The West Passage

Summary

In the cold, dusty confines of Grey Tower, where few remain, the last Guardian has died, and with her last breath charged her young apprentice with a message: "Tell Black it's coming." As unexpected winter sets in on the Grey district, the newly-named Mother has also set out to ask a question of the Black Lady who leads the palace. Can either of them reach their goal before the fabled Beast emerges?

Review

I’ve read a number of books that follow in the footsteps of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Few do so successfully. Alex Pheby’s Mordew made a good effort, but got a little carried away with itself. This book does much better. As with Mordew, it carves out a home in the Gormenghast neighbourhood without actually trying to be Gormenghast.

Pechaček’s decaying, overgrown palace is confusing, filled with obscure ritual, and shows us the misery of the underlings (and sometimes the leaders) of the realm, ground down by obeisance to tradition. It goes a step further in inserting a cast seemingly drawn from a Bosch painting, but treated as absolutely normal (and, in fact, charming). The result is excellent – a rich, hyper-gothic tableau of slow, epic adventure undertaken by confused but noble actors, all against a carefully revealed ancient tragedy, with dryly humorous asides. I loved it.

Where I think Pechaček goes wrong is in focusing so much on the enticing visual imagery – one clever oddity after another – rather than story. The characters spend most of the book trying to get one place or another, and it often began to feel more like a travelogue than a narrative – look at this! And this! And now this! Aren’t they intriguing and grotesque? They are, but to my mind scenery is in aid of story, not in place of it. It’s almost immediately clear that the author has a broad, slant-wise imagination; we don’t need to see proof after proof after proof. The imagery doesn’t fit or work as well, for example, as the vocabulary, which is rich and varied, but generally doesn’t feel like the author is putting it on display (as opposed to choosing just the right and fitting word for the occasion).

The interior art, by the author, is not to my usual taste, but is excellent for the purpose, and genuinely adds another dimension. I’m not sure why Tor felt the need for a different cover artist.

To be fair, Pechaček does land the story pretty well. Early on, I had concerns, but as the book progressed, I grew more and more confident that he would treat the reader well, and he does. There could have been a touch more clarity on one of the two endings, but overall, it reads well, left me satisfied, and left me a definite Pechaček fan. Here’s hoping that for his next book, he does something equally interesting, but very, very different.

One more caveat, I suppose – as with Gormenghast, I found the geography of the palace impossible to unravel, and not a match for either of the maps that is provided.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.