H.G. Parry
Hachette
Otago Daily Times, February 8th 2020
H.G. Parry is a Wellington fantasy writer, book lover, and Oxford comma fan whose debut novel is a rollicking adventure that will delight fans of Jasper Fforde, Ben Aaranovich and English scholarship alike.
Although Robert Sutherland is a reasonably respected lawyer in one of the best law firms in Wellington, he has always felt overshadowed by his brother Charley, a child prodigy who was reading at University level at the age of three and studying at Oxford by his teens. But what really sets Charley apart from his peers is his ability to bring people and things out of books, a process that involves a multidimensional understanding of their structural and functional elements, and a skill he is unable or unwilling to fully suppress (although, to be fair, as a Professor of Victorian Literature such deep reading is an occupational hazard of the job and he is conscientious about putting them back). Whilst Charley was safely abroad, Rob could pretend his brother was an acceptable version of unusual. Now he is back and regularly calls for help catching rogue manifestations just as he did when they were children. As a responsible older brother, Rob feels duty-bound to respond, but his desire to protect Charley is tinged with resentment at his sibling’s irresponsibility and concern about the strain it places on his other relationships. Still, the occasional late-night call-out is little more than an inconvenience until the day he finds himself held at knife-point by Uriah Heap. Although Charley reads Heap back out of existence before any harm is done, it is only the first in a series of out-readings, summoned by a person who describes himself as Charley’s nemesis, and within days the brothers find themselves fighting alongside a motley collection of fictional characters to save Wellington from being overwritten by a villainous Dickensian London. Defeating him requires a deeper understanding of the origins and limits of Charley’s powers and, as Rob discovers, a complete reassessment of the relationship between them that could be just as dangerous as their mysterious enemy.
Parry, who has a PhD in English literature from Victoria University and a sister of her own, draws on her background to great effect, her delight in all things literary conveyed with an unmistakably slantwise Kiwi humour; Wellington is as much a character as any of the novel’s human or literary personae and Rob’s complex feelings about his brother will be painfully familiar to anybody gifted younger sibling. Dickens is a major influence both literally and figuratively, with the plot opening on David Copperfield and the closing on Great Expectations. Manifestations, uniquely coloured by their reader’s imaginations, include five Darcys (pre- and post-Colin Firth), Dorian Gray-as-internet-predator, and an adult version of Millie Radcliffe-Dix, a girl detective, and Charley attacks his enemy’s creations by challenging their literary interpretation. Best of all, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heap reminds us that a first-class novel can also be wonderful fun to read. As Dickens himself so wisely observed, “[T]here is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”
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