyr, and is the closest thing to a father that Jaxom has. Lytol is also emotionally distant because he was once a dragonrider himself whose blue dragon died from injury years before. Surviving and functioning after losing one’s dragon is vanishingly rare, most riders suicide under those circumstances.
Jaxom must also care for and work with the white Ruth who was not expected to live very long when he hatched. It is now roughly seven years later and Ruth has not only survived, he has thrived. He’s still very much a runt at half the size of the next smallest dragon and of an unprecedented color which leads to many people treating him as a freak. Jaxom doesn’t appreciate that at all. Things at least start looking up when he gets to ride Ruth in flight for the first time in the opening chapter. However, the additional freedom of movement comes with some complications of its own.
While Jaxom may ride Ruth with official blessing, as a Lord Holder he is discouraged from even thinking about fighting Thread on Ruth. But fighting Thread is what dragons do! And thus Jaxom rails against yet another stupid restriction. N’ton, the Weyrleader at Fort, is at least pragmatic about his dilemma: “Just don’t let anyone catch you trying to teach Ruth to chew firestone!”
Ruth does possess at least one bona fide talent: he has the best time sense of any dragon. That is, he always knows when in time he is. This comes in handy because early in the book when the exiled Oldtimers who had been stewing in their own bitterness in the Southern Continent (and causing all kinds of problems for the growing Hold there) steal a hardening Queen egg right off of the Benden Weyr hatching ground sands. Within hours it mysteriously reappears in its proper place thereby obviating the punitive raid being contemplated by the Benden riders. Dragon fighting dragon is a worst case scenario that nobody wants to see. The returned egg, though, is obviously harder and much closer to hatching than its remaining siblings. Jaxom and Ruth come across information that leads them to conclude that they are the ones who returned it and concoct a plan to execute the dazzling counter-caper.
Later, after Jaxom and Ruth have been officially training to fight Thread, they get to fly their first Fall. Which they do despite the fact that Jaxom is feeling sick. Like a small case of the sniffles would keep him from that, right? Job done they decide to bathe and refresh themselves in a nice little secluded cove in the Southern Continent that Jaxom’s friend Menolly and Masterharper Robinton had recently discovered. To his credit, Jaxom did leave a note which is a good thing because once Ruth is clean Jaxom lies down on the beach for a nap . . .
. . . And wakes up a month later having nearly died from a rare disease known as Fire-head. Ruth had called for help as soon as he realized that Jaxom was seriously ill. Instantaneous telepathic communication can be downright handy at times. Jaxom had been carefully nursed by Brekke (established as an accomplished healer as far back as Dragonquest), and Sharra, whose ambitious brother Toric is the Holder at Southern who has had to put up with the Oldtimers interference while trying to both establish and expand his young Hold. Over the rest of the book a romance develops between Jaxom and Sharra. There are times when I think that this feels a little forced or rushed but fundamentally I think it works.
While Jaxom is recovering in the Cove two of the Southern Oldtimers pull yet another stunt that winds up with a dragon dying and his rider fighting F’lar. This time F’lar does kill his opponent. Since the dead rider had been basically the leader and worst of the lot down there, new leadership is chosen and steps are taken to rotate in new dragons and return the Southern Weyr to full fighting strength. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of that fatal duel Masterharper Robinton suffers a heart attack.
Ah, Master Robinton. He’s easily one of my all time favorite characters from this or any other author. I’ve not taken the space to more than barely mention his name so far but he’s been a key character since Dragonflight. Robinton is a sage, a wit, a wise arbiter, a voice of reason who skillfully uses his influence to more or less keep everyone working against Thread rather than against each other. He’s easily the single most respected man on Pern. So much so that in the midst of his heart attack many of the dragons take it upon themselves to speak directly to him to keep him awake and alive.
Master Robinton steps down as head of the Harper Hall then travels south by swift ship to recuperate in the same cove where Jaxom has been. While he’s on his way volunteers from every Weyr, Hold, and Craft rush to construct a dwelling suitable for the Masterharper to enjoy his retirement. The result is downright lavish and Robinton is floored by the effort expended on his behalf.
After another few weeks the Master Healer checks up on Jaxom and Robinton and declares both of them fully recovered from their respective maladies. Robinton immediately puts Jaxom, along with Sharra, Menolly, and Piemur to work exploring inland toward the great cone-shaped mountain visible in the distance with the ultimate goal of finding the very first human habitation on the planet. They’d been getting numerous vague hints on that subject from the collective memories of the wild Southern fire lizards which had been seeping into their dreams over the past weeks. The wild fire lizards were excited to see humans “returning” since their collective memory showed them fleeing from an enormous volcanic eruption so long ago.
Sure enough, around the base of that old volcano are the obvious signs of man-made structures buried under the ash. The explorers use Ruth to encourage the wild fire lizards to keep remembering any details they can. Fairly soon they come up with the image of long cylindrical objects with stubby wings swooping down out of the sky, landing in a vast field and finally opening to disgorge their human passengers. The four young people and Ruth follow the fire lizards to the site of this new memory and proceed to excavate down to one of the shuttles. They’d found the actual vehicles that their ancestors had arrived in!
With far too little effort (I know the colonists were a far more advanced civilization than ours but so much so that the shuttle door’s mechanism still works after 25 centuries? I call shenanigans!) they get the door open and get to step inside. Actually by this point they’d called for several others to come witness and help out, including the Benden Weyrleaders, the Master Smith and others so quite a few were on hand for the opening. Inside the find many interesting “artifacts” and also a large, fully detailed map of the planet. This is a major find because to this point they had no maps of the Southern Continent. In fact, Piemur’s job for the past several months had been to chart the Southern coastline on foot. The Benden Weyrleaders see that even if they cede to Toric all of the territory that he currently claims (which is itself huge: nearly half the size of the occupied Northern Continent), most of the Southern will still be available to the Dragonriders.
This Coming of Age story can’t be complete until Jaxom gets the girl (Sharra, in this case). About the time that the shuttles are being dug up, Toric calls his sister back to Southern Hold to tend to a “medical emergency.” It’s just a pretense. Toric does not approve of his sister’s choice because even if Jaxom is a Lord, it’s only over a “table sized Hold in the North.” Armed with the new information from the map, the Benden Weyrleaders bring Toric in to see the shuttles and to finalize the boundaries of his Hold (They had earlier made an agreement that Toric could permanently Hold all the territory he managed to control by the time the Oldtimers died out. The recent changes at the Southern Weyr meant that some alterations to that agreement were called for.). Toric pretty much gets exactly what he wanted so he’s happy.
While that meeting is in progress Jaxom and Ruth rescue Sharra from Southern Hold where Toric had confined her and jump between to the shuttles where the meeting was concluding. Jaxom pointedly informs Toric, “Place and time are no barriers to Ruth. Sharra and I can go anywhere, anywhen on Pern.” Ironically, Toric is impressed by the “lordling’s” spunk and revises his estimation of Jaxom upward and finally bows to the inevitable. The story concludes with the annual gathering of all the Lords Holder at which the newlywed Jaxom will be confirmed Lord of Ruatha in his own right and now longer under the authority of Lytol.
Obviously a lot happens in this book. I spent a lot of time talking about the final third of the book (and barely scratched the surface, believe me!) because in my opinion the discovery of the colonist’s shuttles is the key event that kicks off the rest of the Main Sequence. It’s the point at which the series falls firmly on the Science-Fiction side of the Speculative Fiction super-genre. Before this one could argue that it’s mostly Fantasy with just the barest hints of science peeking through at times. With the shuttles unearthed the story’s foundation is unambiguously Sci-Fi. It’s a trick that I don’t think I’ve seen used by any other author that I can remember reading. I have seen a few worlds built by other authors in which some unimaginably huge cataclysm shakes our world and then a few hundred or thousand years later the story takes place in a pre-industrial fantasy setting complete with magic (and not in a Clarke’s 3rd Law sense, either). McCaffrey’s Pern is a different beast altogether, one for which she has been laying the science-fictional groundwork for since Dragonflight‘s first publication in 1968.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing a post soon about the best order in which to read the Pern books. The next book I’ll be writing up, however, is The Renegades of Pern since it substantially overlaps the events of this book.
“Instantaneous telepathic communication can be downright handy at times.”
*lol* Nice.