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"Goodbye, little Emily." A shadowy figure attends an impromptu
burial in Shoreditch, London. His name is Honoré Lechasseur.
After a chance encounter with the mysterious Catherine Howkins,
he's had advance warning that his friend Emily Blandish is
going to die. But is forewarned necessarily forearmed? And
just how far is he willing to go to save Emily's life? Honoré
isn't the only person taking an interest in Emily. She's also
come to the attention of the Albino, one of the new breed
of gangsters surfacing in post-rationing London. The only
life he cares about is his own...
I
think I can safely say that this is Honoré and Emily's oddest
adventure to date - and that includes Daniel O'Mahony's Doctor
Who novella The
Cabinet of Light and Claire Bott's The
Clockwork Woman. Though The Clockwork Woman
remains my favourite Time Hunter novella, here we meet
more and stranger automatons and augments than ever before:
a mute albino gangster who communicates via an elaborate system
of wax disc recordings, a half-man half-mechanism library-retrieval
system - with a Cockney accent - and a time traveller augmented
with mid-20th-century machine parts.
Then there's the story structure. This being a tale of complications
arising from trying to alter the past, it's hard to pin down
a specific beginning or end to the narrative. Consequently,
author Dale Smith tells his story in neither chronological
order nor the order in which the events are experienced by
any one of the characters. Each section of each chapter contains
a time index, so you can refer back to previous pages to remind
yourself which other events took place at around this time
and fit the whole thing together in your head. I found myself
leafing back through the book quite often. This is not a criticism
- it's actually very stimulating - though if the same structure
had been applied to a full-length novel it might have become
tiresome. As the narrative unfolds, we revisit or reappraise
certain events and discover that their causes are not quite
what we might have expected them to be.
Emily
vehemently resists the temptation to change history, sowing
thematic seeds for the next book, The
Sideways Door. She explains along the way why
these circumstances are different from those of The
Winning Side, the plot of which had a similar
starting point (the death of Emily).
The author makes a point of not allowing the characters to
touch their past or future selves. Doctor Who fans
will know that this is in order to avoid shorting out the
time differential (Mawdryn Undead), though you don't
need to know that to follow and enjoy the story. Smith throws
in other cheeky references to Who and even Star
Trek. I won't spoil them for you - see if you can spot
them!
At
the end of the book the author provides a handy chart, which
allows you to reread the novella from the viewpoints of various
characters and even a couple of inanimate objects. You can
therefore get several reads for your money. It's well worth
hunting through the pages of this book - many times over.
Richard
McGinlay
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