The Time Wreccas
by Val Tyler
Published on September 21st
Beneath the placid surface of Greenwich Park brews a crisis that may have cataclysmic consequences for the world. Greenwich is home to Tid and his grandfather, Old Father Tim, the most senior of the mysterious Guardians whose job is to regulate and protect the workings of time. Father Tim has just completed the Tick, a vital part of the Timepiece that will ensure that time continues to run smoothly over the next millennium. All seems well, but it wouldn't be Greenwich if someone wasn't around to provide a Mean Time, and here this role is supplied by the troglodytic Wreccas.
The Wreccas are an unpleasant, dirty, and ill-spirited race, nine parts Yahoo to one part Womble, who inhabit a network of tunnels under the Park, and survive by scavenging food and drink from the Topside (the surface world). Like their other literary ancestors, Wells's Morlocks, they also have a nasty habit of stealing time machines and hiding them underground, and at the start of this book one of their number, the young female Wrecca, Snot, is forced to trick Tid into showing her where the Tick is kept, with just this in mind. The Wreccas duly steal the device, and thus begins a race both against time and for it: for if the Tick cannot be recovered by the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, time itself will grind to a halt.
The idea behind this book is a potentially fascinating one, and Snot, who emerges as the story's heroine, is sympathetically portrayed as she deals with her divided sense of herself as both Wrecca and (potential) Guardian. Unfortunately she is the only figure in the book who engaged my interest. In general the Wreccas are too relentlessly stupid and selfish to provide more than some isolated moments of comic relief. Their counterparts, the Guardians, are well-meaning but pompous and ineffectual, with very little of the numinous about them, nor is the threat to the world communicated with anything like the obliterating terror it deserves.
Even young Tid, who is shaping up at the beginning of the book to be Snot's co-protagonist, spends most of the last hundred pages off-stage, a strangely undeveloped figure. The sense that this is a world that has not been fully realised may derive in part from its being but the first of the Greenwich Chronicles, and no doubt much will be revealed in later volumes, but this was a frustrating read in many respects. In particular I wanted to know more about the relationship between the Wrecca/Guardian world and the world of human beings - or rather, I wanted there to be a relationship, for as things stand most of this book might as well be set on the moon.
Both Wreccas and Guardians are invisible to humans, who are glimpsed only intermittently, as oblivious figures walking about Greenwich Park. This seems a wasted opportunity, as well as raising practical difficulties. Why have humans never discovered the vast network of Wrecca tunnels, for example? How do the Guardians manage to maintain a society that involves not just isolated houses but even schools in the middle of a crowded city such as London, without finding their buildings continually and distractingly interpenetrating human-built ones? Answers to these questions might easily be provided, but as things stand they are a distraction in themselves.
Buy this book from Amazon UK