Poison, by Chris Wooding

I’m definitely inclined to think that The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was just a one-off - it'll take some convincing now for me to think Wooding is worth spending any more time or money on (though I do still have a masochistic compulsion to read Storm Thief or whatever it was called). Because Wooding really does write trash. Alaizabel Cray worked because it never tried to be anything other than a trashy, fun adventure. Poison gets ideas above its station and as a result falls flat.

Reading the blurb and looking at the cover of this book, I thought it was going to be a sort of gothic fairytale set principally in our world, a kind of dark Alice in Wonderland, which probably would have appealed to me more than the fantasy setting Wooding created, especially since it’s very hard to imagine Poison, with the description Wooding gives her, as anything other than a cartoon figure in the vein of Emily Strange. Some sort of Gaimanesque slightly weird but recognisable world would have worked better than a fantasy land where the protagonist grows up in a swamp, especially since it’s so lazily conceived: are we really supposed to believe that Poison knows what coal chutes and chandeliers are just from hearing word-of-mouth stories? That she doesn’t react to the world with more wonder when she’s seen little more than mud for her entire life?

That aside, it seems for a while that Wooding is going to give us a nice, rewarding lowbrow adventure, until Poison enters the world of Faerie (with her two utterly useless companions – what purpose is there to Peppercorn? Are we supposed to find her total submissive girliness cute rather than patronising?) and Wooding introduces ideas that will dominate the rest of the book – metatextual ideas about storytelling. I suspect he pinched the concept from Sophie’s World, though without the eloquence or tasteful unfolding of the idea, instead trying to sledgehammer home how clever Wooding is, and reminding us again and again that he’s the greater maker. I know Wooding is an anime fan, but I wonder if he’s seen Princess Tutu, which does the same thing as Poison, down to drawing from fairy tales, only with far more wit and sophistication, despite its daft title. And it really does rankle when someone’s trying to be very smart indeed with a world that includes trolls with names like Mgwar.

And while failing entirely to look clever despite his ardent efforts, Wooding again tortures us with his awful writing. I remember impressed by the opening of Alazaizabel Cray, with a beautiful metaphor about a wedge-shaped building as the prow of a ship, but really, that was the first and last time Wooding impressed me. In every book he seems to have an obsession with a slightly obscure word he knows. In Alaizabel it was ‘limned’. Here it’s ‘pique’, which he uses several times, each time sounding like he’s a small child flashing a favourite toy. And then he drops stinkers on us, like a bark being taken up by ‘another canine throat’, or the time when, in a scene that we’re supposed to be taking seriously, we’re told that Poison’s ‘pain returned with reinforcements.’ Pants!