This was published in 1979 and is set roughly three years after the events of Dragonsinger: Harper Of Pern and about four years before The White Dragon.
Piemur wakes up one morning in the Harperhall, helps Menolly feed her fire lizards, has breakfast, then goes off to rehearse a new musical piece that has been written especially for his voice.
And his voice breaks in the opening notes.
Dismissed from his post as an apprentice singer, Piemur is reassigned to the Drumheights, a messaging centre nestled high above the Harperhall. But it seems that Masterharper Robinton, who runs the Harperhall – as well as being highly respected by most of Pern – has plans for Piemur, hoping to channel his energy and quick wits into some more constructive for the boy – and for Pern, as well.
This is the book that we really needed to get after The White Dragon. In that book, we meet Piemur when he was several years older than he is here. He was mapping the extent of the Southern Continent in that story and was travelling with a queen fire lizard and a runner beast (which, we will learn in a couple of books time, is in fact a genetically modified horse).
Dragondrums aims to fill the gaps created by The White Dragon. But it also tells a great story on its own. It’s quite a slim volume but there’s barely a wasted moment in it.
And I’m going to get to my possibly most controversial point about this book first…
Dragondrums is often sold to readers as “The Third Book In The Harperhall Trilogy” following Dragonsong and Dragonsinger: Harper Of Pern.
I don’t think it is.
Those two books are a story on their own – Menolly’s story. The story of how an abused girl managed to take back her life and achieve her own success.
Thematically, Dragondrums just doesn’t fit in to it. For one thing, Menolly is barely in it save as a supporting character. When she does appear, she fulfills the same purpose as Robinton and Sebell; giving Piemur a mission and making sure he gets equipped for it. Actually, in Robinton’s secret service (which is what we are led to believe he is maintaining here), she is more like Major Boothroyd, the quartermaster and weapons expert who kits James Bond out in the Ian Fleming novels. Robinton is, of course, M, while Sebell is Felix Leiter, assisting Piemur in his assignments, (which, like the Bond novels, consists of keeping the money coming while engaging in his own tasks).
However, my major disagreement with Dragondrums as part of the Harperhall “trilogy” is that Menolly and Sebell hook up in it (which also ruins my Bond comparison, frankly – and I double-dog dare you to find or write a Leiter/Boothroyd slashfic). We saw them (Menolly and Sebell, that is) as a couple in The White Dragon, but it wasn’t even hinted at in the earlier Menolly books. This explains how it happened.
The earlier books are pretty sexless. There is so little hanky-panky that is even hinted at in them, so for the alleged “final volume” to feature a sex scene with telepathic lizards, regardless of how much the curtains are drawn over it, does feel a little jarring.
(I’m not even going to get into the sexual politics of it being Menolly’s male lizard mating with Sebell’s queen lizard, especially given the controversy around the role played by women and their female dragons in mating flights raised in earlier books in the series)
There’s also the matter of Robinton demonstrating just what he will do to protect his vision of what Pern should be. This novel features a rather grim scene in which the formerly rather cuddly Masterharper manipulates and torments a man on his deathbed into naming an acceptable successor for his position as Lord Holder. Admittedly, the dying man is Lord Meron of High Reaches Hold who played a major part in the death of two Queen dragons in Dragonquest, but still, it does make you wonder that the folks we are going to meet in later books who distrust “harper learning” might not have a point.
But it is a great book, nonetheless. Piemur is an engaging and resourceful hero and his adventures are not so outrageous that they defy the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Although I do object (again) to McCaffrey’s treatment of Mirrim here: in The White Dragon, we saw that she had Impressed a green dragon, named Path. In this novel, Piemur gets to attend the Hatching where that event occurs. However, it gets relegated to a moment where Menolly reminds Piemur that she hasn’t forgotten that he wants his own fire lizard, rather than something life-changing for Mirrim.
Dragondrums also adds something to the whole picture of life on Pern, too.
The drums of the title have very little to do with dragons but they are important to life on Pern: previously we had seen information being communicated by dragonriders. However, despite being an almost instantaneous for of transport, even teleporting dragons are rather pressed upon for other duties when the events that they were actually created for arise: threadfall. It might be unrealistic to expect dragons to act as messengers when they are also the heroes of the air, defending the planet from mindless parasites. It’s not unrealistic to expect other methods of communication to arise. In Dragonquest, we saw Mastersmith Fandarel’s early efforts at creating some kind of electric telegraph for long-distance communication, but we also had messages being transmitted via drum. This, I imagine is similar to semaphore but with sound rather than big flapping wooden arms. And it makes perfect sense: semaphore, or some other form of signal tower would be susceptible to destruction by Thread, whereas drums can be covered up, are reasonably portable and can also be heard from long distances.
In a later story, we will also have a group of people who deliver messages in a more old-fashioned way: they run between stations with them. For bulky packages, traders (also introduced in a later book) could be paid to transport goods.
These are all details that spring out of a book that goes where no other book in the series since the first had gone thus far: outside of the main society of the dragonriders, Holders and craftmasters. Far from just explaining what happened before the events of The White Dragon, Dragondrums opens up Pern far more than we had experienced previously.
Coming Up Next: Moreta: Dragonlady Of Pern
