What do You think about The Light Ages (2005)?
An exquisitely realized alternative world evocative of Dickens, both his world and his work. Robbie Borrows is the son of guildsmen, workers positioned somewhere in the lower third of a stratified society built on magic assisted technology in an England frozen in the early industrial age. Starting in his early childhood, he escapes his programmed life and has periodic contact with Annalise, a changeling who freely moves in and out of the social structures of the time. At times tragic, but never compelling, the plot plods along in a typical Victorian style, leaving the reader struggling to identify and root for the hero. I wanted to love this book, but wonderful prose isn't enough--I need motivation, action, passion.
—Janet Martin
Originally published on my blog here in April 2004.The small number of books that I would consider my favourite serious fantasy novels (E.R. Eddison's Mistress of Mistresses, Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time series, Jack Vance's Lyonesse, John Crowley's Little, Big) share one important quality - atmosphere. There are other novels with similar power that I don't actually like very much, notably China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, and at least one series that I suspect would join the list if I got round to reading it, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Now The Light Ages has to join the list; it will surely also establish itself as one of the classics of the genre.The setting of The Light Ages is an alternative industrial England, a place where the essence of magic, a mineral named aether, is mined alongside iron and coal. It is the story of a man born in a Yorkshire town which is a centre of aether mining, and how he travels to London and becomes part of a train of events which threaten the power of the Guildsmen who are the magnates of the Age, the Third Age of Industry that many think is coming to its end.This background is itself enough to make The Light Ages stand out as an original fantasy novel. Alternate histories are almost always fit better into the science fiction genre than fantasy, with a special version of the "What if..." question that is the core of the genre. It is almost commonplace to ask questions like "What might have happened if Nazi Germany and Japan had wone the Second World War?" (Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle) or "What might England be like if the Reformation had never happened?" (Keith Roberts' Pavane). But almost always these are straight extrapolations from the science and technology of the time, without the extra magical dimension used here. Where magic is interpolated into the real world, or a background as clearly related to the real world, it tends to be at the fringes, "beyond the fields we know" or in an unseen world underpinning the everyday, as in Neil Gaiman's novels. The Light Ages is pretty much unique as an alternate history which seriously looks at how things might be different if magic is real. (The only novel I can think of comparable in terms of the use of magic in an alternative reality is The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - a children's classic in the genre.) The Light Ages is also one of only a small number of fantasy novels in which magic is an industrial raw material used in processes which produce pollution. (Saruman's industrialisation in The Lord of the Rings is easily the best known example, though there and in The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant it is the misuse of magic which pollutes. Holly Lisle has also set her novels in a world contaminated by fallout from an ancient war between wizards.)The England portrayed in The Light Ages is very much the polluted, industrial and worker-exploiting England of the Victorian era, Dickensian in inspiration though MacLeod is able to be more explicit in his depiction of squalor than Dickens ever did. While the quality of his evocation in places approaches Dickens, its attention to the industrial poor and radical politics is more akin to the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell. This fantasy novel is one of the best ever written, and any reader of the genre would be well advised to pick it up. They may find that it's too slow for their tastes, but I just found it magical.
—Simon Mcleish
If this book had been a movie, I can imagine that the pitch session would have gone like this: Writer: Think: Great Expectations meets Germinal! Producer: Germa-what? Writer: It's this French novel by … Producer: Nobody's gonna wanna watch a French story. What are you? Crazy?Writer: But with magic, you know, like Harry Potter! But it'll take place in the Victorian century, and instead of coal we'll have this magic called aether, and instead of coal pits, we'll have aether pits. Producer: Now, you're talkin'. Writer: So, we have this kid right, and he meets this old lady, like Miss Havisham…Producer: Does this have monsters? Kids love monsters. Writer: And Miss Havisham is a monster, cause of the aether. Only she doesn't look like one. Producer: And it's gotta have sex too. Writer: Well, this Miss Havisham character brings up this little girl, Annalise, who's also a monster. But pretty. Producer: Awww, no monster sex. That's way too weird. Writer: But then, even though the kid falls in love with her, she wants nothing to do with him, see. Just like Great Expectations.Producer: Okay, I think we can sell that. Star-crossed lovers! Boy loves girl monster! Any violence? We gonna need some violence. Writer: Yeah, that's where the Germi…errr…yeah, there're going to be riots cause the people are fed up of being crushed by the rich. And the boy will grow up to be this radical revolutionary. And there'll be this big scene where this bell-tower comes crashing down. And lots of fire and explosions. And dragons! And unicorns! Just like Harry Potter! Producer: Oh excellent! Gimme a script tomorrow! The sad thing is that there are some great scenes: Robbie's mother slowly turning into a troll due to overexposure to aether, the ball when Robbie meets Annalise for the first time as an adult, the bell-tower crashing down on Robbie and Annalise… For these, I give it three stars. But not more than three. Because these individual scenes don't gel into a compelling enough vision of an aetherised England. It's not enough to just write a story about the Victorian age, and then instead of "coal" write "aether" and instead of "coal pits" write "aether pits", and pretty much leave everything else the same. When Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, she had it set in 1800's England at war with Napoleonic France. The rendering of the culture and society was sufficiently similar to be recognizable. But the magic was woven in with such loving detail that it made that world subtly, weirdly, magically and compellingly different. This is not what happens here: yes, this is an age powered by some exotic-sounding type substance but of that substance, of that magic, little more than a slapped-on name and some superficial descriptions of shimmering threads. So, you see, that's pretty much the problem. You can take the idea of an age powered by magic, you can take ideas from history, but ultimately it still has to fuse together into a living, breathing whole. Otherwise, all it is is an Aetherpiltdown Man: an awkward dead construction cobbled together unconvincingly from various disparate parts.
—Whitaker
