Professor Yaffle

Shadowmancer, GP Taylor

I really wanted to like this book. It sounded good, had good reviews, and indeed started off promisingly enough, as a tale of smugglers and black magic, children pitted against an evil vicar, and a mysterious object of power from Africa. However, about half way throuhg it goes all Old Testament on your ass. All types of magic, witches, tarot cards and so on are pronounced to be irredeemably evil, the devil (who turns up towads the end) claims he uses the name of earth mother to trap the unwary, and the only chance of salvation anyone has is through their acceptance of the "one true god".

The characters never become especially three dimensional: Raphah (which I never could decide how to pronounce, so that annoyed me all the way through), hot on the trail of a missing religious object from Africa spends most of his time being offended at how eighteenth century villagers react to an irritatingly sanctimonious black guy appearing in their midst. The evil vicar never seems to be consistent in his character and when dealing with the sumggler Jacon Crane there seem to be huge leaps between his intent in different scenes, without it being clear whether he's being treacherous or just confused.

The end comes suddenly, to the extent that as the number of pages left dwindled I was wondering if it would actually be left on a cliffhanger and I'd have to struggle through another book. However, no, it all ends in a rather rushed scene in Whitby, but leaving lots of things unresolved (such as the fate of the Azimuth, who Crane had sworn to help, Thomas' mother, Kate's father, or the people of Baytown whose houses have just fallen into the sea).

While he does work in some nice elements of mythology, both local Yorkshire and Eastern Christian, all it really suceeds in delivering is a plot full of holes and characters that never become more than symbols for religious allegory that's rammed home with the subtlety of a poker. I won't be bothering with any others by him.

posted by Izzy @ 4:41 pm