The Moonlight Market - Joanne Harris ****

By Brian Clegg

There’s a popular marketing approach that involves describing a book as ‘X meets Y’ – in the case of this new urban fantasy fairy story by Joanne Harris, we’re told it’s ‘Neverwhere meets Stardust’ - and I’ve never seen such an accurate comparison. Yet Neil Gaiman need not worry: although there are strong echoes of both books here, this is never a ripoff of his work.

If you’ve only ever associated Joanne Harris with romance (perhaps in the form of her novel/film Chocolat) she may seem an unlikely author for the genre – but she has form with her excellent Gospel of Loki – and, as was the case with Neverwhere, this is a romance in its own way, underlining the difference between lust (or glamour) and love.

The similarity to Neverwhere is that the book features a London with a mysterious magical hidden side, including the secret nighttime market of the title, into which our innocent main character Tom is plunged, while the Stardust side comes with the unknown magical nature of the main character and its gradual revelation. We also get a classic fantasy setting of a location that is only visible, or not ruined in moonlight. In this case it’s Old London Bridge*, where that market takes place when the moon is out.

The central theme is of a centuries-old enmity between two groups of humanoid creatures, one moth-like, the other butterfly-based. At some point in the past the Moth king and Butterfly queen fell in love and had a child – but this child is no more with only vague echoes of his existence and the creatures have lost their kingdom, been existing in London ever since, in part thanks to the meddling of a mysterious Spider mage. All too often when a fantasy writer invokes fairytale the writing style becomes dull, but Harris avoids this and manages to make these earthbound creatures believable.

The one really irritating thing about this book is the hero, who is perhaps the least perceptive main character ever known. Not only does he repeatedly (many, many times) ignore everyone who tells him that his obsession with a character called Vanessa is both doomed and due to an illusion, he is also totally oblivious to the much more attractive sounding character who loves him. When it is finally revealed that this is the case, he bewails ‘But she hit me with a brick!’ (technically true, but it was to save his life). Has he not seen practically any romcom from Much Ado About Nothing to the present day? A bit of this sort of thing is entertaining, but it is sustained for too long.

Overall, though, a highly satisfying urban fairy tale fantasy read.

* The cover oddly seems to suggest that Old London Bridge was where Westminster Bridge is now. It wasn’t.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.