Travel through a mirror

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
--W. B. Yeats

A famous mountain climber, now a recluse living on the family estate -- living, in fact, in an enormous, decaying home, a one-time abbey, surrounded by a deep frozen forest, lying at the bottom of a canyon carved by waters rushing off of Dartmoor.  His obsessions: the death of his wife in an auto accident, and an ancient mirror -- highly-polished obsidian -- updated with modern high-voltage attachments -- a device that permits travel through time.  The obsessions are related.

And the other characters! A scar-faced man from the age of Dickens who claims he was robbed, that he is the mirror's rightful owner and wants it back. A woman from a dark and bleak future, who comes seeking to change the course of time. Jake, an angry student expelled from his exclusive Swiss prep school, who comes to the abbey in search of his missing father -- his father having been the recluse's best friend; Jake suspects murder. Gideon -- a boy apparently Jake's age, but actually born five hundred years earlier -- a human by birth, but raised and kept immortal by the fairy-lore of the Shee.  The Shee themselves, the amoral and self-centered beings who haunt the forest surrounding the abbey.  The abbey's butler, Piers, who just happens to be a genie.

The English have a knack for writing a certain type of fantasy novel.  Tolkien, of course.  And Susan Cooper, more recently, author of The Dark is Rising series.  In a somewhat different way, even Philip Pullman, and the His Dark Materials trilogy.  And now, Catherine Fisher has published the first book of her new trilogy, Obsidian Mirror.

What these fantasy writers have in common -- Pullman to a lesser extent -- is a deep feeling for the history and mythology of England, together with the ability to tell an absorbing good tale of adventure.  I read the New York Times's review of Fisher's new "young adult" book a couple of weeks ago, and was able to download it this week.  I read it virtually overnight. 

Obsidian Mirror is the first fantasy book I've read since Revelation Space, a couple of months ago.  Nothing could be more different.  Alastair Reynold's imaginative series takes place in a distant future among peoples whose problems are not ours and whose memories of our own lives in the early twenty-first century are as faint and cloudy as are our memories of the Middle Ages.   The series' characters live, and have always lived, in deep space.  They are "deracinated" both physically and mentally.

Fisher's novel, by contrast, is cozy, home-centered, and, well, English -- deeply rooted in the folklore and landscapes of Devon.  People drop in and out on their way to and from other eras -- nineteenth century London is vividly depicted in all its filth, poverty and danger -- but the action centers about an ancient Devon country home, an enormous structure closely surrounded by a fairy-infested enchanted forest.  The plot itself is a bit clunky, perhaps -- absorbing enough, but I had the vague sense of having read stories with similar plots in the past.  But Obsidian Mirror is superlative in presenting characters who I cared about and wanted to know better, and even more superlative in painting a sense of place, scenes both beautiful and frightening.

All the characters, including the trilogy's (presumptive) hero, Jake -- the novel is narrated from multiple points of view --  are self-centered and selfish.  Each wants the mirror for his own aims, and is willing to deceive and trick the others to get it.  For the most part, however, none is able to avoid occasional flare-ups of empathy for the others, thereby softening and humanizing each of them in our eyes.  The fact that the novel's point of view changes several times a chapter prevents us from becoming too attached to -- or from cheering on behalf of -- any one of the characters too exclusively. 

Fisher has a marked ability to depict vividly strange and/or beautiful settings.  I mentioned her descriptions of nineteenth century London.  The haunted forest surrounding the abbey -- and the elusive Shee who live and rule within -- also come alive through her descriptive language.

Jake turned.  A tiny shimmer caught his eye.  He stared at it; saw a patch of glossy leaf, a lichened tree trunk.

And it became them.

He breathed in, felt Gideon's warning grip.

They were almost people.

Where they had come from he couldn't tell; they were so much a part of the shadow and the foliage.  Tall and pale, male and female, it was as if they had always been there, and just some adjustment of the light had revealed them to him.  Their faces were narrow and beautiful, their hair silvery-fair.
...
"Who are they?" he whispered.

Gideon was silent.  Then he put his lips to Jake's ear.  "Don't be fooled.  They look like angels, but they're demons.  They're the Shee.

In Obsidion Mirror, there are no "angels," either human or fairy.  Everyone is out for himself.  Everyone is a mixture of selfishness and kindness with the selfishness usually prevailing.  But Gideon -- immortal by adoption and enchantment, the boy the Shee had five centuries earlier lured away from his family home as a toddler, the human who knows the ways of the fairy world, the boy who craves the sort of warmth and friendship that are foreign to the superficial, pleasure-loving Shee who have adopted him -- is perhaps the saddest and most sympathetic of all the characters.

The book ends after much action, many discoveries, many revelations -- but nothing yet resolved.  Gideon returns to the icy forest, his hopes of finding a trustworthy human he could befriend apparently dashed.

"Enjoy it, Jake.  Enjoy it while you can.  The food, the warmth, the people.  Do everything, taste everything.  Enjoy your life because outside is only the cold and the dark."
...
"I won't let you go," Jake said, angry. But even as he said it, Gideon wasn't there; the frail green velvet faded from between his fingers, and he held only air.

I'm definitely hooked. I'm waiting for Book Two!
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(1-1-15) I've provided a brief review of Book Two, The Slanted Worlds, on Goodreads. Book Three, The Door in the Moon, will be published on March 24, 2015. (2-29-16) This turned out to be a quartet, rather than a trilogy. I commented on the final volume, The Speed of Darkness, on February 17, 2016.