The Dragons of Babel - Michael Swanwick
A surreal dream that doesn't quite slide into a nightmare.
I'll admit that Swanwick had me worried a few times that this dark, steampunk-flavored fairytale was going to have one of those dreadful nihilistic endings that authors of serious scifi or fantasy are prone to writing, where the protagonist finds out that his cause is hopeless, life is pain, etc., and I almost stopped reading. Nihilism gets less and less appealing to me, for some reason, as I get older. But I stuck with it and was fairly pleased and pleasantly surprised with the way it ended.
I like to describe this kind of story as 'world-based' as opposed to a 'character-based' story where I identify with and empathize with the main character. It's a twisted worldscape, peopled with highly colorful characters from a wide variety of myths, with modernity thrown in the mix. Babel could be New York City, if it had been founded by haints, elves, dwarves and a hundred other types of supernatural beings. Through the eyes of a recently arrived war refugee, Will le Fey, the reader wanders, lost and overwhelmed, trying to find sense in the chaos.
Will le Fey has a lot of the characteristics of a hero. He's clever and cunning, with a sufficient dose of both compassion and ruthlessness. He's courageous and ambitious, and makes several attempts to do big things like lead a rebellion and win his true love, but he's continually being thwarted, not because he's done anything wrong, but because the world isn't actually what he thought it was. Reality carries him along for a while, then pulls the rug out from under him, but he does achieve a kind of mixed success in the end.