Williams Horwood’s Duncton novels, starting with Duncton Wood, were an essential part of my teenage years, and of my transition from more simplistic tales to books for adults, complete with sex, violence, religious persecution, frailty and hope – they may have been about a civilisation of moles, but telling people that really doesn’t do justice to what Horwood achieved in the two trilogies of the Duncton series. While he has published other novels, nothing Horwood has done since, I suspect, has made the same impact on the bestseller charts or the reading public – so it was with surprise and delight that I was offered an advance copy of the first of four new novels from Horwood, the Hyddenworld quartet.

While the Duncton books were technically fantasy, they, like Watership Down and no doubt other tales of talking animals, tended to find themselves on the general fiction shelves in the bookshop – but with Hyddenworld, it is firmly at the fantasy shelves that Horwood is aiming. His objective is ambitious: to create a fusion of ancient English myths and legends with an environmental parable about man’s impact on the Earth, through the medium of fantasy. The Hydden are rather Hobbitesque, but their ability to hide from human eyes and live unnoticed, while using the best bits of human technology, is more reminiscent of the Borrowers. Rather than just having a race who are very good at hiding from humans, Horwood introduces a rather clever element – the use of henges as portals that allows Hydden to enter the human world, growing to human size, and humans to do the same in reverse.

The story that will play out over the course of the four books is an attempt to prevent environmental catastrophe caused by humans by finding the pieces of a legendary amulet. Horwood has always been big on destiny, and the two characters unlucky enough to have their fate predetermined are Jack and Katherine. Jack is a Hydden who was sent in to the human world to live because he is ‘Giant-born’, and thus expected to do great things; Katherine is a human girl of the same age whose fate becomes tied up with Jack’s when they are still children, in deeply tragic circumstances. Helping them are numerous Hydden, including the singular Bedwyn Stort, inventor and scatterbrained genius; Brief, Master Scrivener of Brum, the Hydden city hiding beneath our own Birmingham; and Pike, gruff staverman (warrior), as well as Professor Arthur Foale, the only human who believes that the Hydden exist. It’s when Jack and Katherine make their first foray in the Hyddenworld that things become interesting, and they become enmeshed in the tortuous politics of Brum, which, like the Hyddenworld across Europe, is ruled by the sinister Fyrd.

There are some lovely ideas in this book, but sad to say they are somewhat obscured by a number of problems. Given some of the marvellous characters created by Horwood in the Duncton books (I can still name scores of them years after reading the books – brooding Rooster, scheming Rune, noble Tryfan, modest Boswell, and most of all marvellous madams and sirs, the irrepressible Mayweed), you would not expect characterisation to be a problem, but it really is: very few of the Hydden are genuinely engaging, with only the rotund Festoon Avon and his personal chef Parlance having the kind of memorable double-act that Horwood can do so well. The human characters too are somewhat underdeveloped – perhaps Horwood will find Jack and Katherine easier to write when they pass through those difficult teenage years and in to adulthood.

The Hyddenworld itself doesn’t really get a chance to shine. It’s not until near the end of the book, when the heroes have escaped from Brum and holed up in the Hydden Welsh village of Wardine, that we really start to get a sense of their society, their values, their quirks – ultimately, that we really start to feel the immersion that should the hallmark of all great fantasy. Maybe this will be corrected in future books as Jack and Katherine’s adventures plunge them deeper into the Hyddenworld – they, like us, are only putting their toe in the water in Book 1.

Hyddenworld: Spring is a book that I really wanted to love, but the weakness of chacterisation and the sense that it was not actually showing me enough of the world promised by the title were ultimately frustrating. There is an overall uneveness in tone, a difficulty in establishing a confident narrative voice, that has never troubled Horwood before, and it pervades the book. While eminently likeable in places, especially in the latter stages, I can’t say it was an experience that was half as rewarding or satisfying as I expected. A great shame.

Bookmark to