Anna Smaill - The Chimes

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Original and gripping

I think this is a very good book. Anna Smaill creates an exceptionally convincing and original world with very believable characters and a decent plot.

The Chimes is set in a post-apocalyptic London. It is hard to give a sense of the plot and setting without giving away more that I would have liked to know before reading it because they emerge gently from an extremely skilful and gripping narrative. Memories are now transient and almost vanish each night, reading and writing are banned and long-forgotten skills. Such memories as people have and things like directions for navigation and a type of sign language are largely preserved in music, which permeates the whole plot and background of the book. Language has adapted to the new world; it is largely normal English, but with changes in vocabulary such as presto and lento for fast and slow, tacet for silent and so in. Smaill pays her readers the compliment of just using the terms without explanation, so it helps to have some knowledge of musical terminology and even a bit of basic music theory, but it's not essential.

I think the creation of this world is beautifully done. In less skilful hands this could be pretty dreadful, but the first-person narration is pitch-perfect and is a fantastically realistic and atmospheric evocation of the book's world and of the state of mind of the narrator. The language is perfectly convincing, with little touches like old circuit-boards now called secret-boards, and outlawed ideas termed blasphony making it perfectly believable to me. There are echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and other fine books, but they are faint echoes because Anna Smaill has created something wholly her own here.

The plot is perfectly decent but much less original, and unlike several other reviewers I found the second part of the book rather less interesting as the plot begins to unfold because it's an idea which is the basis of many, many books and films, with the "ordinary" character struggling to free the world from oppression by a mighty, dominating state machinery. It is Smaill's creation of her imagined, music-based world, rather than this plot, which gives this book its quality and distinctiveness, but it is all well done and did keep me reading avidly.

I have rounded what is really a 4.5-star rating up to 5, possibly because music is a big part of my life so this book spoke to me in a way I enjoyed very much. I can also recommend it to the non-musical, though, as a very well-written, evocative and engrossing book.