Hodder & Stoughton, UK, 1998, ISBN 0-340-69610-9 hardback, ISBN 0-340-69611-7 paperback
The Fall is reviewed by Derek M. Fox
What is it about Simon Clark's writing that makes him so popular?
His eye for detail? His way of making characters live? Certainly these are important: they enable his readership to identify with them, to love and to hate them. Yet I feel it is more than this.
First and foremost he is a teller of tales – a storyteller. And this elevates him from the obvious question many ask viz: What do you do? Many state the answer: I'm a writer. Or, I'm an author, which is fine, but does it really impart anything?
Storyteller encapsulates it better, right? And in The Fall, Clark's storytelling is really something.
Couched halfway between Fantasy and Horror with a smidgen of Sci-fi for good measure, the plot takes the reader back in time, but not way back, no sir. Just a tad, then another... and another. This works because one can at least assimilate what is happening without being left too breathless by a sudden jolt – though jolts there are aplenty.
Playing with time, juggling with paradox, and actually answering at least some of the 'what if's, the main protagonist, Sam Baker, a T.V. director from the good ol' US of A initially finds himself in England doing a feature on an amphitheatre of all things. But it's what lurks there which conjures all manner of uneasy thought, the 'what if's becoming highly probable, and subsequently made to seem real.
Our dependable trappings of modern civilisation are kicked into touch as passengers on a coach tour are suddenly turned into killers, the flips in time effecting horrific changes to personality, and physical appearance.
Sam's glimpse into the future, caused by a lightning strike when he's twelve years old – that same vicious bolt killing his two best friends – hints that he has been 'selected' for something more profound. And by God, or whoever, he has!
The characters lent vision by lightning actually live in Sam's future, and when he arrives there quite naturally through growing up, they help, they prove obstinate, and some die... horribly.
Time is a strange animal, for who knows what lurks back there on the 'other side'? This being the veil between life and... other life?
It is a B-I-G book, over 500 pages, and may well rank with H.G. Well's Time Machine, or the classic novel by Richard Matheson, Bid Time Return. All characters are handled well, and yes we do feel for them; basic animal instincts are exercised, not least illustrated in the tome's fetching (and disturbing) cover illustration by Chris Moore.
The one disappointing feature is that it does kinda run out of steam, but then how far can one go back without becoming repetitive and boring? Maybe Simon Clark thought this and ended it where he felt it should end. After all, there really is no end to time is there? Either backwards or forwards?
Simply choose a place and go there, and try not to be put off by the hint of the creatures who lurk in such environs. Could this, one wonders, be couched in Simon's repeated lines: 'Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight...'?
The reader doesn't actually get a buffalo served up, but there are some pretty mean sonsabitches in this fantastic world of change.
Rural England just ain't what it used to be, especially if you go trespassing in ancient amphitheatres. In The Fall the admission is worth it, especially if you, the reader, have some time on your hands...
Derek M. Fox's novels Recluse and Demon are published by Tanjen.