Review of The Speed of Darkness by Catherine Fisher

[sheenaghpugh]

We might slow the speed of darkness but it still comes anyway

He froze, waiting. The Wood across the stream seemed empty and silent, patters of rain dripping from its soaked branches. Then as if the light had changed, or something in his brain had adjusted, he saw them. Thin and spindly and elegant, their coats and dresses red and gold as the beech leaves, they leaned and lazed and laughed, that host of silver-haired, beautiful, sly creatures that ran and whispered through his dreams. Slants of wan sunlight lit their eyes, beady as starlings', their gaudy buttons and jewels, the ribbons on their coats. Their fingers were too long, their voices the buzz of bees. Some of them still had wings for arms, one a beak instead of a mouth.

Yep, the Shee are back. And the Wintercombe crowd: Piers, Maskelyne, Jake, Sarah, Wharton, Rebecca, not forgetting David and Venn, getting ever closer to being able to use the mirror as they want to. Halloween is approaching, the day of the dead, when the best chance will arise of getting Venn's dead wife back – but also the time when the Shee are at their most powerful.

But there are two new elements. For the first time, we go into the future to see the world Janus has made – or will make. This might have been predicted, but a total surprise was that we also go farther back in time than ever before and find out at last what the relevance to the story is of all those chapter epigraphs about Venn's adventure on Katra Simba.

At this stage of the tetralogy, the last thing I want to do is provide spoilers, so I must be careful what I quote or refer to. What I will warn against is expecting the kind of ending that ties everything up in neat bows, because it isn't what you will get. As befits a quartet of novels which has postulated that time doesn't really exist as such, or at least not in straight lines, the endings for the various characters are a lot more interesting and uncertain than that, and the novel's last three sentences, in particular, are very enigmatic. The title comes from a remark, late in the book, by a character I won't name: "We might slow the speed of darkness but it still comes anyway". This, I think, is the clue to the last sentence.

Now the quartet is complete, it can be seen what an ambitious, rich, sweeping piece of work it is. It makes far more demands of its readership than many adult books do, never mind YA ones, both in following its twisting plot and in absorbing and processing the complex and thought-provoking moral and intellectual questions it keeps throwing up. One of the main ones in this volume concerns what could only be called a good deed, which has dreadful results and arguably should never have been done. The whole series is also a fine example of Fisher's skill at world-building, to the point that very few will want to leave it simply because the pages have come to an end. I am already dreaming of a spin-off for Moll…

Comments

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

... I think I want to read these. Oh just what I need, more books :)