check out website: www.earthlight.co.uk The book begins with an anonymous 'grandmaster' walking through a festering industrial London to meet a 'changeling who calls herself Niana'. The story then skips to a boy on his 'Day of Testing' - an endurance test with oath that all people must undergo in MacLeod's grim England - whereupon you are left with the 'stigmata' or 'Mark' that permits you to work for a 'guild'. The boy and protagonist is Robert Borrows.  Robert and his family live in Bracebridge, a town grown up about the industrial need for aether, a mystical 'fifth element' that powers machinery and holds together the fabric of manufactured goods, including bridges and buildings. As Robert says: ‘With aether, this world turns on the slow dark eddies of Ages beyond conflict and war. Without it - but the very thought was impossible...’ It is not, however, some clean and perfect product - Bracebridge is constantly rocked by the booming of the aether engines and the town and environs are both heavily polluted by its processing there. Exposure to aether causes mutations, too, not just in children but adults and with devastating results. ‘[The] fear was always there that an excess of aether might take hold of you and heal the Mark on your wrist. From there, your fate was terrible. You would become a troll, a changeling... the trollman would come in a dark green van to bear you off to Northallerton, that legendary asylum, where you would be used and tended for the rest of your life.’ The book is split into six parts, each an important division of Robert's life and his developing dissatisfaction with England's archaic social structure. Following his mother's gruesome demise at an impressionable age, Robert flees to London in an attempt to unravel himself from his past and perhaps remove the burden of 'England's great human pyramid'. ‘Mawdingly & Clawtson was a name, a sound, a feeling, an edifice. Industry was our purpose. Aether was our god. It was as if we were all trying to turn our eyes from something vital and lay our heads on the pounding earth, lulling ourselves into a sleep which would last a lifetime of endless duty and disappointment.’ While in London, Robert hooks up with revolutionaries and develops some unsavoury habits before encountering an enchanting girl he met in unusual circumstances shortly before his mother's death. With her arrival, a window of opportunity opens and a fast-paced magical tour of the opulent high-guild lifestyle ensues. To say that 'The Light Ages' is a coming-of-age novel would be an understatement (as well as a terrible pun). On a fantasy level, it couldn't be further removed from Tolkien. It does have dragons and unicorns, magic and spells and fairy-tale princesses but here they are anti-establishment symbols or abused playthings of the high-guilded bourgeoisie. The book is grim, filthy, intelligent, political and rarely fun, although there are a few light-hearted moments and the occasional rapier flash of pitch-dark satire. It is Dickens meets Marx and an 'Angry Young Man', brimming with mystery, intrigue and poetic flair. I expect many readers will hate this book for the very same reasons I loved it - an unlikeable cast of characters and the author's determination to tell you the unabridged tale of Robert Borrows', whether you enjoy certain aspects or not. With this uncompromising attitude, MacLeod has successfully created a man and England so vivid in detail, it is sometimes difficult whilst reading to remember that neither is genuinely historical. I hope he writes more set in this absorbing, complicated world as I feel there is still a huge amount left to be explored. Lucy A.E. Ward www.littlebehemoth.com |
