The Oversight

A drunken reprobate brings a girl, bound and gagged, to the door of a London house, where he has been told a Jew will pay a pretty penny for screaming girls. Thus is a scheme put into motion with the intent of destroying the Free Company of the London Oversight, the thin red line between the natural and supranatural worlds. Once hundreds strong, the Oversight has been reduced to a mere handful of members, the very smallest number able to perform their function. The girl, Lucy Harker, might be the first in a line of new recruits, or she could be the destruction of all they have worked for.

In The Oversight, author Charlie Fletcher sets about the creation of a world in which a company of individuals with magical gifts protects an unsuspecting human world from the depredations of the uncanny. Not that it is an entirely new creation, as the presence of Glints - exclusively female psychometrists, who experience the past recorded in stone as tooth-jarring visions, and focus their power through a sea glass heartstone - and John Dee - characterised as a serial killing arsehole* who travels through mirrors and murders Glints to use their heartstones as torches - connects it to the world of the excellent Stone Heart trilogy (which I reviewed in my past life as a teacher.)

The Oversight is divided into three main parts: The deeds of the struggling members of the Oversight itself; the misadventures of Lucy Harker; and glimpses of the doings of the villains of the piece. The first of these is a sort of desperate mystical detective novel, the second a paranormal fugitive Huckleberry Finn and the last a chance to wallow in the smirking evil of the repellent Templebain brothers, a vicious Viscount, and probably-Napoleon and his retained vampire.

The story of the Oversight's history emerges quite organically, without too much delving into the pronoun game or willful retention of vital information - two of the perils of emergent backstory - and while one development in Lucy's story seems a little counter-intuitive at first, it makes sense on consideration that a group of people trying to protect a paranoid natural ninja might consider it necessary to bung her in a sack temporarily for her own good. While the focus is on Britain, and especially London, there is a definite sense of a wider world in which the Oversight operate, and a good balance between their powers and competence and forces which nonetheless threaten them.

Simon Prebble is a good reader, which is a good thing, since my next audiobook is 30 hours of Prebble reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which could otherwise get pretty tedious. Actually, I might set that one back while I get through the TV version, but it's on the phone anyway, and I am not remotely averse to picking up The Paradox if it has the same reader.

* I don't know why John Dee is so much the whipping villain of mystical alternate histories; possibly because he was English.