Iโd read a lot of his stuff before, and we have mutual friends (enough for me to know his surname sounds like โMarsโ), but that didnโt help as much as Iโd expected here. Yes, I pretty much figured out the way the relationship between the shy, bereaved outsider Simon and the equally bookish Goth-chick Kelly would pan out but I was wrong-footed by everything else.
The prose-style (and the rather misleading blurb) keep you half-expecting things that donโt quite materialise. You think Kellyโs going to sprout wings next chapter and she doesnโt. The book-exchange at the core of the novel isnโt really any bigger inside and the back room doesnโt lead to adventures like in Mr Benn. At least, not that kind of adventure. Simonโs grandparents look likely to come to blows but their conflict, predictably over reading and its uses, goes in an odd direction and is resolved offstage. Simonโs gran, Winnie, has a relationship with the once-local celebrity author Ada Jones (obviously Catherine Cookson) and the flashbacks make it seem as if a Big Secret is about to be revealed, but thatโs not quite what we get either. Magrs usually combines Magic Realist malarkey with very detailed descriptions of his home town in the North East but the place-names and specifics are replaced by vagueries and the locale became more generic here.
At heart this is a book about the power of books to heal. The character with most of the wisdom to make this work is the Exchangeโs manager, Terrance (and for those mutual friends and me that spelling is significant but heโs more than an in-joke). Heโs barely in it. Instead, the characters who donโt find books, especially Adaโs books, especially valuable are all shown as part of the reason Simon and Kelly will probably leave this town soon. Thereโs a lot left unsaid in this book, and at several stages itโs almost possible to imagine the author considering where the story will go next and deciding against what he really wanted to do because thatโs exactly what we all expect. This isnโt a bad thing, as for once the restraining of his usual exuberence and jiggery-pokery is what the book needs. But if you pick up that sense that magicโs almost about to happen once every couple of chapters it can be frustrating. Iโve already told you how un-fantastical events in this book are but itโs written by someone who sees the everyday world as potentially no different from a wild tale of enchantment.
By Tat Wood