The Dragon of the Drowned World

The Story

When the earth shivers and shakes and the oceans rise over the lands, thirteen year old Jojo washes up on a strange shore. The adult survivors build a ramshackle settlement from the debris the ocean delivers, and make sense of their predicament by comparing themselves to Noah and his Ark.

But not everyone agrees and all Jojo wants is his family back.

He scours the beach each day looking for things that aren’t broken or dirty and stumbles on a strange, silvery plate. When the plate is smashed by an older boy, Jojo stores the pieces in his secret cave, but then odd things start to happen. The ferocious blood crabs give way to him on the beach and when he’s attacked by a giant serpent, it suddenly lets him go.

His fellow wash up, Lee, finds a strange, poisoned little creature and friendship grows as they team up to care for it. Lee insists the creature is a griffin and Jojo’s plate pieces belong to a loong or dragon but Jojo has enough problems without adding mythic creatures to the list.

When Lee’s little creature takes to the skies and the adults set out to hunt it down, Jojo and Lee embark on a desperate quest to save it. But as their journey takes them ever deeper into danger and the plates seem to grow in power, Jojo fears the dragon might turn out to be the deadliest creature of them all.

Like adventure stories where mythic animals come alive? Where characters tackle the really big questions of life? You’ll love The Dragon of the Drowned World.

K S Nikakis holds a M. Ed. (Hons) in the purposes of dragons in selected 20th century children’s literature and a Ph.D in Joseph Campbell’s hero myth.

The Idea

In March 2011, the area around Fukushima, Japan, was devastated by a tsunami that washed an estimated five million tonnes of houses, cars, boats, fishing gear, shipping containers and other material into the ocean. While it is estimated 70% of the debris sank near shore, it is likely 1.5 million tonnes continues to float in the ocean to eventually wash up on the shores of distant countries or to join the various Pacific Ocean ‘garbage patches’ caused by dumped rubbish and ocean currents.

I found the image of vast rafts of destroyed possessions (and the bodies of humans and animals) and their eventual deposition on beaches, particularly powerful. Apart from turning the sea and shore into an enormous rubbish dump, it provides a continual reminder of the initial catastrophic event. It also provides hope (in the form of survivors washing up) and despair (when corpses wash up instead). The situation is even worse for those whose loved ones fail to appear. They swing between hope and despair, a state that leaves them unable to take action or move on.

The Secondary World

The world that Jojo, Lee and the other survivors inhabit is grey, bleak and rubbish-strewn. It is also dangerously unpredictable. Whatever caused the oceans to rise over the lands also altered the behaviour of tides, weather, and seasons. Many familiar animals are strangely altered in colour and size, while totally new ones appear such as the pterodactyl-like, leather-winged birds. Time seems to have been disrupted too along with the barrier between life and death, fact and fantasy, so that ghosts and mythic creatures intrude.

The Music

Kate Bush - Running up that Hill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE_Vooailq0

Deep Fantasy

Happy reading.