re:mote voices

Title: Sabriel
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: Collins

The Times newspaper is currently running a book offer in association with the publisher Harper Collins - for 20 weeks if you buy a copy of The Times newspaper in certain stores then you will get one of twenty books, that Harper Collins are calling modern classics, with a different book for each week the campaign runs. The first week that it caught my attention I had been going to pick up a copy of JG Ballard's Super Cannes, but was unable to get one of the right stores in the time remaining. Last week the featured novel was Sabriel, the first in what is so far a trilogy by Australian author Garth Nix.

Sabriel, and Nix's other novels had caught my eye with the nice cover design work, though in saying that there seem to be new editions out, which I don't quite like as much. Sabriel is regarded as teen fiction, part of the rise in popular teen-fantasy novels - along with the likes of GP Taylor, Philip Pulman or JK Rowling. The BBC recently ran a documentary on this type of fiction, discussing how much darker it had become in recent years. Which is part of what makes me curious as to what constitutes a "teen" read.

On reflection I concede that the peak of my own fantasy reading was when I was a teenager - having read Lord Of The Rings by the time I was 11, and most of Tolkein's back catalogue there after. The years following covered the grounds of Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Stephen Donaldson, Piers Anthony, Terry Pratchett, Michael Moorcock, and the like. While in later years I haven't touched the genre nearly as much. In fact Sabriel is my first reading of a fantasy novel in at least 5 years, and most likely more.

But considering the idea of "teen" fiction, I find it curious that if Sabriel was made into a film, and a film that was true to the text, then it would certainly get an 18 rating. What with at least one scene of full frontal male nudity, and the fact that the book is readily filled with slit throats and the living dead.

Sabriel is an 18 year old girl, who is in the last weeks of her life at an exclusive girl school - a school where she has pretty much lived since she was 5 years old. The book starts with the full moon, which would normally provide a visit from her father Abhorsen. However instead of her father an animated spirit turns up, providing her with her father's sword and bells, a clear sign that he is in trouble. This triggers her return to the Old Kingdom, where the Dead are becoming an increasing problem.

This sets up a bloody quest for Sabriel, to find her father's body and see if she can return his spirit. But in the process, she realises that his name is not Abhorsen, rather that is a title, handed down from generation to generation - a necromancer who serves the charter by returning the Dead to Death. As she crosses the land she is accompanied by a cat who is not cat and man revived after 200 years - fighting zombies, and bog monsters animated by sacrificial blood and dead spirits.

The balance between the mystery of legends unfolding and the knowledge provided works well, unravelling as the book progresses in such away that we learn things a little at a time - Sabriel's absence from the Old Kingdom being a ploy to allow for that - but there is also enough left over to allow for the expansion of the fantasy for the following volumes.