British performance poet Tim Clare's debut novel, The Honours, creates a realistic, historically recognisable world – England on the cusp of the Second World War – and then has that world invaded by the fantastical and the horrific. It is a novel caught between world wars, essentially about war, that also happens to feature giant, murderous bat creatures and kindly beetle beings called Little Gentlemen.
It's as though Downton Abbey had been invaded by minotaur-like creatures, had been defended by a 13-year-old heroine with a sawn-off shotgun and, eventually, exposed to the sort of grisly, otherworldly horror that would make Stephen King or H P Lovecraft proud.
Clare is a serious writer. There is an evocative, poetic realism to his fantasy that fans of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy or Game of Thrones might appreciate – no matter how crazy things get, and they do get crazy, Clare writes as if he is reporting from history.
The Honours takes place in 1935, at Alderberen Hall in Norfolk, England. Many of the characters we meet have been scarred directly or indirectly by the Great War. They have come to be healed.
Meanwhile, Delphine Venner, our protagonist, spends a good deal of her time imagining herself in the same trenches that surely contributed to the mental decline of her beloved father, a painter who has taken his family to Alderberen Hall so that he can recover from a massive breakdown: “She was running through no-man’s-land at midnight; to the east and west, Vickers guns and MG08s cackled and spat. If she flagged for an instant, thousands of rounds would shred her legs. The thought relaxed her.”
It's a peculiar fantasy for a 13-year-old girl, but then Delphine isn't your typical 13-year-old girl, and therein lies both a strength and the primary weakness of The Honours.
Delphine is a robust creation. She’s upper-class but nearly feral, roaming Alderberen Hall searching for Bolshevik plots and training herself in the use of firearms. She’s fiercely curious, strident, mouthy and disrespectful to authority. Of course, she antagonises many of the adults she comes in contact with. (Tellingly, Delphine’s “insolence and enterprise” greatly impresses the novel’s mysterious, immortal antagonist.)
The Honours rests nearly entirely on her shoulders. We follow Delphine from her expulsion from school to her arrival at Aldeberen Hall, where she discovers the key that begins opening the doors to a plot which, until the last possible moment, she charmingly believes involves some kind of Bolshevik invasion of England. She trusts nobody and nobody really takes her seriously. Alderberen Hall is honeycombed with tunnels, false walls and secrets, and nothing is initially as it seems. Bolsheviks are the least of Delphine's worries. Indeed, war is coming, but not the one that she or the reader expects.
That said, you can also see why she bothers the adults around her so much. Delphine can be a touch overpowering – and the chapters of the novel not told from her point of view were welcome and refreshing. I felt that more such adult detours would have made the novel richer – especially since so many of the secondary characters were so interesting. There were only so many times I wanted to follow Delphine into a dark tunnel.
The second half of The Honours presents us with a lot of dark tunnels, and maybe a bit too much action for my tastes, but it also leads to a strange, moving and unexpected conclusion that seemed far more like a beginning. I hope that it is. The final line of the novel perfectly hits its mark, and it feels like we've only just scratched the surface on Clare's new world and Delphine's dark adventure within it.
This book is available on Amazon.
Tod Wodicka lives in Berlin. His second novel, The Household Spirit, will be published by Jonathan Cape in June.
thereview@thenational.ae
