A young girl wakes up to a world where the letter “D” suddenly doesn’t exist! Her journey to find out why begins after attending the funeral of her former history professor and sends her on a quest into another world - a world ruled over by a mysterious dictator called the Gamp.
I was surprised to see Michel Faber putting out another novel seeing as he claimed that his previous one, 2014’s The Book of Strange New Things, would be his last ever. But, in the afterword, he says that he started this story 35 years ago so I guess he felt he couldn’t end his writing career without finally completing it (and publishing it, of course)?
He also mentions his influences for the story: Dickens, Lewis’ Narnia books, James Thurber’s The Wonderful O, and the Wonderland novels. Having read D, I would say the book has more in common with Roald Dahl, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and Walter Moers’ The 13 and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear - and I would also say that D unfortunately isn’t half as good as any of them!
This is definitely a book for younger readers rather than Faber’s usual adult audience. The writing style, the child protagonist and the whimsical premise of the letter D disappearing put me in mind of Dahl’s The Witches, particularly the magical stuff that happened after the funeral. I liked most of the first act before Dhikilo, our main character, went into Liminus, the other world.
Almost everything in Liminus though was insufferably bad! The one exception was the episode in the Bleak House, a haunted hotel that tries to drive Dhikilo and her travelling companion, Mrs Robinson the shape-shifting sphinx, insane. That was interesting.
All the rest was awful. The story is just them meeting one group of annoying idiots after another with no consequences. Each group is defined by tediously irritating speech patterns. All don’t use the letter “D” but others talk as if they have mouths full of toffee so Dhikilo has to repeat back what they say and none of the dialogue is worthwhile.
What makes it worse is how contrived everything is. Why the letter “D”? Just ‘cos. How does the Gamp in this world affect the “real” world (though Dhikilo’s English home town of Cawber-on-Sands isn’t real either)? No idea. Why are there so many Dickens references (Magwitches, Droods, Bleak House, Nelly/Little Nell) - what’s the relevance? No point - Faber’s just a Dickens fanboy, it seems. Why do so many people go along with this weird arbitrary rule of not using the letter “D” when no-one enforces it and there’s no consequences to using it anyway? No idea. Just because this is essentially a book for kids doesn’t mean you can cut corners with sloppy storytelling.
The first act was decent, the Bleak House part was ok, but most of the novel is a dreary journey through the dullest, least imaginative “fantasy” landscape ever. I wouldn’t recommend D to either fantasy or Faber fans. It’s rare for a book to have its quality accurately stamped on the cover - I give D a D-grade! If you want to read something similar that’s actually good, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are still the gold standard, closely followed by The Phantom Tollbooth and Walter Moers’ Zamonia novels.
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