Midnight Never Come

Midnight Never Come
Marie Brennan
Orbit Books

379 pages
May 2008 (UK)
June 2008 (US)

One of my favourite periods of English history is that of the Elizabethan era (1558 - 1603). It was a time when boundaries were being pushed in theatre and poetry and literature, a time when England seemed to prosper with the Virgin Queen on the throne. Edmund Spenser named his eponymous faerie queen for her, as a tribute to her and England's glory: Gloriana...

But what if there were a real faerie queen, one that held court beneath London, a great shadow to the great light ...

Of course, in faerie fiction, having an icy queen ruling the faerie throne, while a human queen lives above, is not that unusual. A great light does cast a great shadow. Nor is having a faery story with intrigue and spying (Mark Chadbourn's Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast, for example) set in Elizabethan England really new. What sets Marie Brennan apart, then, is the quality of her writing, the complexities of her plot, the characterisations, the world-building... everything.

Midnight Never Come is woven absolutely seamlessly into the fabric of the time, not just by having characters such as John Dee, Walsingham, Lady Lune, Michael Deven and Elizabeth herself, but in the very small details that on their own are unimportant, but, through flash-backs and memories, together form an intricate and fascinating back-history. In my interview with Marie Brennan we spoke of this: I wanted a particular flashback scene to take place in the early part of the sixteenth century, but the closest annular or total solar eclipse over London was in 1547, so into 1547 the scene goes. Leeway? Not hardly.

Is it ridiculous? Of course. On the other hand, it's part of the pleasure. Being able to weave my story into the known facts without jostling any of them out of place is bizarrely fun, despite the work.

There's a rich diversity among the fae, with brownies, giants, kelpies, the Wild Hunt, Hobs, et cetera, and Marie also includes a substantial amount of mythology and folk legend (all of which is relevant to the location), including the depiction of Gog and Magog as the (really not that great!) guardian giants of London. It's so well done that I'm half convinced a lot of these events did, in fact, happen!

At it's heart, Midnight Never Come is a love story, and my instinct reaction when I heard that fact was, "Oh no. Faery sex magic." But it's not at all like that at all! (Of course.) It's a story of a time when a mortal loved a fae and the ultimate price that was paid when that love was disdained, and the effects that it had on so many people.

If I had a criticism, it would be that it's quite a slow build-up, with a scenes being set and characters fleshed out for perhaps a bit too long before the main plot takes over, but other than that, I was really impressed by Midnight Never Come. Politics, romance, fantasy, and history. With faeries. An excellent combination, and Marie Brennan is an excellent writer.

And Ashes Lie is the next book in the Onyx Court series, it's a sequel of sorts, with continuity among the faerie characters, but definitely something that a person could pick up without having read Midnight Never Come. It'll cover the period from 1640 to 1666 -- in other words, the English Civil War, the Interregnum (when they chopped the head off Charles I and drove Charles II into exile), the Restoration of the monarchy, and then the Great Plague and the Great Fire. It's an action-packed span of time; if Midnight Never Come is my Elizabethan faerie spy novel, And Ashes Lie is my Stuart faerie disaster novel.

Marie's brand new website went live yesterday, and it's full of intriguing stuff! There's also a very cool competition coming up where you can win a £250 gift voucher to spend with the book retailer of your choice and a signed copy of Midnight Never Come.

For more information:

Amazon UK
Amazon US

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