Review of The Box of Red Brocade by Catherine Fisher (pub. Hodder)

[sheenaghpugh]

This is the second book in the Chronoptika series which began with The Obsidian Mirror, which I reviewed here. To recap briefly, the mirror is a time portal currently in the house of Oberon Venn, who wants to use it to bring back his dead wife Leah. His best friend David has already got lost in time trying to use the mirror, and his son Jake wants to bring him back. Maskelyne, the mirror's original owner, wants it back for purposes unknown, while Sarah, a girl from the future, knows what carnage the mirror will cause there and wants to destroy it. Outside the house, in the woods, is the timeless land of the Shee, whose queen Lady Summer wants Venn. Gideon, stolen by the Shee as a baby long ago, wants to be human again but does not know if this will kill him.

Complicated... but it gets more so. There is a lot of travel between worlds and times in this second book, as people search for each other and for a talisman that may be able to destroy the mirror. It gets quite hard to keep track of who is where and who has what at any one time, and that is quite deliberate; we are meant to feel these characters' confusion, and their mutual mistrust as their alliances keep shifting. Rebecca, once very much Maskelyne's ally, begins here to detach from him and form new loyalties. Venn, who isn't completely human, is drawn toward the faery world that can give him immortality. In this extract, he is feeling the pull of his non-human side:

He heard the flowers open on the hawthorn bushes, the bees wake, the small furled buds of oak and ash and rowan rustle and uncurl. He felt the wind change and the breeze shiver, hedgehogs crisp through banks of leaves, tadpoles in the lake open their eyes and grow tails and swim in the deep water.

A theme that is beginning to emerge is the search for power. Several characters – Janus (the fearsome tyrant from the future), Lady Summer, the Victorian inventor Harcourt Symmes and his daughter, Maskelyne as far as we know, seem to want power more than anything. It's possible that Venn too is driven as much by power as love. Others, like David and Jake, Rebecca and the harassed schoolteacher Wharton, definitely seem to be driven more by concern for their fellow-humans. Since the notes of the mirror's inventor state that love is the only thing that can defeat time, they would seem to have the right of it.

There are still huge questions and mysteries, to resolve which we shall have to await volume 3. In the meantime there is the driving momentum and lyrical beauty of the prose. We are constantly being reminded of the passage of time and that the past and future are as real as the present: here Wharton has a sudden sense of the future of the building he is in:

And from deep below the house he became aware of a sound he realized he had heard all night under his pillow, in his dreams – the roar of the swollen river Wintercombe, in its deep ravine beneath the very cellars.

Hurrying after Piers, he noted rain dripping into more buckets here and there, damp green mouldy patches forming on the ceilings. The whole Abbey was leaking and running with water.

In the Monk's Walk the stone was wet under his hand, the gargoyles of lost mediaeval monsters vomiting rain through their open mouths. He sensed all at once the soft timbers, the creaking gutters, the saturated soil under the foundations, had a sudden nightmarish terror of the great building collapsing, toppling, washing away, becoming the ruin that Sarah had hinted at.

Roll on the next instalment...