This is a really welcome return to writing ffor Fforde after a ffour year hiatus. (sorry).

I am guessing, but my suspicion is that his inspiration for this novel was the question “What if the last Ice Age had not finished when it did?” We know that human evolution – or probably more accurately the development of human civilisation – was profoundly affected by the most recent Ice Age. It can’t be a coincidence that the glaciers began to retreat around 11,700 years ago, and we can start to trace the rise of civilisation as we know it from around 10,000 years ago. But what if the ice had never gone away – what would human civilisation look like?

Fforde builds his world around this premise, or something very similar to it. In this chilly world humans hibernate, and it is part of his slow reveal technique that it is not until around 250 pages in that we discover what we should have probably already worked out, that humans have retained body hair more akin to our monkey cousins than our current-day down.

This world is shown through the eyes of Charlie Worthing, a trainee Night Consul. The Night Consuls are a police force who maintain order while 99% of the population sleep through the winter, protecting the sleeping from the Villains and others who choose not to hibernate. Charlie is very much the innocent abroad, who tries to do the right thing but is constantly stumbling into situations where his presence is at best a complicating factor.

In this alternative world, death during the winter is a frequent occurrence, not just for the Night Consuls. Go to sleep thin and you don’t wake up. The drugs people take to stop calorie sapping dreams can also take their toll, leaving some survivors as little more than brain dead and very hungry zombies. Charlie’s first job as a consul is to escort one such walker to a research facility, and when his companion is stolen, Charlie goes in pursuit, setting off a chain of events that cause mayhem in this sector of snow-bound Wales.

Fforde’s world building is wonderful – he has really given a huge amount of thought to what life in his world would be like. It is in many ways a quite sinister dystopia – fertility rights are traded down generations for example. He has also created a detailed vision of what dream manipulation might look like. As a detective story the novel is slightly less successful – Charlie is a hapless hero who is always on the spot when someone else is blown away by one of the freaky new percussive weapons people have, or predated by one of the WinterVolk – semi-mythological creatures who people the winters, along with the surviving mega-fauna such as mammoths. Somehow he always survives, and for me this pattern became a little predictable – Charlie and A.N.Other character set out to explore mysterious scenario a, b, or c, peril threatens and A.N.Other is blasted to kingdom-come with Charlie watching open-mouthed alongside them.

The novel is chock-full of in-jokes and contemporary references, (and not-so contemporary references – Rick Astley features, for example) and the winter-world  is very recognisable, even if given a tweak. There is a Jane Bond film franchise, with one controversial male casting. References to the Welsh setting and the class war with the English give the novel a very specific set of cultural references that may not travel well – the novel is not yet published in the US, and it will be interesting to see how it is received there.

Quibbles aside, it is fantastic to have Fforde back. I don’t know if Charlie Worthing will be appearing in any sequels – I have a hunch not – but anything he writes is definitely worth reading. Highly recommended. If you haven’t read Fforde before then I also cannot recommend ‘The Eyre Affair’ highly enough – it is brilliant.