Raw Talent, Ramshackle Structure

A rich, gothic fantasy about Wull and his father who keep the river free from ice in the winter but whose lives are overturned by the arrival upstream of a mormorach, a huge, magical creature that causes all sorts of other long-dormant magic to awaken, including the terrible bohdan which takes possession of Wull's father.

Stewart's writing positively seethes with raw talent and imaginative power but his structure is slightly ramshackle. He has a tendency to move the plot on by generating an endless supply of lavishly grotesque characters. They are great fun but it's not always clear why they are in the story.

As a result the narrative ends up littered with loose ends and abandoned sub-plots so that in the end you are left wondering what it was all about. Nonetheless, Riverkeep is a remarkable debut and heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in children's fantasy.

A Little Knowledge

The Ballroom is set at the beginning of the twentieth century in a huge lunatic asylum near Manchester, the centre-piece of which is a ballroom where weekly dances are attended by the normally segregated female and male patients.

At the heart of the story are four strongly-drawn characters: Ella, the factory worker committed for breaking a window, John the Irish labourer recovering from a breakdown after the collapse of his marriage, Clem an educated young woman who refuses to accept her father's choice of husband, and Charles, the second-rate doctor fascinated by the newly-popular ideas of the eugenic movement.

A study in the abuse of power, The Ballroom examines the consequences of poorly understood scientific thinking , in this case the extension of evolutionary theory to ideas about race, class and mental illness, and, in particular, the ideas behind the eugenics movement.

Eugenics ultimately gave birth to the horrors of Nazism, but in its early days it was supported by influential people on the right and left of the political spectrum including, in Britain, the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, whom ambitious Charles hopes to impress with his plans for a programme of compulsory sterilization for the feeble-minded.

Lyrical writing, a compelling emotional narrative and a nail-biting plot make for a novel that functions on a number of different levels and afterwards lingers powerfully in the reader's mind like a warning from history.

Set partly in the late eighteen seventies and partly in the early nineteen twenties, The Shadow Hour is the story of two governesses, grandmother Harriet and grand-daughter Grace, whose lives become inextricably bound up with those of the family whose children they are engaged to teach.

The plot is complex and, frankly, rather contrived, being dependent on coincidences and on an inherited gift of clairvoyance that Harriet and Grace refer to as the 'glimmers'. Moreover, it takes a long time to unfold and I grew impatient, feeling the pacing could have been better managed.

What gives the book its strength, however, is the atmospheric quality of Riordan's writing. She is particularly good at period detail and at telling sense-impressions. I loved this description of a railway carriage:

Taking a seat in first class, he breathed in the familiar scent of a carriage on a fine spring morning. They smelt different according to the weather and season. Warmed dust, shaving soap and a hint of varnish on dry days; mackintosh wax and damp wool on wet ones. Winter after a downpour was least pleasant, stale smoke and sour breath turning the tightly closed windows opaque.

Readers who enjoy recycling the tropes of governess fiction - an old house, ageing servants, family secrets and and plucky but dis-empowered heroine - will love this. Others must content themselves with the very considerable flashes of talent in those descriptive passages.

Convinced that the world is going to be destroyed in some apocalyptic scenario, eight-year-old Peggy's father takes her to a forest wilderness in Bavaria where he convinces her that they are the last two people left alive.

For the next nine years their life is one of bare subsistence - growing vegetables, trapping small animals, eating acorns . Without sufficient clothing or tools, they soon turn into half-wild creatures themselves, descending eventually into outright madness that ends in terrible violence.

This is a story of psychological and physical abuse and the victim is a child. Consequently, I found it extremely hard going. Moreover, the way the book was written contributed to the difficulty. There's a great deal of jumping about between the past and the present for what seemed to me to be little significant gain in terms of narrative force. There is also a good deal of extended description of nature which I strongly suspect the author enjoyed a good deal more than I did.

A powerful novel with a compelling premise, Our Endless Numbered Days is a tremendously brave piece of writing - but it's not for the squeamish. I was mightily relieved when I reached the end.