24 May 2013 14:05:20
Victoria McQueen, a teenager living in New England, rides her bike across a strange bridge into another reality and finds herself trapped in Christmasland, the demented stronghold of the vampiric Charlie Manx. Manx, sustained by the force emanating from his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith (guess the licence plate), is a child-killer with a psychotic sidekick, Bing Partridge. After a desperate struggle – one of the novel's best set-pieces – Vic emerges as the only survivor of Manx's predations. Manx winds up unconscious in the prison wing of a hospital, suffering from an ageing disorder in which "a month is more like a year".
Vic grows up, has a child – Wayne – and becomes an author. She is still haunted by the other reality, receiving phone calls from Christmasland that wreck her marriage. Some of Hill's most evocative writing describes these hauntings: "The night filled with a choir of phones. It was like frogs in spring, an alien harmony of croaks and chirrups and whistles." Wayne finds it hard to trust a mother who "believed the phone was ringing when it wasn't, had conversations with dead children."
Hill wisely focuses less on the Dread Vehicle than on telling Vic's life story. The leisurely pacing in the first 200 pages works perfectly to make the reader care about her. By the time of Manx's inevitable return, aided by the rebuilding of the Wraith, the reader is invested in Vic's entire family.
The second half of NOS-4R2 becomes a drawn-out back-and-forth in which Manx stalks Vic and Vic stalks Manx. This repetitive quality isn't helped by Manx, who is a little two-dimensional. Once you've spent 10 minutes with Manx in the Wraith, you've pretty much had the full experience. Bing is much creepier, although not the brightest bulb in the room.
The second problem involves the nature of the other reality or realities. Manx mentions "pocket universes" and Vic refers to "a version [of reality] that Charlie Manx carries around in his head". That explanation veers a little too close to "it was all a dream". But when she then postulates that "Maybe some people can ride into that thought world if they have the right vehicle," the detail seems both so clunky and so specific that the reader is pulled out of the moment to wonder about the rules.
For the most part, NOS-4R2 exists in a pleasantly naive bubble of time and space, within which events such as the Iraq war and global warming have had no visible influence. This is a legitimate stance for a novel that wants to have fun with monsters: but Hill could have offered readers more complicated villains and more genuine surprises.
Despite these flaws, there's a big engine of entertainment at the heart of NOS-4R2. Nothing here is new, but an earnest dedication to escapism often makes the novel suspenseful, and that may be enough for some.
