n the year 1678, an Englishman named Joshua Wagstaffe discovered aether: a buried source of natural magical power, almost infinite in its applications. Once refined into a liquid, aether can make blades sharp, lend strength to impossible buildings, heat homes. (As aether loses its potency over time, however, it changes to engine ice, an inert substance.) Most dramatically, aether can warp living flesh. Uncanny creatures—dragons, unicorns, drays, shovel-headed pitbeasts—arise from the deft mixing of embryos and aether. But what of the inevitable human contaminations? Such cases result in trolls, fairies, witches, all disdained by Mark-sanctified normal humans. Such sports are either locked up or killed, or at best employed as useful slaves.
Nearly 300 years have passed since the discovery of aether, and that span has been divided into three distinct eras of a century apiece, eras in which the bizarre social and cultural ramifications of aether have had time to harden, ramify and exfoliate. Now the Third Age is about to end, and although change is in the air, no one—not the high and mighty guildmasters or the lowly peons called marts—knows what the Fourth Age will bring.
Into this time of tumult is born Robert Borrows, the son of a humble working parents in the town of Bracebridge, where a quarter of England's aether is produced. We will share Robert's life story in his own voice, from earliest youth through his old age, with a concentration on his fiery youth, when he works as a revolutionary to bring down the old order. But first we watch him grow up under the shadow of his strange mother, who was wounded somehow in a hushed-up aether accident before Robert was born. One pivotal day, Robert and his mother go to a neighboring town and in a ruined mansion meet with a strange woman named Mistress Summerton and her young charge, Annalise. Robert is captivated by Anna, and both dreams and the reality of her will dog his life from here on, altering his destiny. Shortly after this incident, Robert's mother succumbs to her old wound, turning troll, and Robert's ties with home are weakened. Before long, he's running away to London.
In the city of immense riches and equally vast poverty, Robert meets Saul, a petty thief who nonetheless possesses high principles concerning political change. Robert becomes a thief, too, but also a social agitator, working with Blissenhawk, the printer of the underground newspaper New Dawn. In the midst of all this, he re-encounters Anna, now a socialite, and her friends, Sadie and George. Straddling two worlds—the gaudy sphere of the aether-rich and the dirty hell of the downtrodden marts—Robert finds himself conflicted. Will he succeed in discovering the secrets that bind him and Anna? Will such secrets bring down the whole country? And which faction will Robert ultimately choose to side with?
A fantasy novel of style and substance
Ian R. MacLeod writes not copiously, but very, very well. His first book, the superb story collection Voyages by Starlight, appeared in 1996. His first novel, The Great Wheel, came out a year later. Since then, he's had the occasional magazine appearance—notably with "The Summer Isles," which won a World Fantasy Award—but no other book publication till now. But the six-year wait has been worth it. Like China Miéville's Perdido Street Station (2000), The Light Ages is a bold, subtle, elegant, stunning fantasy in the mode of Mervyn Peake, he of Gormenghast (1950) fame. Dickensian, melancholy, full of smoky vistas and moments of contrasting sunshine, MacLeod's book is simply the best fantasy novel since Miéville's Perdido, and that statement does not exclude Peridido's sequel The Scar (2002). (It's interesting to compare MacLeod's book with Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan (1995), which, although it uses a similar hook—a mysterious energy called plasm—is determinedly science-fictional.)
MacLeod's triumphs come in various ways. First of all is the depth and consistency and physicality of his creation. The 300-year-old world of aetherish England is palpably real, encrusted with hoary traditions, ancient legends (the tale of a redeemer figure known as Goldenwhite is particularly significant, for Anna's career will parallel Goldenwhite's) and odd customs. Yet strange and beautiful and resonant as all these counterfactual adornments are, they are perfectly balanced by the things in common with our world: social climbing, Oedipal longings, the allure of the big city for the rural youth. In other words, MacLeod has succeed in fusing Great Expectations (1861) or Look Homeward, Angel (1929) with Peake's exoticism, producing a book that is at once real literature and real fantasy, betraying neither tradition.
MacLeod's character portrayal is the book's next dimension of greatness. Robert Borrows is as rich and deep a figure as any in fantastical literature, from John Crowley's Smokey Barnable to Tolkien's Frodo. Every supporting character—and there are dozens—boasts, if not equal, then appropriate depths. Anna, as willful changeling, is both human and other, and the tentative love affair between her and Robert gives the book its central engine. As Robert realizes late in the tale, both he and Anna have "failed to recreate" as adults the "spells of love" they briefly sustained in their youth. And these characters move in a plot that is both leisurely and powerfully onflowing. Propelled by the central mystery of the day the aether engines stopped in Bracebridge before Robert was born, the story twists and turns into knots before suddenly transforming to a coherent tapestry whose central revelation both shocks and confirms.
But MacLeod's final, most effective conquest is achieved and delivered through sheer language. Sentence by sentence, this book is the most well-written you will have read in ages. Never clotted, yet always poetic, MacLeod's prose flows like aether, bewitching, transformative and seductive. Here, style truly supports content, and vice versa.
