Cuckoo Song, by Frances Hardinge
Frances Hardinge is fast becoming the most featured author on this blog - and with good reason. I always enjoy her books, and although I have been trying to pace myself and not read them all too quickly, I think at this point I have actually now read Hardinge's entire output. Had to happen at some point. With my insatiable appetite for her gorgeous language, combined with a tantalising whole shelf of her books at the library, it was inevitable that I was going to consume the whole Hardinge canon. Luckily she's still alive, so my fingers are crossed that she will write some more!
Having said all that though, Cuckoo Song was probably my least favourite of all the Hardinge books I've read. It was about a family whose daughter Triss is swapped for a changeling - and it is told from the perspective of the changeling. For a significant number of chapters, the changeling was unaware that she was a changeling. Believing that she was Triss, she couldn't understand why she was so hungry all the time (later revealed to be a typical trait of changelings), or why she kept finding dead leaves in her hair (also a feature of changelings) or why she had no memories of the fateful night when all this began (the night when she and Triss were swapped).
I think part of the reason I didn't enjoy this book so much is because Hardinge had created the protagonist's confusion and distress so effectively. It was about 150 pages before she realised what she was, and all that time was spent in a state of desperate perplexity which was shared by the reader. As soon as the truth came out and the Triss-rescue mission started, the book picked up, becoming a familiar fast-paced Hardinge fantasy. I often find that Hardinge's books have some macabre elements, which usually give way fairly swiftly to the thrill of the adventure and the loveable-ness of the characters. With this one, the thrill and the loveable-ness arrived a little too late for me. I was left for too long in the land of the sinister.
The other effect of being left in the dark for so long was that I felt the world-building was not done as effectively as it could have been. One of the things I admire most about Frances Hardinge is her ability to construct such intricate fantasy worlds, totally mad and improbable and yet somehow entirely real and believable. Cuckoo Song did have a great fantasy world in it, a world merged with the real-life setting of London, but I would have liked to see more of it in the first half of the book. The way it was only really introduced after the discovery of the truth made all the wackiness seem a bit out of tune with the first 150-odd pages, where if it had been built up from the start it might have seemed a bit less weird.
I also couldn't help thinking that there might have been a few too many eccentric ideas in this book, such that it didn't quite bind together. (At times it felt like an unusual dream, and it wouldn't have surprised me if some of it did indeed occur to Hardinge in her sleep!) Some of the ideas were cool enough to be whole concepts in their own right, and I wondered whether the way they had all been crammed incongruously in undermined them a bit. For example, in one of the early chapters someone got eaten by a cinema screen. That's a fantastic idea, and I think it was under-used - it didn't really come up again after that point! I was torn between admiring Hardinge's abundance of imaginative ideas (in that she could afford to put them all in one book!) and wishing she'd saved a few of them for later.
Looking back at what I've written here, it seems as though I've given this book a pretty bad review, but I should clarify that even though it didn't quite match the sky-high standard of some of Hardinge's other novels, it was still a good book. It was a cool concept, with some interesting characters, and a clever multi-layered plot. Add that to the inevitable scrumptious imagery that all Hardinge's books are infused with, and it was an enjoyable read overall.