Pretty Lizzie Higgs is gone, burned to death on her own hearth—but was she really a changeling, as her husband insists? Albie Mirralls met his cousin only once, in 1851, within the grand glass arches of the Crystal Palace, but unable to countenance the rumours that surround her murder, he leaves his young wife in London and travels to Halfoak, a village steeped in superstition.
Albie begins to look into Lizzie's death, but in this place where the old tales hold sway and the hidden people supposedly roam, answers are slippery and further tragedy is just a step away...
***
In the beginning, a bang: a promising and potentially explosive prologue, or a scene that's suggestive of all the fun to come. That's a fine way for a story—especially a scary story—to start. But you've got to be smart. You don't want to give yourself nowhere to go by starting the show with the showstopper, and I dare say that's exactly what Alison Littlewood did with her debut.
Chilling and thrilling in equal measure, and at once creepy and weepy, A Cold Season was a hell of a hard act to follow, and although both Path of Needles and The Unquiet House were reasonably well received, nothing Littlewood has written since said has surpassed its macabre mastery. Certainly not last year's tedious sequel. Happily, her newest novel rights almost every one of A Cold Silence's throng of wrongs. I'd go farther than that, in fact; I'd assert that The Hidden People is the aforementioned author's most accomplished effort yet—if not necessarily her most accessible.
Albert Mirralls—Albie to his nearest and dearest—only met his lovely cousin once, at the Great Exhibition of 1851 that saw the unveiling of that transparent marvel, the Crystal Palace, but little Lizzie Higgs, with her sweet songs and her sure steps, made such an impression on our man in those moments that when he hears of her murder more than a decade later, he immediately leaves the life he's built behind in order to address her death.
In Halfoak, a superstitious village arranged around a great, twisted tree, Albie is told the whole of the sordid story his sophisticated father had only hinted at. Little Lizzie had gone on to marry James Higgs, a shoemaker, and though they had been happy in their house on the hill, their inability to bear children became the talk of the town in time. Higgs, for his part, had an unusual idea why: he thought his wonderful wife had been replaced by a changeling. As the local publican puts it:
"The good folk, as they call them—mainly from fear, I think—the quiet ones, the hidden people—they're fading, you see? [...] Their race is weak. And so they take changelings—human children, or women who can bear them, to strengthen their lines. And in their place they leave one of their own, worn-out and old, bewitched to look like the one they're meant to replace, though of course they do not thrive; they soon sicken or die. Or they leave a stock of wood, similarly enchanted, and with similar outcome. These changelings can be identified by their weaknesses, or some disfigurement, or by a sweet temper turning of a sudden into querulous and unnatural ways. They might refuse to speak or eat. A child might become a milksop or a squalling affliction. A good wife may be transformed into a shrew. There are many ways of telling." (p.89)
Tragically, the recent disappearance of a wooden broom and the entirely understandable turning of Lizzie's temper was all it took to convince Higgs that his wife was not the woman he married. To wit, he tried to drive the fairy from his home. He tried iron; he tried herbs; and, all else having failed, he tried fire. "And she was consumed by it." (p.13)
In 1893, young journalist Arthur Shaw is at work in the British Museum Reading Room when the Great Storm hits London, wreaking unprecedented damage. In its aftermath, Arthur’s newspaper closes, owing him money, and all his debts come due at once. His fiancé Josephine takes a job as a stenographer for some of the fashionable spiritualist and occult societies of fin de siècle London society. At one of her meetings, Arthur is given a job lead for what seems to be accounting work, but at a salary many times what any clerk could expect. The work is long and peculiar, as the workers spend all day performing unnerving calculations that make them hallucinate or even go mad, but the money is compelling.
Things are beginning to look up when the perils of dabbling in the esoteric suddenly come to a head: A war breaks out between competing magical societies. Josephine joins one of them for a hazardous occult exploration—an experiment which threatens to leave her stranded at the outer limits of consciousness, among the celestial spheres.
Arthur won’t give up his great love so easily, and hunts for a way to save her, as Josephine fights for survival... somewhere in the vicinity of Mars.
***
John Carter from Mars meets Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in Felix Gilman's boisterous new novel, in which a man of fact finds himself face to face with the stuff of fantasy.
The tale takes place in London in the late 1800s: a dark and dirty and dangerous place. Jack the Ripper has finished his grisly business, though the murders attributed to this almost mythical figure remain in recent memory, so when the Great Storm strikes, some see it as the world's way of cleansing the city of its sins.
Other individuals, thinking this wishful, seek escape via more mystical means—among them the members of the Ordo V.V. 341, which fashionable fraternity Arthur Shaw attends at the outset of The Revolutions, with the apple of his eye, Josephine Bradman, on his arm. A science writer for The Monthly Mammoth, recently made redundant, he has precious little interest in spiritualism, however it's her bread and butter, as a typist and translator specialising in the supernatural.
The couple don't expect much out of the meeting, but there they're introduced to Atwood, the Lord and leader of another order. Seeing something in Josephine, he invites her to join his more serious circle, and offers Arthur an inordinately profitable job that he's not allowed to talk about.
Josephine doesn't trust this fellow for a second, and cautions Arthur accordingly, but with a wedding to pay for, they put aside their misgivings for the sake of their relationship. Thus, in the name of love, they are undone. Momentarily, our man is driven mad by Atwood's sinister business, which is wreathed in "secrecy, codes [and] conspiratorial oaths." (p.71) In the depths of her despair, his other half's only option is to ask Atwood to intervene.
He will, on one condition... that Josephine joins his order: a secret society dedicated to astral travel.
Rebecca, a 15-year-old American, isn't entirely happy with her life, comfortable though it is. Still, even she knows that she shouldn't talk to strangers. So when her mysterious neighbour Miss Hatfield asked her in for a chat and a drink, Rebecca wasn't entirely sure why she said yes. It was a decision that was to change everything.
For Miss Hatfield is immortal. And now, thanks to a drop of water from the Fountain of Youth, Rebecca is as well. But this gift might be more of a curse, and it comes with a price. Rebecca is beginning to lose her personality, to take on the aspects of her neighbour. She is becoming the next Miss Hatfield.
But before the process goes too far, Rebecca must travel back in time to turn-of-the-century New York and steal a painting, a picture which might provide a clue to the whereabouts of the source of immortality. A clue which must remain hidden from the world. In order to retrieve the painting, Rebecca must infiltrate a wealthy household, learn more about the head of the family, and find an opportunity to escape. Before her journey is through, she will also have—rather reluctantly—fallen in love. But how can she stay with the boy she cares for, when she must return to her own time before her time-travelling has a fatal effect on her body? And would she rather stay and die in love, or leave and live alone?
And who is the mysterious stranger who shadows her from place to place? A hunter for the secret of immortality... or someone who has already found it?
***
The Seventh Miss Hatfield is seventeen year old Anna Caltabiano's second novel: a scientific romance, after a fashion, and indeed, an extraordinary feat for someone so young. I can't in good conscience recommend it, however—much as I might like to champion the work of such a promising new author.
It's 1954, and Cynthia, a lonely little girl on the edge of adolescence, has become fascinated by her new neighbour: a strange lady who has spoken to no one in the weeks since she moved into the street. The better to get a glimpse of this antisocial character, Cynthia puts away her doll one day to take Miss Hatfield a package the postman abandoned when she refused to open her door. To her surprise and delight, she's invited in for a glass of freshly made lemonade. Her host, however, slips some mysterious liquid into her drink: a drop of water from a lake discovered in the distant past by Ponce de Leon which immediately makes her immortal.
"I'm rescuing you from your life," Rebecca Hatfield reasons. "I know you're miserable. I've watched you playing with your doll. You don't fit in with your friends or your family. You can't fit in because you aren't meant to—you're meant for something greater than a normal existence." (p.22) Something more like the lot of a time-travelling identity thief, if you can believe it, as that's exactly what Miss Hatfield asks Cynthia to do: to pop into the past, pretending to be someone else, so as to steal a prized painting.
Once the Oversight, the secret society that polices the lines between the mundane and the magic, counted hundreds of brave souls among its members. Now their number can be tallied on a single hand.
When a drunkard brings a screaming girl to the Oversight's London headquarters, it seems their hopes for a new recruit will be fulfilled—but the girl is a trap, her appearance a puzzle the five remaining guardians must solve or lose each other, and their society, for good.
As the borders between the natural and the supernatural begin to break down, brutal murders erupt across the city, the Oversight are torn viciously apart, and their enemies close in for the final blow.
This dark Dickensian fantasy spins a tale of witch-hunters, magicians, mirror-walkers and the unlikeliest of heroes drawn from the depths of British folklore. Meet the Oversight, and remember: when they fall, so do we all.
***
Charlie Fletcher, author of the Stoneheart trilogy for children, gives Suzanna Clarke a run for her money in The Oversight, a canny urban fantasy about a secret society sworn to protect the people from supranatural shenanigans.
"We were founded long ago," Sara said, "when the world was less crowded and people liked to fill up the space with four or five long words where one simple one would do: we are the Free Company for the Regulation and Oversight of Recondite Exigency and Supranatural Lore." (p.42)
That's magic to you and me—which is to say "strange, hidden things that happen without a normal explanation" (p.42)—and the very reasonable rules governing its usage; rules the Oversight exists to enforce... or has done, historically. These days, though, they can hardly keep their own house in order, so what hope do they have of overcoming a conspiracy of wicked witchfinders?
Once upon a time, there were many Hands in many lands, with five fingers each and an abundance of extra digits insisting on enlisting—the better to defend against those who would use their supranatural skills for ill. Then the Disaster happened; the Oversight was betrayed by its own, and you might measure the cost of its lax attitude in lives, given that the Great Fire of London was the result.
Fast forward to the year eighteen something or other. The society has been dramatically diminished in the centuries since the Disaster. No one trusts the Oversight any more, thus there's just the one Hand left standing, led—insofar as any Hand can be—by Sara Falk, a Glint who sees herself reflected in the serving girl who, at the outset of Fletcher's text, is deposited on the doorstep of the house the last Hand shares on Wellclose Square.
I am not a natural researcher when it comes to writing fiction. I find it slows the act of storytelling down—I like to get into a flow with the words and pausing to check facts can be jarring. I love reading historical fiction but I vowed to myself I would never write it. Then I came across the Thames Torso murders, and having read Dan Simmons' The Terror [doesn't get better, does it? — Ed] I felt inspired to give writing a blend of fact and fiction ago.
I took advice from several friends who've written historical fiction and their universal top tip—which I've since passed on—is not to get bogged down in trying to research everything before you start. You can get lost in it, and by the time you come to need a small piece of information, like for example, what a middle-class late-Victorian family might have for dinner, you've forgotten what your research told you.
Also, you can get caught up in tiny details and miss big things. While writing Mayhem I very nearly missed the Dockers' Strike of 1889, and given that some of my action takes place in the wharves, that could have been disastrous. When planning Murder the first thing I did was a quick search on major events that happen during each year of the book. Although Murder is quite a claustrophobic story of paranoia, Queen Victoria's diamond Jubilee took place during one of the years of the story. It was a huge nationwide celebration and to not feature it would have damaged the authenticity of the narrative.
Writing a novel set in Victorian London can also be a double-edged sword in that we each have an image of the era in our heads from various film and television adaptations of famous novels. In some respects, that's great in that you don't have to set up the entire world for the reader, but the danger is that your description can become generic. Luckily, if you dig around on the internet (the saviour of the modern writer) you can find some great contemporary accounts of various parts of the city written by journalists and diarists of the time which help with small details and getting the atmosphere of the place right.
Newspaper archives are also great for understanding the feel of the era. I subscribe to the Times Archive (all the newspaper articles in both Mayhem and Murder are authentic), and I searched for murders that made the papers of the day and investigations that both Dr Thomas Bond and Henry Moore were involved in (other than the most famous, the Jack the Ripper case) to use as the backdrop to events in Murder.
When I'd found those I also read other sections of the newspapers to try and get into the mentality of the period—the social issues, the politics etc. in order to make my characters' behaviours more realistic. It's surprising how similar in many ways we are to those who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. We both exist in fast-changing times with huge divisions between the rich and poor and the problems that come with that.
Using real people and events from history creates its own problems when weaving a story around them but I've thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a magic in having written a book about people who you come to think of as 'your' characters and then searching old newspaper reports and learning more and more about their fascinating lives. I love writing fiction, but if there's one thing I've learned from writing these novels, it's that there is sometimes nothing stranger than fact.
Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, thinks he has finally recovered from the terrible events of years before. He no longer has nightmares about Jack the Ripper—or the other monster, an enemy even more malign who hid in Jack’s shadow and haunted the streets of London at the end of the 1880s. He has made his peace with his part in bringing calm back to the East End.
His fame as a profiler of criminals is increasing, his practice is steads, and Dr Bond is beginning to dream of marriage, and children. Life is good.
But when a woman’s body is found brutally beaten to death in a railway carriage and a letter written years before is discovered by the police, the past he has fought so hard to put behind him begins to taint the present, and he can no longer fight his new suspicions.
Just when he thought life had returned to normal, Dr Bond is about to discover that some things will not remain buried: once again his uncanny enemy is loose on the streets of London... and this time Dr Bond is alone.
***
Mayhem was "a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper's red reign." This was essentially set dressing, however. Instead of simply reiterating that grisly business, as many such texts have been content to, Sarah Pinborough's plot revolved around "another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him," including Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, who returns—rather the worse for wear—in Murder.
It's been six years since the shocking events at the end of Mayhem, which saw Bond and his assistants in all things mystical—a priest and a pauper—catch and kill the Thames Torso Murderer: one James Harrington; husband of the beautiful Juliana, whose heart the doctor dearly desires.
Harrington, for his part, was hardly to blame for his horrendous descent: it was the Upir—a violent parasite he picked up in Poland—which led him down that dark path. And though the host is dead, the creature he carried on his back lives still... and hungers, I shouldn't wonder.
Murder begins with Bond feeling free of these fears for the first time in recent years, and planning, at long last, to propose to Juliana. But his hopes have to go on hold when an American friend of Harrington's arrives in the capital with a collection of confessional letters which implicate their late acquaintance in some truly unspeakable deeds.
To keep up appearances, he has to be seen to take these seriously, and inevitably, his investigations lead him back to Jack. Harrington, he realises, couldn't have been the Ripper, as he had in his heart of hearts hoped... but perhaps his parasite played a part. Perhaps the mayhem that the Upir created in its wake drove another member of Juliana's family to madness. Perhaps her outwardly affable father, whose alibi falls apart the moment Bond subjects it to the slightest scrutiny, is a killer in their midst.
Uprooted from her home in India, Alice is raised by her aunt, a spiritualist medium in Windsor. When the mysterious Mr Tilsbury enters their lives, Alice is drawn into a plot to steal the priceless Koh-i-Noor diamond, claimed by the British Empire at the end of the Anglo-Sikh wars.
Said to be both blessed and cursed, the sacred Indian stone exerts its power over all who encounter it: a handsome deposed maharajah determined to claim his rightful throne, a man hell-bent on discovering the secrets of eternity, and a widowed queen who hopes the jewel can draw her husband's spirit back. In the midst of all this madness, Alice must discover a way to regain control of her life and fate...
***
Raised in lovely, lively Lahore by her ayah, a makeshift mother in place of the real parent who passed away on the birthing table, Alice Willoughby is spirited away one dark day by her father — a doctor in the employ of the Empire who deems the days ahead too dangerous for his darling daughter. To wit, he leaves little Alice in Windsor, with instructions to "learn [her] heritage. What it is to be an English child. What it is to be a Christian." (p.41)
Alas, Alice's father is unaware that the aunt who swears she will care for her in his absence harbours certain indefinable designs... on a diamond, and indeed the dead.
My father said it was summertime when we first arrived at Southampton docks. But, so often I found myself shivering and oppressed by the dreariness of day when it seemed all the colours in the world had been bleached away to a dirty grey. My father left me yearning for the only home I'd ever known to live in a house like a darkened maze where, at first, I was very often lost in the claustrophobia of walls too close, of ceilings too low, of narrow stairs that led up and up to a bedroom where the walls had been papered with rosebuds. But those flowers were pale imitations, too regimented and prim by far when compared with the fragrant, blowsy blossoms we'd left behind in India. I would lie in that bedroom and think of home, feeling hungry but never wanting to eat, with the food so bland and lacking taste. And the only thing to comfort me was to stare through the gloom to a gap in the shutters, where I sometimes saw the starlit skies and wondered if those self-same stars were shining over India. To sparkle in my ayah's eyes. (p.22)
Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret — an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects — and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s elite. Day encourages his followers to explore dream manipulation with the goal of discovering a strange hidden world, a place he calls the Empyrean.
A year later, Nathan has vanished, and the famed Inspector Vidocq arrives in London to untangle the events that led up to Nathan’s disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, Jane realizes she must discover the origins of her talent, and use it to find Nathan herself, before it’s too late.
***
I've never been a particularly religious person, but even I am struck, sometimes, with the conviction that there must be more to the world than this. Some power greater than ours.
I don't mean to say that the world is not enough — that would make me the Bond villain of bloggers, after all. Nor do I intend to imply that the power people wield is at all paltry — to be sure, that too would be very far from the truth. But in the face of nature's creations, not to mention its infinite variations, it's hard to avoid being awed, is it not?
Be that as it may, I am content to live in a wonderful world and know that it is so, yet many demand more. To each their own, of course; I wouldn't dare discriminate! But from time to time, men like Ariston Day emerge from the many aforementioned. The antagonist of Adam McOmber's darkly fantastic first novel believes with every fibre of his being that there is somewhere a door to be opened; a membrane, maybe, to be teased — or torn — apart. And Day is determined to do so. At any conceivable cost.
The charismatic leader of a sensational sect known as the Theatre of Provocation, which has its headquarters deep beneath a tavern called the Temple of the Lamb, Day exists primarily on the periphery of McOmber's magnificently measured debut. His tempestuous presence, however, is felt from the first.
That's not the case for our narrator, Jane Silverlake, who has lived a lonely life. At once shunned by the poor and rejected by the rich, she seems set aside from society entirely at a time and a place, specifically Victorian-era England, which values nothing else as highly. To make her existence still more maudlin, she's been haunted by objects ever since losing her mother to an eerie fever — an uncanny talent that takes a telling turn during The White Forest's first act. Rather than simply singing to her, the things she sees start to speak; if not in words then courtesy increasingly crystalline images:
It was as if every object had become a curtain, and behind that curtain lay a new realm. The realm was not of simple colour and sound — it was an actual place. Had I read any of the burgeoning literature of scientific fiction, I might have called the place a "parallel dimension," but I had no word for what I saw. It was a landscape — a white forest, pale as paper, clearly a vision of some alien landscape. In the forest there was a stream of milk-white water that did not flow but remained still, as if frozen. There were flowers in the undergrowth — blossoms that appeared to be lit from within, like Chinese lanterns. I recognised the place. As a child, I'd seen it in dreams inside the mouths that opened in Mother's flesh. (p.90)
Jane tries to keep these surreal experiences a secret, but when she is befriended — quite out of the blue — by a beautiful young woman, Miss Madeline Lee, and a dashing gentleman-in-the-making named Nathan Ashe, her abilities inevitably become apparent. A powerful bond forms between the three thereafter, brought on by this shared knowledge, and the years elapse happily.
For a long while, we triangulated, and there was energy in that. I sometimes felt myself to be the center of our group, a project for both of them. It wasn't until Nathan discovered the Empyrean itself that everything truly got out of hand. The triangle was broken by that strange vision, and it was then that we began our free fall. (p.87)
Nathan's fascination with the Empyrean ultimately leads him into the arms of Ariston Day... and then he disappears completely. Quite literally, he is lost. An Inspector Vidoq — the model for the main character of many of Edgar Allen Poe's most notable short stories — is called in to investigate this locked room mystery of sorts, but Jane and Maddy only cooperate with Vidoq to a point. To preserve the sanctity of the secret they share, the ladies resolve to unravel the strange circumstances surrounding their dear heart's vanishing act themselves.
Little do they realise where the case will take them, and how it is bound to break them.
The White Forest has an absorbing plot, compelling characters and an exceptionally well-rendered setting, assuming you can get past a few factual and geographical inaccuracies, meanwhile McOmber imparts an abundance of exquisite imagery in pristine prose that often comes close to poetry. Little about this book is anything less than impeccable, in fact — let me state, out of the gate, that it's great; positively phenomenal for a first novel — but what impressed me most about The White Forest was its incremental descent into dark fantasy.
At the outset, the author plays it perfectly straight. His Hampstead Heath feels nearly real. His lords and ladies are far from the caricatures that tend to populate these sorts of novels; they're authentic individuals, flawed and self-absorbed, but not tortured or hysterical or wholly heroic. Our central characters are similarly convincing, which is to say, for all that they're the good guys, they do some despicable things.
In short, it's all awfully ordinary. But the extraordinary is never far away. Even the banality of the beginning is punctuated by moments of sudden, shattering violence. Confronted by Maddy's beauty in a mirror, for instance, Jane wonders:
What would it feel like [...] to crack the brush against her skull? An awful notion. She was mine, and I was hers. And yet she had a lovely face — I could not stop myself from thinking this — certainly lovelier than my own. But what did Nathan think? A horrid question. If Nathan ever chose one of us, the fantasy would be broken. Flood-waters would rise. (p.175)
And indeed they do.
But these are only isolated moments, initially. By the end, however, the unknowable notions that formerly suffused the fringes of the fiction have supplanted its earlier reality entirely; the last chapters don't even take place on our planet! Suddenly The White Forest is like Lovecraft come Among Others, Caitlin R. Kiernan meets The Croning, yet somehow McOmber makes the whole his own.
At once weird and wonderful, The White Forest is an uncanny confluence of magic and mystery, and over its controlled course, Adam McOmber paints a picture both beautiful and terrifying, exhibiting his mastery of both the fantastical and the practically factual. To come full circle, The White Forest is the sort of book that makes one wonder whether there mightn't be something more to the world than we're aware of, and it's my pleasure to recommend it unreservedly.
As much to my surprise as anyone else's, I enjoyed the new Sherlock Holmes novel by Alex Rider writer Anthony Horowitz... well, immensely. You can read my review of The House of Silk in full here, but suffice it to say Horowitz's novel so endeared the great detective to me that I immediately laid waste to my little library, the better to see what other contemporary pastiches I could read to tide me over till the imminent second season of the exemplary BBC series.
Fast-forward to the present - though 2012 still sounds like the far-flung future to me - and I may have read more Sherlock Holmes stories in the last month than ever before -- not just to satisfy my own appetites, either, because a while ago I heard how the overlords in charge of Tor.com were intending to keep the site ticking on over through Christmas and New Year.
The result - Holmes for the Holidays - has been running since a bit before the big day, and it's been brilliant. Lots of fun, and indubitably interesting. If you aren't following along already, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you pop on over to the index and catch up if you can.
For my part, I contributed two short articles, both of which have now had their official unveiling. In the first, I looked at an old one-shot Caliber Comics put out in the mid-90s: namely The Sussex Vampire, a short graphic adaptation of the original Conan Doyle story masterminded by none other than Warren effing Ellis.
'The Sussex Vampire' is an excellent adaptation of a sterling Sherlock Holmes story, fittingly illustrated and ably scripted by an author since risen to renown, whose early work – up to and including this superb single issue – deserves a great deal more attention than it gets. Warren Ellis and Craig Gilmour make for fine co-conspirators, and while 'The Sussex Vampire' isn’t as easy to find these days as it was for me, way back when – at least, not by legal means – if you can: do.
And I couldn't very well let a celebration of all things Sherlock Holmes pass by without a tip of the trilby - ahem - to Neil Gaiman, whose stunning 'A Study In Emerald' entangled the mythos of everyone's favourite consulting detective together with that - of all things - of H. P. Lovecraft.
Then, in the process of researching 'A Study In Emerald,' I realised Gaiman had recently written a second Sherlock Holmes story, so I got myself a copy of the new anthology out of Titan Books - that is to say A Study in Sherlock - and endeavoured to write about these two weird tales together.
'The Case of Death and Honey' occurs in the mysterious twilight years of the great detective's career, but is also alludes to what might have happened to our man after his retirement. Given that 'A Study In Emerald' so evoked 'A Study in Scarlet' - which is to say the very first Sherlock Holmes story - this, I think, is particularly fitting. A sort of closing of the circle; though it isn't giving the game away to stress, a second time, that appearances can be... deceiving.
Never mind the various other stories it contains, A Study in Sherlock is worth the price of admission for 'The Case of Death and Honey' alone. It's the sort of short story that reminds you what short stories are for.
Anyway, I will of course be glued to the telly tonight, when the first feature-length episode of the second season of the BBC's Sherlock series premieres. If there's a better way to ring in 2012, no-one's mentioned it to me!
I'm almost afraid to ask, but you guys are as psyched as I am, right?
As to A Game of Shadows, in case you were wondering: no, I haven't seen it yet... but I am hoping to make it to the movies in the imminent. For this, do you think? Or should I wait to rent it on Blu-ray, and see something better?
London, 1896. Andrew Harrington is young, wealthy and heartbroken. His lover Marie Kelly was murdered by Jack the Ripper and he longs to turn back the clock and save her.
Meanwhile, Claire Haggerty rails against the position of women in Victorian society. Forever being matched with men her family consider suitable, she yearns for a time when she can be free to love whom she chooses.
But hidden in the attic of popular author and noted scientific speculator H.G. Wells is a machine that will change everything.
As their three quests converge, it becomes clear that time is the problem – to escape it, to change it, might offer them the hope they need...
***
Imagine a tray of cupcakes.
Cupcakes are delicious, you think, so you eat one. Perhaps you earn your icing by nibbling away at the sugar-sweet sponge first, or perhaps you just pop the whole thing into your mouth -- how indeed do you eat yours? It actually matters a great deal. But whatever the method to your particular madness, your suspicions are borne out: the cupcake was indeed delicious. In fact you enjoy your first cupcake so much you take a second; you've hardly eaten anything else today, so in a sense, you've earned it. In short order, if you're anything like me, a second has turned into a third, a fourth into a fifth and finally a sixth...
...and just like that, all the cupcakes are gone! How did that happen?
To make matters worse, now you hate the taste of cupcakes, you've eaten so very many of them. Now the thought of even the sight of one more cupcake makes you nauseous.
The Map of Time can be like that, if you read it unwisely. As I did, when I realised what a delicious (if not strictly nutritious) treat it was. I couldn't get enough of The Map of Time, until one marathon reading session later, I realised I had had enough. But if sheer greed does not spoil your appetite for it - if you can tame the temptation coiled tight inside you like a sugar high - you will find in award-winning Spanish author Felix J. Palma's first novel to be translated into the English language a thing of some decadence, indulgence, and delight.
The Map of Time is not so much a story in three parts as it three stories, told as one - though each enriches the next to a certain extent, incrementally feeding in to a single greater tale as Palma raises curtain after curtain, by and large the three phases of The Map of Time function in isolation. In the first, beginning in the late 1800s, disillusioned young cad Andrew Harrington falls for the prostitute Marie Kelly - none other - then into a decade of despair after Jack the Ripper claims the last of his victims. Andrew wants nothing more than to be able to turn back the clock that he might somehow save his dearly departed from a fate worse than death... and if the writer H. G. Wells is to be believed, there may be a way.
Meanwhile, Claire Haggerty seems a modern woman out of time in a city of old: in turn-of-the-century London she feels desperately disconnected from the high society that clamours on incorrigibly around her... that is until until she takes passage on Gilliam Murrary's magnificent Time-Travelling Train, a startling expeditionary voyage which deposits Claire and her fellow passengers in the year 2000, when the fate of the human race is decided in a duel between the courageous Captain Shackleton and the evil automaton called Solomon. With the past fast receding and the present dead to her, maybe - just maybe - she will finally find love... in the future!
In the third of The Map of Time's three parts, Wells himself takes charge of the narrative; moreover, he takes charge of his own narrative at last, as he becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in which all the evidence points towards an impossible perpetrator: a time-travelling serial killer. But what does this man from the future want? That is besides a trail of bodies that should not be? And what has H. G. Wells of all people got to do with it?
The Map of Time is a delightfully digressionary novel: at once a whimsical send-up of all things Victoriana, an rip-roaring, old-fashioned adventure and a lovingly throwback scientific romance, a la the novels of Wells himself. On all fronts, it succeeds to a certain degree, but each, I think, is ever-so-slightly held back by a sense of irreverence; a notion that perhaps there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Palma's prose is knowingly purple, and often prone to disappearing down the rabbit-hole of its own inspired imagination, so The Map of Time tends to drag when it is not in full flow. In those moments where the narrator - an affable, all-seeing sort perfectly pleased at other times to rudely intrude upon affairs - seems content to revel in his own cleverness, or expound upon this or that (occasionally fascinating) aside at disproportionate length, almost as if he were a non-fiction novelist dedicated to the details... in those moments - and there are a fair few such moments - Palma's long-windedness can come off as not a little over-indulgent, and pace-breaking besides.
Then again, Palma has what you might describe as an "undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all," (p.437) and there is too a great deal to The Map of Time. I would not suggest it is at all understuffed -- and perhaps if Palma had not, by way of his mysterious narrator, stopped so often to take the measure of one flight of fancy or another, his novel would have proved more exhausting that it is. The Map of Time is a tad bloated, assuredly, but it is at no point truly tiresome. Testing, yes, and yet it will repay your meagre investment a hundredfold by the end, if you stick with it, and consume it correctly. In short bursts, then, Felix J. Palma's first novel to make it across the straits between Spain and our English-speaking territories is by turns funny, witty and winning. And - to paraphrase Palma's easily-distracted omniscient narrator - other such pronouncements.
I would also add that as The Map of Time hopscotches merrily from the Great Fire of London to the Autumn of Terror to the ultimate millennial conflict between man and machine, by way of Jack the Ripper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Timecop - or at a least time-travelling detective inspector out of Scotland Yard (so much of a muchness, really) - Palma is tremendously well serviced by his translator, erstwhile BBC Radio 4 journalist, presenter, author and man of many talents Nick Caistor. He provides Palma with what feels a pitch-perfect translation, capturing the light touch of the original author wonderfully, with none of the awkwardness or the imprecise turn of phrase one must typically tolerate in fiction first written in another language. As the pioneer Gilliam Murray says, "aren't there lies that make life more beautiful?" (p.418) I dare say Nick Caistor's fibs fall ably into that category.
The Map of Time is a terrific feat, in the final summation, full of twists and turns and surprising reversals of fortune, which touches - tangentially - on questions of fate and predestination, of life imitating art and art imitating life in return. It is sometimes very lovely, and though on occasion it can be slow-going, heed my advice: take no more than three chapter-sized measures of The Map of Time a day until your prescription is finished, and I guarantee you'll come away from Felix J. Palma's fabulous farce a healthy, happy specimen of humanity indeed. In fact, since I do not know you will be able to help yourself, shall we say... doctor's orders?
