Rating: 3/5
Review: A bit of a struggle
I'm afraid I struggled with this book. It has its merits, but there are long portions of it in which I very nearly gave up altogether. It could just be me - I seem to be out of step with the majority of reviewers, many of whom found Hyddenworld very enjoyable. I didn't think it was terrible by any means, but it just failed to grip me and I found it a bit of an effort to get to the end.
The central premise of a parallel world inhabited by hyddens is promising, and William Horwood has a rich imagination. There are good sections but neither the story nor the characters really drew me in - indeed after 500 pages of adventures I'm still not absolutely sure what the overarching story really is. The writing is generally pretty good, but in this genre I think writers need real control of their language to create and maintain the atmosphere of their alternative reality. Tolkien, Alan Garner or Susan Cooper for example, all have different styles but all have a sure sense of what that style is and how it fits the tale. In some places Horwood's prose doesn't have the gravitas to give the story the weight of the great powers it talks about, and in other places styles clash badly. As an example, during a description of the Bilgesnipe people, he writes of "a culture...in which all is intertwined with philosophies deep and marvellous, theories extraordinary, sciences forgotten, poetry elusive..." which is a bit forced but OK, until in the next sentence we get, "...they have been frequently ghettoized..." The ugly neologism "ghettoized" doesn't belong in this world and utterly destroyed for me any atmosphere created by what went before. That seemed to happen a lot for me in both the language and narrative structure of the book.
I am sorry to be critical. This just wasn't for me, but it obviously is for others.
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