Rotherweird. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it will change your life. Okay, it probably won’t perform any of those plastic airport clichés but I wouldn't be reading it if it did. This series it is a photogenic little ramble through the mind of a writer who intended the most audacious thing an author can do – give us a new legend. Is it eccentric enough to earn that though?

Firstly, the author: Andrew Caldecott is a retired QC (senior legal mind in the UK system) with a good vocabulary who seems to have picked up the pen as a hobby to keep his brain buzzing. He’s clearly a classicist and a puzzle solver, so if the blurb had said this was the first literary outing of the crossword compiler ‘Cyclops’, I would have believed that too, without question. He’s also, very obviously, deeply influenced by Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. He’s not on the wrong path. Anecdote warning. There was once a woman who watched a terrible play and said to a television producer “I could write a play as good as that”, which she went on to do, then no one wanted to make it and she had no idea why. The thing is, we shouldn’t aspire to be slightly better than the worst; we should try to be up there with the most descriptive, imaginative and emotive writers of all time. Then, when we inevitably fall slightly short, on account of being mortal, what’s on paper is still something to be proud of.

I read all three books in this series (Rotherweird, Wyntertide, Lost Acre) and could misremember which scene was in which, so I’ll generalise. The author’s professional background is reflected in structure, as the autonomous town of Rotherweird (within England) is a manifestation of the concept of a legal loophole. The place has its own laws and independence, which the nation around it could be expected to threaten under normal conditions but does not do so because an Elizabethan queen has granted them exclusive status under a Royal Charter. This is a toy train set concept, where if a writer makes and claims their own place (e.g. Pratchett owned Discworld), where they can set the rules without anyone else putting their hand up and saying “actually that’s not how it’s done because I spent last weekend there, glamping”. Fantasy needs a concept setting and this is one.

The other legally-minded thing that happens a lot in this book is the very English pattern of resolution being achieved by gathering the town together, listening to speakers putting cases for and against a proposal, then voting on it. In the long run, money and threats are not as effective as public consensus. Although loser’s consent is a principle which has collapsed badly in recent times, the passive systems of progression through an impasse under ‘the right way of doing things’ assumes everyone has the same respect for procedure that the legal profession adheres to. Maybe people with the intelligence to read will be reliable and fair too – but the rest of society has learned from politics the somewhat murky matter of the midnight moving of goal posts. Take me back to simpler times.

Okay, so we’ve got a town in a valley that is within but not administratively part of a host country. There are too many characters, I have to say (more than the Iliad), making it hard to follow each of their motivations. There’s not just an Amber and an Ember but a couple of the shape-shifting characters go through 3 and in one case 5 personas. If you want to understand the story accurately, a notebook and pencil would help. If you subscribe to the Rotherweird = Gormenghast motif, I counted no less than 5 Steerpikes (separate murderous antagonists). There’s one everyman character (reactor), who matures only slightly over the course of the series and, duck, three dangerously capable women. Valourhand is the most inspiring for me, a gifted opponent/ally who propels herself around town with a vaulting pole. Now that’s a memorable image.

All three books are very well copy edited, credit due, with nothing annoying left undetected to interrupt the daydream. Being picky, there was a ‘Hayman Salts’ (unnecessary plural) toward the end but it’s amazing to find so few typos in about 1,200 pages. There’s a scene, in I think book 2, where an ice dragon swoops to strafe two characters then no more is said about it. It is very dissatisfying because it feels to the reader like there was further material on the escape from peril which got snipped out of the approved draft. The creature turns up much later and more information becomes available but if you encounter this section in a linear progression, as for the first time, it’s as if an event started and then – blink – the problem has vanished and let’s pour tea. As an editor, I would have told him to write another page to satisfy it. Also, what happened to the comet? Did it just evaporate? Why did I prefer Rotherweird and Lost Acre to the bridging book Wyntertide? Probably because of this cauterised scene.

I would recommend that people buy, borrow and read this series because it is an attempt to be unique (which should always be encouraged), written with some intelligence and originality (even better for the mind candy). You have to be the kind of person who doesn’t mind a cat’s cradle of a tale though, where the plot makes sense to the author but doesn’t fit neatly into an ordinary, predictable narrative arc. Like the town it portrays, Rotherweird’s story and that of its people has grown organically and you get the sense this has happened over the span of hundreds of years, so of course the journey has to be complex to convey this feeling; you just have to keep up. I kept thinking things were red herrings or Chekov’s guns, but they weren’t because the characters would then go on to use them. You can’t read this without the feeling that the story is running ahead of you, digging strange new tunnels, only debatably under control, and then the mole trap goes off and we find the plot lined up again.

All in all, I liked the imaginative quality and the tying-up between the world of Celtic/Norse myth and the new reality. The idea you can pass through an interface into ‘the other side of the glass’ is two thousand years old now (at least) but it still holds its appeal when presented slightly differently. I had to suspend disbelief that a secret of this magnitude could be kept for so long and the last battle appeared as if to fulfil an expectation of the publishing industry (fear if the trees and locations inverting would have been enough) but I can see that palpable catastrophic danger is the regular way to conclude thrillers.

Probably the most glorious thing I can say in its favour is that Rotherweird is unlike any other place in fiction. It is layered real but unreal. I could make an oblique comparison to Atlantis or Gormenghast as other fantasy independent states, but Rotherweird had a civilised ‘home counties’ sense to it, with the pub and a pint of Sturdy as the centre of community, which the aforementioned flights of conception lacked. Rotherweird is certainly a place you could move to and never want to leave, but outsiders would soon spoil the magic, wouldn’t they? I can see why Queen Bess would want to keep it safe. She was a smart bitch, that one. ( )

Now that his minion has been defeated, can the inhabitants of Rotherweird defeat Wynter himself?

The world building remains meticulous, with an interesting array of characters so I'm not sure what went wrong. About half way through I just stopped caring and couldn't face another book and a half of the trilogy. ( )