by Christopher Fowler
p. 1988
High above the city streets of London there exists a culture
of young people who live among the rooftops, swinging from metal cables and
living off the grid, unseen and largely forgotten by the world below... that
is, until a couple of hapless twenty-somethings stumble upon their niche
society and get thrown in the middle of an urban gang war fought right over our
heads. That is the general idea behind Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld—a dark, at times absurdly
comical, at times distinctly horrific thriller novel—that introduces the reader
to a different kind of ‘high society,’ and one that exists entirely in secret.
As a part of his boring job finding books to translate to
the big screen, 24-year-old Robert Linden must track down Sarah Endsleigh, the elusive
daughter of a recently murdered author, as she holds the rights to her mother’s
only novel. In doing so, Robert meets Rose, the author’s feisty, independent landlord,
and the two of them stumble upon Sarah’s alternative lifestyle—as one of the
inhabitants of ‘Roofworld,’ a community of young people who live on the
rooftops and travel among a long-existing series of cable wires in order to
escape the drudge of everyday society. There are two warring factions, Sarah’s
people, led by her enigmatic boyfriend (who later turns out to be a dud),
Nathaniel Zalian, and a much larger, Nazi-esque lot of screw-ups, skinheads and
drug addicts who bumble around under the guidance of their cult leader, who
calls himself Chymes. It’s got something to do with occult mumbo jumbo—something
about the sun and the moon and zodiac signs or whatever and there’s a lot of
cult-ish yammering going on amongst Chymes and his disciples, but it’s all very
boring and eye-roll-inducing and really only there to amp up the danger
element.
I had a funny moment early on, when it struck me how
similar Roofworld felt to Neil
Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, which Iread a few weeks back, except that Roofworld
was published 8 years prior to Gaiman’s book.
It’s pretty striking: a boring, young man in a dead-end job
(even their names are similar—Richard/Robert) meets a mysterious girl and is
thrust into an alternative London society that ‘normal’ people completely
overlook in their day to day lives—only while Neverwhere implores you to look below, Roofworld has you looking at what’s above. When his life is
threatened, the unwitting hero must summon
unnatural courage to save the day. There are dubious allies, lots of
murders going on thanks to a villain with a God complex, and, although Roofworld is mostly grounded in ‘reality,’
there is still a distinct magical feel to it reminiscent of Gaiman’s Neverwhere.
All of this is not to say that Gaiman stole his idea from
this lesser known author. I fully believe that it’s possible that two authors
can come up with the same idea independent of one another, or that even if one
did inspire the other, the interpretation of the idea can vary and the author’s
can have different things to say. Besides, Neverwhere
is supposedly based on the book Free Live
Free, by Gene Wolfe, and that was
published four years before Roofworld.
Having not read that one, I can’t claim any similarities but it does illustrate the point I’m getting to
here, which is that this journey—the unwitting hero who is thrust into a world
parallel to our own—is quite a popular one in fantasy/science fiction. And it’s
not hard to see why—the idea that there is an escape to the mundane, that we
are destined for something greater, that it’s waiting for us just outside the
door if only we would look, it’s the
stuff urban adventure tales are made of, and it’s applied here to great effect.
Though I found Fowler’s book hard to put down, I still had
some complaints about it. The focus shifts around too much, like Fowler couldn’t
decide what kind of a story he wanted to write. There are the chapters focusing
on the Roofworlders and their battles, there are the chapters about Robert and
Rose—the newcomers and outsiders—and there is a third thread about headstrong,
sexist Detective Ian Hargreave, his coworker/lover Janice, and the commissioner’s
puny son, Butterworth, a young constable needing to prove himself and whom
Hargreave constantly picks on. And littered in between all of this are a
smattering of tedious chapters wherein Chymes predictably offs another dumb
disciple. Fowler tried to go in too many directions at once and the whole thing
is just kind of a mess. Though occasionally entertaining, Hargreave and
Butterworth’s side adventures were totally unnecessary and detracted from what
should have been the main focus—the state of Roofworld and the people who
inhabit it.
Set in 1988, Roofworld
has a style that is—at times painfully—reflective
of its time. This is a deviation where I appreciate Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere over Roofworld, because the former painted a decent comparison to our
tendency to overlook the disenfranchised, while the latter focused on people
who chose to be disenfranchised, and
spent a lot of time ragging predictably on big corporations and ‘the man,’
though not in so many words. I believe Fowler had some big ideas but not enough
follow through for it to mean anything. Roofworld,
though it is swinging away towards its inevitable dissolution, is presented as
a sort of utopia, but I felt no compulsion to join them. Perhaps it was in part
due to my inability to fully picture Fowler’s strange world. Having never lived
in an urban landscape, I have a hard time picturing how such a thing would even
be possible.
But mostly, I just found the Roofworlders obnoxious and
pretentious ‘kids’ who don’t want to grow up.
Roofworld is not a
bad book, and it certainly gives you some things to think about, but I’m going
to need more than a few cables and wires attached to buildings to suspend my
disbelief for that long.
(And let's talk about that byline on the back page for a minute... "You won't see them unless you know where to look"? Well that just sort of invalidates the entire plot of the book you're about to read. Shame on you, publishers!)
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