Schiaparelli's Theosophical Sandwich Shop

Forteana-fuelled steampunk frolic through the play-pits of Wells and Verne with this first entry into the Blackwood and Harrington Mysteries. Similar to Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series or Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, author Alan K. Baker crafts his alternate history London from a patchwork of obscure Victorian sources: Vril Energy, Andrew Crosse and the Spring Heel Jack sightings rub shoulders with a bureaucratic version of the Martians from War of the Worlds; Madame Blavatsky's Akashic Records are wittily reimagined as a proto-internet supervised by the Cottingley Fairies. Esoteric weirdness is drawn from other eras, too: Indrid Cold and the Comte de Saint Germain play important roles; the Knights Templar serve as the Metropolitan Police; more besides. Clever as some of this is, there is both too much going on and not enough. Baker creates a detailed, complex backdrop but doesn't charge the book with sufficient dynamic to bring it all to life. The occult Victoriana moves too swiftly into high magic and fairies before volte-facing into a pulp space opera; the villains are a boastful Bond blowhard and his remorseless killer, a pair who create little sense of danger despite all the carnage they wreak. The brief mentions of a Lovecraftian outer darkness of illimitable madness and horror are mere hints here. The plot is reasonable (similar to the unloved film version of LoEG) and the lead characters of Thomas Blackwood and Lady Sofia Harrington are fine, but it's all spread too thinly, the mystery becoming melodrama far too soon, the whole somehow lacking.
Still, it was pleasantly diverting as an audiobook, benefiting enormously from having the superb Michael Maloney on narration duties (due a bonus for soldiering on manfully through the trilling and interminable Martian conference scene where many a lesser narrator would have lost the will to live).
It sounds like I've damned this with faint praise but it was fun and with enough good ideas that I would give the next installment a listen; hopefully the parts click into place there.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!