Now I’ve finished the latest draft of my novel (and hopefully any further revisions will be relatively minor rather than the major changes I made this time) I can get back to blogging, and to start with, here’s a belated review of The Brakespeare Voyage (ebook here).

This is an odd book for me to review, in that I had — sort of — read it before I ever read it. Simon Bucher-Jones, one of the two co-authors, told me the basic story outline several years ago, and last year he sent me a late draft of the book so we could coordinate stories a little — there is something set up in this book that will resonate a little with my own next book (which will be published by the same publisher, so take this as my declaration of interest).

So when I actually read it, as an actual proper book, there was a strange feeling of deja vu — but then, that’s appropriate for a book like this, which is resolutely non-linear in its structure, and which is built on a dense network of allusions both to other books and to earlier and later events in the novel’s own timeline.

The book is, in essence, the story of a whaling ship, and as such all through it there are resonances with other nautical stories — the Jonahs (whalers who believe their own ship is also a whale), Captain No-One, one strand of the story starting “Call me Nebaioth” (Nebaioth being the son of the Biblical Ishmael) — but this is no ordinary whaling ship, being instead a ship that sails the void between brane universes.

Captaining it — at least in one version of reality — is Robert Scarratt, a figure who will be familiar to readers of The Book Of The War. Both Bucher-Jones and Dennis contributed to that book, and so it should be no surprise that this book makes more use of the Faction Paradox mythology than many of the books have up until this point. Where books like Erasing Sherlock or Warlords Of Utopia are Faction Paradox books because they have a certain atmosphere that fits with the other books, this is something that couldn’t have been done as anything else. It makes use of so much of what is established in the other Faction Paradox books that it’s impossible to conceive of it being done in any other series.

And it’s absolutely marvellous. While the basic form of the narrative is that of a nautical adventure — the kind of story that was mostly told between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries — all the elements of that style of story are given new forms and context in a story which works on the grandest scales imaginable.

Some may find the novel’s form — with multiple narratorial viewpoints intertwined (though mostly just those of Scarratt and Nebaioth), each telling only part of the story and not in chronological sequence, with some metafictional elements also thrown in — difficult, if they’re coming to this book only knowing the authors for Doctor Who spin-off fiction. But the truth is that the form merely fits the subject matter, and Faction Paradox more than any other setting seems to demand this kind of structure (there are superficial structural similarities both to Lawrence Burton’s Against Nature and to the next Faction Paradox novel, though all three books were conceived independently).

The book requires some work from the reader, but surprisingly little for such an idea-rich book. Practically every page, and certainly every chapter, contains an idea around which a lesser writer would base an entire book on its own. My own particular favourite was Hilberta’s Hostel, which I found a beautifully funny concept.

I’m really not doing justice to the book, but it’s probably the best thing that either Bucher-Jones or Dennis have written, and another sign that the Faction Paradox series is in safe hands at Obverse.

For those who are interested, Simon has posted several pieces about the evolution of the novel on his blog, where you can also read some pieces of Faction Paradox flash-fiction.