Titan Books, 2020, 389 p. Published in Interzone 288, Jul-Aug 2020.

Workaholic Nina Scaife has not taken a break from her job as a producer on a north of England TV news programme for five years. Now, her partner Rob Fisher having left her for another woman (and the two kids they’ve had,) she is accompanying her young teenaged daughter, Laurie, to Hope Island off the coast of Maine – where Nina has been too busy to travel to before – to visit Tammy and Abram Fisher, Rob’s parents, to break the news to them – and Laurie. The island is isolated, with bad communications to the outside world, and internet and mobile phone coverage barely even patchy.
On the way from the ferry terminal to the Fishers’ house Nina has to brake suddenly to avoid hitting a young girl on the road. This disorienting experience sets a tone of mild unease for the narrative, which, however, hovers below the edge of manifesting into something greater for well over half the book before it finally tips over into the weird.

Nina feels unsettled by Tammy who she thinks disapproves of her because of her atheism and also for never marrying Rob. Abram seems a detached presence, possibly descending into dementia. The Fishers’ bond with Laurie is strong though, but that between Laurie and Nina is fraught. Laurie’s teenage discontents, her wrong-footings of Nina, are well portrayed.

Tammy introduces Nina to a sort of commune known as the Sanctuary, run by a group known as the Siblings at the other end of the island. One of its members, Clay, is carrying out experiments into sound but also into silence using noise dampening headphones and a recorder. As part of his demonstration he takes Nina into a shell midden, a cavern inside a hill where no shells should be, where she has a strange experience with a sound that at first she perceives as the wind through the entrance passage but then feels as if it comes from everywhere. After this she tends to carry the headphones around with her but also experiences dreams of floating.

Due to her previous visits to the island with Rob, Laurie has an affinity with the local children – especially the oldest, Thomas, whose mother Marie has a young baby who wails incessantly and claws at his mother’s neck constantly, drawing blood, but, to Nina, Thomas can appear distant, as if his awareness is elsewhere. He also manifests a tic of rubbing at his ears, something Abram too does in his absent-minded moments.

Gradually, sound becomes a recurring motif. In what seems an innocent exchange Tammy tells Nina, “‘Everybody’s got a voice inside them,’” a voice telling them what’s going on in the outside world and also what’s inside themselves. Nina begins to feel everyone is shouting.

When a man called Si Michaud finds the body of Lukas Weber on the beach, skull caved in, the novel seems as if it might change tack into the crime investigation genre as Nina tries to find out who the murderer was. Nina takes Abram to the cliff above where the body was found, where he lets out a wordless howl to shut out the voices in his ear. Later Abram too becomes a murder victim and the islanders behave oddly at the gathering to mourn him.

Nina’s suspicions soon fall on the children. To this end she alienates the islands’ parents after she reasons some of the children have tried to kill her. Tracking down May and Noah Hutchinson she finds them almost feral and apparently terrorising their mother and father. All this gets trammelled up in Nina’s mind along with the implications of Tammy’s paintings of a man falling off a cliff. She wonders if she can trust anyone, even Laurie.

It is to Major’s credit that, despite the nagging familiarity of the situation, the necessity of isolation, the lack of communications, to the story, there is still an impetus to keep turning the pages, but how it all hangs together, the importance of sound and of the shell midden, are revealed in something of a rush. Suffice to say the explanation is not down to Earth but it does come as a bit of a deus ex machina.

Nevertheless, Major writes well, character and relationships are handled deftly, but the realistic register of the parts of the book which deal with these aspects feel as if they come from another novel entirely compared to the fantastical flourishes which are in store in its climax.

The following did not appear in the published review:-

There is overuse of a metaphor relating to white blood cells.

Pedant’s corner:- English coins (that would be British coins.) “At the crescendo of their performance” (At the climax of their performance,) fit (fitted,) “the fishmongers” (I’ve read that they don’t have such retail specialists in the US. And would a small-ish island have one anyway?) “beneath that were a series of decorated shells” (beneath that was a series of,) “lying prone” (this was while she was gazing up at the sky. Difficult to do when face down.) “The crowd were becoming restless again” (The crowd was becoming restless,) “his voice rising to a crescendo” (to a climax.) “It was around a metre across and sixty centimetres.” (sixty centimetres tall?) crenulations (crenellations,) shrunk (shrank,) sunk (x 2, sank,) “was last thing she wanted” (was the last thing,) snuck (sneaked.) “None of the adults were concerned” (None of the adults was concerned,) “as she swum” (as she swam,) sprung (sprang.)

Sep-Oct 2020, TTA Press

This issue’s Editorial is by Alexander Glass who reflects on the human need to define things, especially as regards gender, and contrasts two different approaches to this as found in Science Fiction. Andy Hedgecock’s Future Interrupted^a considers the failings of education systems to teach outside narrow parameters and SF’s almost complete recent failure to examine education at all by mention of novels that, in the past, did. In Climbing Stories Aliya Whiteley^b ponders the strange disjunction between these coronavirus times and SF futures, the necessary waiting involved before resolution, waiting that writers are habitually accustomed to. Book Zone again follows the film reviews and features an interview with M John Harrison plus a review of his new novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by Andy Hedgecock^c (who says the novel quietly, but surely, slips the bounds of literary realism, sf and fantasy and transcends the limitations of all three,) my guardedly welcoming take on Tim Major’s Hope Island, Duncan Lawie delights in Ken MacLeod’s mix of summer romance with Scottish folklore, Selkie Summer, Maureen Kincaid Speller^d says the buzz about The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez is justified, while Stephen Theaker^e gets a bite at three cherries – Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Firewalkers (not ground-breaking but a solid story,) Andres Eschbach’s The Hair-Carpet Weavers (a retitling of The Carpet Weavers published in 2005) and, despite flaws, very good, plus R B Lemberg’s decent but not outstanding The Four Profound Weaves – Graham Sleight finds William Gibson’s Agency terrific fun but at the moment suffers from being written pre-Covid. Finally things are rounded off with Barbara Melville^f interviewing Agnes Gomillion.

In the fiction:-
Told as in an interrogation transcript Time’s Own Gravity by Alexander Glass¹ postulates that time and energy are interconvertible – though it’s harder to do than with energy and matter. A man called Lukasz, of mysterious origins, developed (or brought with him) the Technology involved but something went wrong and emanations speeding time up locally are occurring with increasing frequency.

Soaring, the World on their Shoulders by Cécile Cristofari² is set in an alternate steam-powered France (there is mention of Marseilles and Spain) in the time of its tipping over into a brand of fascism. (“You know, what they say makes a lot of sense. Our country will be great again.”) Madame Santucci is a scientist who despises the regime and then herself for complying with it. Her research is double-edged though.

A Distant Hum by John K Peck³ is one of those stories that never quite explains itself and of which Interzone is relatively fond. It’s set in a city by an archipelago in a familiar demi-monde milieu where our female protagonist has memories to exorcise and revenge to take.

The Captured Dreams of the Dead Machine of Daniel Bennett’s story are old computer files from before the great information plague now worth a great deal to collectors. In this society, however, tech – of any sort – is not a universally accepted boon.
Warsuit by Gary Gibson⁴ sees a battlefield scavenger find the powered down suit of the title on one of his expeditions. It is operated by a downloaded human intelligence and they come to an accommodation.

Pedant’s corner:- ^afocussed (focused,) “Larrry Niven’s” (Larry,) “the population … are exposed to” (the population .. is exposed to,) Sf (SF.) ^b“This inability to see what’s coming next be considered ironic” (might be considered ironic.) “Six weeks or so separates us” (Six weeks …. separate us.) ^c“returns to finds the business suddenly closed” (returns to find.) ^dJimenez’ (Jimenez’s.) ^e“the centre of a ever expanding desert” (an,) “Nen-Sasaïr agrees to come with.” (Nen-Sasaïr agrees to come with her.) ^fDouglass’ (Douglass’s,)
¹“‘if you stay to close to it’” (too close) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. ²“filled to burst” (filled to bursting.) “A second person hauls themselves into the nest” (that pronoun should surely not be plural.) ³Written in Usian, “These [lighthouse foghorns] were unique to the region, in that they each used a distinctly different sound, so that an experienced captain could not only avoid foundering on the rocks, but could use the varied tones as navigational guides.” (Not unique: all lighthouse foghorns were like this,) “none of them were …” (none of them was.) ⁴“They span ever faster” (spun.)

Interzone 288 is out now. (It arrived on my doorstep this morning.)

This is the one which contains my review of Tim Major’s Hope Island.

Along with many other goodies of course.

My latest book to review for Interzone will be Hope Island by Tim Major.

I read his previous novel Snakeskins earlier this year.

I must admit to being surprised when the book fell on the doormat this morning. The list of possible review books for Iz 288 was only sent out a couple of days ago. I’ll get onto it as soon as possible.