Rotherweird: Rotherweird Book I

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I was also aware of Caldecott, a respected QC in media law with a string of high profile cases to his name – and what appeared to be a whimsical fantasy novel seemed an unexpected direction. Intrigued by the premise and author, excited by the cover art, I had high hopes…. A fantasy trilogy might seem an unlikely venture for a distinguished QC, but Andrew Caldecott has already tried his hand at drama, and received good notices. And on closer acquaintance, there are congruences between the first episode, Rotherweird and his day job. Though it resembles the love child of Gormenghast without the rancour, and Hogwarts without the rightful heir, it diverges from the usual fantasy templates. This lends a certain haziness to the cast, despite the vivid descriptions; a quality reinforced by Caldecott’s restless, mayfly viewpoint. Frequently – though never in the spare, subtler “old history” sections, which gracefully unravel the town’s necromantic origins - I found myself yearning for more inner time with its inhabitants, particularly those caught in the story’s gnarlier moral nodes. However, whilst it is not perfect, I did enjoy Rotherweird enough to launch straight into Wyntertyde once I had finished it! Which also says something about the post-Christmas reading slump in which I often find myself in January. The third book, LostAcre, is apparently due to be released in May 2019 and, yes, I will be keeping an eye out for it. Now I know most of the characters. Intricate and crisp, witty and solemn: a book with special and dangerous properties,’ Hilary Mantel

There is something rather familiar within this strange concept. At times Lost Acre almost felt Edenic, especially as the various cages were hoisted into the mixing point by means of a handy tree. A tree of knowledge of good and evil, maybe. Perhaps that’ll happen. Rotherweird is only the start of a trilogy. Call me greedy, but I’m already itching to return to Caldecott’s universe – those crazy towers, those flawed nubs of humans, and, most of all, those entrancingly poignant, beautiful-ugly metamorphs.For beneath the enchanting surface lurks a secret so dark that it must never be rediscovered, still less reused. Rotherweird is twisted, arcane murder-mystery with shades of Deborah Harkness, Hope Mirrlees and Ben Aaronovitch, Mervyn Peake and Edward Gorey at their disturbing best. The pace of the novel also seemed a little … off. Especially in the first novel: the climax, which should have been iconic and dramatic as a range of plot threads wound together, just seemed a little rushed. A little brief. With an overly convenient invention dropped into the laps of the main characters. The company of quirky heroes are all rather passive: their most significant skills appear not to be combat or strategy but rather anagrams and crossword solving! The second book was more rounded, giving the female characters a little more space, and evened out the pace a little bit more – as well as (apparently) killing off a number of significant characters. Rotherweird holds its own secret – which is revealed pretty early on in the first novel – which explains its prohibition against studying history: it contains a portal to Lost Acre, another realm or universe or plane of existence populated by monstrous creatures and containing a “mixing point” into which animals, plants and people can be sent to be merged together into grotesque forms. A collection of four stones placed in various places on a cage seem to be able to control the process and – in the sixteenth century – the mixing point is used by the gifted children to, variously, create monstrous familiars, to punish the recalcitrant and to grant power and longevity.

In its fantastical logic, Rotherweird is always coherent, but how it speaks to the non-fantastical is often sublime. It understands history and the perils of historical amnesia. While arguing for science, it delicately distils the ethical quandaries of tinkering with Nature, summoning the spectres of agribusiness, GM foods, deforestation and species extinction with allusive, devastating simplicity: "They do many things to living things."

A twisted, arcane murder-mystery with shades of Hope Mirrlees, Ben Aaronovitch, Mervyn Peake and Edward Gorey at their disturbing best. While there is plenty to savour in this engrossing debut, some of Caldecott’s storytelling choices come at a cost. Occasionally, whimsy threatens to overwhelm – we’re told punning is one character’s forte, but actually it’s an occupational hazard for all Rotherweirders. Similarly, when we might expect anagram fiend Marmon Finch to solve a central mystery, it’s another character who does. But what of the bigger picture? If what happened 400 years ago was not magic but science, and that science is still horribly functional, is the rest of Elizabethan cosmology still the Standard Model in Rotherweird’s reality? (There must be some strange goings-on, in that particle physics lab in the North Tower!) The possibilities are intriguing. Unlike Hogwarts magic, science is not an isolated area. The changing Standard Model of what science is shapes the way we see the world. What other realities, that we have never imagined, populate the Rotherweird continuum? Maybe we’ll find out next time. For beneath the enchanting surface lurks a secret so dark that it mustneverbe rediscovered, still less reused.