She wants nothing but to get away: “The Thames is riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, it’s 11:30 and the town’s a little model of itself, a long way behind me.” Farther down the road, Holly has her first inkling of a strange world in which “Horologists” bound up with one Yu Leon Marinus and, well, sort-of-neo-Cathars are having it out, invited into Holly’s reality thanks to a tear in her psychic fabric.
At first it’s 1984, and Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old suburban runaway, is just beginning to suss out that it’s a scary, weird place, if with no shortage of goodwilled protectors. A few dozen pages in, and Mitchell has subverted all that. Another exacting, challenging and deeply rewarding novel from logophile and time-travel master Mitchell ( Cloud Atlas, 2004, etc.).Īs this long (but not too long) tale opens, we’re in the familiar territory of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006)-Thatcher’s England, that is.
Mitchell’s latest could have been called The Rime of the Ancient Marinus-the “youthful ancient Marinus,” that is.
0 kommentar(er)
