Philip Womack

Chuckles in the middle of nowhere

I really wanted to like this book. After the dire Eragon, which has now been made into a worse film, and this year’s The Meaning of Night, with its coy Victorianisms and pointless footnotes, I was longing for a ‘fantasy’ that would enchant and amuse in delicious detail. And somewhere, in the 750-odd pages of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, there might be such a book.

The novel starts off fairly promisingly, with the heroine, Miss Celestial Temple, chasing after the stuffed-shirt fiancé who dumped her. She stumbles across a party which is a cover for a deadly ‘Process’ run by a cabal of people with silly, unconvincing names like Xonq or Lacquer-Sforza. But then the plot — which is rather thin and has something to do with mind-control and glass books — is spread over endless chases through featureless streets, with people overhearing other people conspiring, and asking if there is more tea. It is fairly amusing for a villain to ask, mid-fight, if there is any tea, once; more is asking for trouble.

Dalquist creates no sense of location —whatever the American reviewers think, it is not London, or even Londonesque. If this lack of identifiable place is supposed to add to a sense of mystery, I’m afraid it doesn’t. We might as well be on a regional television film set. Carriages trundle around, unsavoury characters swing swordsticks, virtue is threatened. So far, so many boxes ticked. But again and again I found myself wondering where a character actually was — underground Foreign Office lair, palace in the salt marshes, seedy city streets are all indistinguishable.

Fake adverts are printed at the back of the book, inviting us to test the wares of whorehouses and to buy shares in ‘indigo clay’.

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