Of Myth and Shadow

I feel like I’ve lived in Aegaan. (For a while, I thought I might die there). This is an absorbing book whose characters get inside your head and steal a bit of your soul. Mind you, they have time to do so. This is the longest book I’ve ever read. Having started it, I did feel compelled to finish, but I also felt an irrational resentment as if I’d been taken hostage. If I’d bought it as a physical book, I’d probably have noticed that it needed its own suitcase, and I’d have known what I was letting myself in for. With an e-book – gifted kindly by Blackthorn Book Tours in exchange for an honest review - the size isn’t immediately apparent… And it got its claws into me before I had time to realise.

It’s a great book, in its own way – fair do’s, it must have taken a lot of writing, and every page is full of Matthew Cox’s trademark qualities as a writer – beautiful fluid prose, good dialogue, wonderfully defined characters, world class world-building, great story telling. A less confident writer (like JK Rowling or Tolkein maybe?) wouldn’t have dared this project – they’d have taken each of the strands and done each as a separate book, making it a series. (Aah, perhaps there is a parallel universe in which JK Rowling and Tolkein are both one-book wonders… one very long book each…)

There is a beauty in the unity of this novel – and it is a unity, a single story, no matter how many paths it takes in getting to its conclusion. Perhaps it was this that drove him to do it in this way, to preserve the integrity of his vision - in which case credit to him for taking the risk. All the same, even in a summer of Covid, with half the world off work, locked down, and looking for escape, I’m not sure that there is space in readers’ lives for a book this long. If that’s right, it’s a shame – Aegaan’s a great place and deserves the tourists.