Brian Malbon's Reviews > The Witches of Chiswick

The thing about Robert Rankin is that when he's good, he's absolutely amazing - funny, bizarre, and skewed this side of Douglas Adams that it's worth reading. When he's bad, however, he's unreadable, although I would bet that the members of his cult following would disagree. Unluckily for a casual reader like me, who has difficulty finding his books on this side of the Atlantic, most of the Rankin novels I have managed to find are in the bad category. Luckily for me, however, the ones I have found that fall into the "good" category (Dance of the Voodoo Handbag, Knees Up, Mother Earth) are just so joyfuly weird as to make up for slogging through his less appealing works.

Also luckily for me, the Witches of Chiswick is one of those better books - an extraordinarily imaginative time travel odyssey with more than enough madcap shenanigans to keep the pages turning.

I'll start this review by saying that I really think only the British have ever really understood time travel. There's something about the way the minds over in Jolly Olde England are wired - the minds that brought forth both Monty Python and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seem to be the most comfortable with the bizarre twists a time travel story can take. With the exception of Back To The Future, of course, and the work of Terry Gilliam (a Pythoner although an American), most of the North American attempts at the genre fall into depressingly flat territory. That is why I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if the first real time machine is (or was, or may once be - oho!) invented in Britain.

That said, the time travel in the Witches of Chiswick and its sort-of sequel, Knees Up Mother Earth are exemplary. The story doesn't even get under way until the main character is spurred to action by his future self, gone back in time to get himself going. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In a far, depressing distopian future, humanity exists confined to several enormous bleak and broken high-rises, obesity is considered not just fashionable but sexy and our hero Will is a "too-skinny" young man who dreams of better and is convinced things have gone wrong long long before. Enter a mysterious stranger with a wristwatch branded "Babbage" and himself from three days hence, and Will suddenly finds himself thrust into an adventure that will lead him to discover H.G. Wells' genuine, honest to goodness time machine parked somewhere in the 21st century. The time machine propells him back to the London of 1899 and the discovery of wonders that have been hidden from history.

See, Charles Babbage's clockwork "adding machine" computer was not really a single novelty of the 1850s but the dawn of a Victorian computer age that by 1899 includes wristwatches, personal computers and robot assassins. Nicola Tesla did not really get the electricity rug yanked from under his feet by Edison, but in fact parlayed his much more visually interesting electrical inventions into "Tesla towers", giant globes dotted all over London that provide free electricity wirelessly to every citizen and somehow making flying hansom cabs not only possible but commonplace. It's a steampunk Victorian England with stovepipe hats and dapper gentlemen and amazing technology, and gets extra props just for finally giving me the opportunity to use the word "steampunk."

So why don't we know about all these wonderful advances? Why did the twentieth century dawn without these developments that could have changed the world, forcing us to invent our own versions of the exact same things that somehow seem paler and less wonderful? And how does this relate to the horrible future that Will knows is in store for the human race? The answer is that a secret cabal of witches (the ones from the title) are conspiring to rewrite history, and when the clock strikes midnight on New Years and ushers in the year 1900 the world will revert to the fairly prosaic modern world we know, millions of people somehow forgetting that their horseless carriages also used to fly. And somehow Will must stop it.

What Rankin does best is to take a listless and forgettable character into a wild and woolly situation and let him find a solution through skills he didn't know he had; or to have him be saved by a ridiculous Deus Ex Machina that works only because it fits the madness of the rest of the novel. Both of those things happen in this novel, although thankfully the final confrontation is just Will and his measly abilities against an evil force. Where it falls apart, as it does in every single one of his novels, is when he tries to insert his own peculiar panoply of recurring characters. He has these elements he tries to put in every book, often cramming them into places they really can't fit, in an attempt to create a mythology. What he doesn't ever seem to realize is that he already HAS a mythology; all his novels are already so delightfully interwoven that heroes from one become villains in another or the hero of one becomes a fictional character in a book the next hero might read. It's all so brilliantly meta that it doesn't need a forced mythology (and double props for giving me a chance to write "meta" where it makes sense).

So we don't need Hugo Rune (a fat com-man who makes outlandish claims of his own worth while tricking people into paying his restaurant bills), or Barry the Time-traveling Sprout (as sarcastic, stupid and unnecessary as he is in every Rankin book), or the Suburban Book of the Dead (a 'hilarious' spoof of the Necronomicon - I can't remember if it's in this one or not, but its every appearance in any book is so ham-fisted and forced that I had to mention it once) to make their obligatory appearances. These are the parts where the book bogs down intolerably. Just give me a nice little time-travel-magic-steampunk-Victorian adventure, let it be what it is on its own terms, and leave it the hell alone. The book works better that way.