By Alex Bell
Shortly after her husband, Liam, dies unexpectedly, strange things start happening around Jasmyn Gracey. Dead swans fall from the sky at his funeral – black swans – and strange people, people she never heard of before, show up on her doorstep. At her grandparents stables a man on a huge black horse seems to know all about her, her wedding photos are defaced with a screaming picture of her rather than the happy, smiling one she remembers and it appears that Liam made several trips to countries he never told her about. But while these events are upsetting and disturbing, the mystery that surrounds them serve to force Jasmyn out of her house and embark on a trip to Germany where she must team up with Liam’s estranged brother, Ben, to figure out what is going on.
As a modern take on the gothic fairytale, Jasmyn definitely has some interesting stuff going on, and kudos to Alex Bell for trying, but unfortunately, while there’s a good story lurking in it somewhere, she never really brings it out which is a shame because there is so much promise in the premise.
I’ve got to start with the main character, Jasmyn. She’s just really hard to like. Sure she’s suffering with a great deal of grief, after all her husband died, but she is resolutely determined to wallow in self pity despite the proffered help of those around her and basically she comes across as selfish, self-obsessed and, frankly, a bit of a whiner. The other main character, Ben, does a pretty good job of being acting in exactly the same way and, because they antagonise each other, together they are just intolerable. Now admittedly a great deal of ‘why’ they are like this is explained at the end but it takes an intrepid reader to wade through this to get there and it doesn’t help that the rest of the main cast are all painted as bad-guys which leaves you with exactly no-one to root for.
The other big disappointment for me was in the story itself. Again and again there are references to fairyland, to the way it’s ruled, to people within it and yet none of this is ever explored in any depth. Some quite wonderful pieces of magic and fantasy are touched upon but there is never any consequence or logic to it and you get the sense that somewhere in fairyland is a much better, much more interesting story – fully intertwined with this one – but we’re never going to find out what it is. It’s doubly infuriating because Ms Bell writes with a great deal of repetition, often hammering home, over and over, stuff that is often quite mundane, while skipping over important plot points which have the potential to be really interesting. It’s common for creative writing classes to recite the mantra that “story is character” but occasionally story has to be story otherwise your characters are sitting around doing lots of nothing.
Finally, and probably most infuriating of all, the end of the book leaves a lot of unanswered and unresolved issues. A lot is made of Mad King Ludwig and the ‘was it suicide or murder’ and it never turns into anything. What happens to Ben is never fully explained nor explored, how will Jasmyn go back to her old life once the main mystery is solved or indeed will she?
I’ve never written a book and I’m all too aware of how hard it is so I don’t want to trash ‘Jasmyn’ out of hand, but I can’t help feeling that if it wasn’t for the current fetish for ‘paranormal/urban/dark fantasy’ that this book wouldn’t have found its way onto our shelves without some major work done on it. It has some lovely writing in places and some of the images it conjures are terrific, in particular the use of the Ice Palace as a location that bridges Fairyland and this world is inspired, but it feels rushed and it is entirely possible that another 100-or-so pages of story, from fairyland, intertwined with what’s written, would have given us a stronger and much more interesting novel and tied up the loose ends nicely.
Jasmine is published by Gollancz and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.
Alex Bell has a website