Verdigris Deep
by Frances Hardinge
Fans of Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge's prize-winning and much-praised debut novel will be puzzled by her second. It is almost completely different from that exuberant, untidy evocation of an alternative 18th century London complete with floating coffee houses.
Verdigris Deep begins in deliberately grimy and gritty reality with three children running to catch a bus in the rain; they miss it and it looks as if they might be stranded in squalid Magwhite, with its minimart and chip shop, an "almost-place" that is "almost countryside" and "almost a village." Hardinge uses her considerable powers of description to conjure up a dismal setting, as far removed from coventional fantasy as possible.
But wait, what is this? Josh, Ryan and Chelle have spent their spare money on milkshakes and their return tickets will not work on the next bus (you can see PLOT DEVICE writ large here).
So Josh scrambles down into a nearby overgrown wishing well and takes enough coins from it to buy new tickets for them all, thus releasing the incovenient powers of ungranted wishes into their lives. The wishes which the three find themselves granting are as mundane as the setting - a nerdy youth wants a Harley-Davidson, a moony secretary wants to be special to her boss, a failed middle-aged actor wants a part in a West End play.
It is as if Hardinge has taken a bit of Orwell, another of Betjeman and stirred it with a dirty lolly-stick to create a sad and sleazy ambience, peopled with sad '50s sitcom characters. But there is a powerful imagination at work here and it gradually ratchets up the situation until we are in a kind of Diana Wynne Jones-type vortex of plot climax.
Ryan, the sensitive one, develops wartlike growths on his hands, which turn into a second pair of eyes (uncannily like the ones the monster has in Pan's Labyrinth). With these he can see the manifestations of the spirit of the well. She is after Josh, who has become a creature of unpredictable malice. Shopping trolleys turn evil, machines in Ryan's house explode, a flood rises and a nice smiley young woman like someone in a '30s detective story is trapped by a giant, malevolent hedge ...
This chaotic, undisciplined fantasy imagination is Hardinge's great strength and I wish she had got into her stride sooner with this book. The relentless ordinariness of the setting and the daft title (not, I suspect, hers) will put off many readers and that is a shame. Because if they persisted they would find themselves caught up in the same kind of baroque, nay rococo, storytelling that characterised the first book. It will be interesting to see what she does next.
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