Review of Anchorwick
Anchorwick is written in a deliberately old-fashioned style (that of the early 20th century, perhaps) and it feels very English, as in England. The best compliment I can pay the author is that, despite the book having been published in 2007, the writing feels authentically old throughout. Unfortunately, he also imitates the wordiness of his inspirations: the narrator goes on a few too many paragraph-long digressions about the contents of a room, or the way someone dresses or behaves.
The plot is interesting but not intriguing, and it's too thin for the length of the book and for the slowness with which new information drips out between the cracks of overwritten sentences.
A mystery is introduced and slowly resolved, but along the way there are occasional, unexplained references to what are apparently events from two or three earlier books. These pop up rarely, but they have a way of wrenching you out of a setting that is otherwise a fairly transparent alternate-universe Cambridge, or some similar English university. The first time "mastodon trains" came up, I thought it was a funny way of referring to ordinary trains... but no: this world has mastodons as pack animals, and saber-toothed cats prowl the countryside. And at one point, more than halfway through the book, the narrator casually mentions that an asteroid struck about 150 years before the story takes place and plunged the world into some kind of little Ice Age. What?!
So it's all very strange. The mystery at the heart of the book concerns the realization that there is a spirit world, and the slow investigation of it. Yet other, equally bizarre elements crowd around the edges of the setting, intruding when the author needs them to but not, so far as I can tell, changing much. The land where the characters live is England, just not our England. Richard III and the Tudors are mentioned at one point. The characters describe themselves as Christian. The main character is a young man staying temporarily at an English-style university to help his uncle with a manuscript. He gets pulled into investigating funky supernatural stuff with his friends and family, creeping around the museum at night and all that, but he also spends time commenting on the stuffiness of the dons, encouraging his friends to cram for their first-year exams, and so on.
Some of the supernatural elements get explained in due course, as the characters investigate the central mystery. Others remain frustratingly unclear, which hurts the final chapters in particular. There's no meaningful villain, either, or at least not one still alive during the story.
As far as I can tell, there's no direct continuity between the books other than the setting itself. This seems to be the first one in which a character discovers a way to travel to the spirit world. To my knowledge, that wasn't established in the previous novels, so this book is about what these characters do with such an ability.
Ultimately, I don't think the book had enough to tell me, or to show me, to make the author's earlier books in the same universe worth my while. I have no confidence that they would contain logical throughlines that explain the unexplained. I think there would just be more fantasy, and it would be up to me to accept it as the baseline of the setting. To put it another way: the author can't decide whether he's writing about an alternate-universe England, with the emphasis on "England", or writing proper fantasy. Hence a setting that is England with the serial numbers filed off, except for the sudden injection of a handful of very alternate-universe elements. Which is it, Mr. Barlough?