Others are reviewing this book as Dickensian. I find that wrong as Dickens writing style is different to me. I get caught up in Dickens with the minutiae of characterization. He will go on for pages about one minor character who are all linked, like Paul Haggis's movie Crash, at the end.

MacLeod I feel is being compared unfairly to Dickens because there are similarities with our protagonist, Robbie going to a old decrepit house, like Pip in Great Expectations. Of a London that has a seedy side that Dickens was able to relate through much of his work.

That is where the similarities end for me. The Light Ages is a novel with a Steampunk feel as we have a Victorian Era world of technology run on an energy form that is magical. Robbie, telling in first person, which I feel brings the book down and lengthens it too long, is intimately wrapped up in the procurement of this component. A mystery and great political upheaval surrounds this.

It starts slowly, and does not grab you right away. It shows you a world that you can well imagine, How Green Was My Valley, the story of the lives of the Welsh Coal Miners comes to mind. An ordinary story is made fantastical, but it is made much better through the writer's prose. MacLeod is rich in language and he shares it with you. Since Robbie is the person relating the story to us though, the prose is to rich for the character and there is why the book is too long, and could be better. But without the prose it would be a lesser presentation. Thus we come to it that our story just does not fit the writing. ( )

The setting for this novel is an England where magic is mined from the ground. The country runs on “aether” a substance that is magic made real. With the right spells you can do anything with it. It is used in communications, construction, machines and clothing. There is a price to pay for this marvelous substance, if exposed for too long a person will physically change into something less human and more magical. These creatures are call “trolls” or “changelings” and are taken away to asylums or are left to wander the streets.

The story is narrated by Robert Borrows. He begins his life in a small town where aether is mined. Aether is the cause of much tragedy for him and his family. As a young man he hops a train for London where he learns of the gulf between the rich and the poor in this booming city. The guilds control the aether, money and people but a new age is coming with the hope of a better way of life for all.

The story is written in the style of Dickens with many unusual characters coming and going through Robert’s life. The setting is a London where the poor struggle to survive and the rich dance at elaborate balls and eat and drink while the poor starve. At the beginning of the novel we meet an old and wise changeling names Missy who raises Anna, the woman that Robert loves. These characters remind me of Miss Havisham and Estella from “Great Expectations.”

The book doesn’t grab you at the beginning; in fact it doesn’t really take off until you are about half way through. It also is not a happy uplifting novel. There is much injustice in this book that is not resolved in the end, but such is the world. ( )

[grabbed from this site]

This creation owes much to Charles Dickens. It also owes much to Mervyn Peake at least in a Gormenghastish way, but the writing is all McLeod. This is a sumptuous book, with a wonderful use of language. If you want a whiz-bang adventure story, well, sorry. This one won't do.

Robbie Brown was born in what we might think of as 1876 in England. But not our England. Note the day of the week he was born; Sixshiftday. As you read on, you find that the "Guilds" have done away with the old 6 days of work and one of rest. Now men work 12 days, Firstshiftday through Twelfthshiftday, and wonder of wonders, get Halfshiftday and then Noshiftday. Aren't the mighty Guilds kind?

Bracebridge is a mining town in West Yorkshire that mines a rare commodity. Aether. The magic of the world, the Magick of Faery, has been extracted, and converted to a wondrous liquid which with the proper spells can build castles in the air and allow shoddy workmanship to become usable, and even valuable, and create unicorns, dragons, pitbeasts. As in the extraction and refinement of radioactive material, aether is dangerous, and Robert's mother is contaminated a number of years before our story starts when Robbie is seven. She turns into a troll and is taken away.

The story moves through the stages of Robbie's life, first as a child when he meets Annalise, the changeling girl who is the center of his life while swirling through his periphery, his move to London, falling in with a thief who is also a political activist desirous of bringing down the Guilds, his political activism, and his "illegal entry" into the Guilds. In a sense, I am minded of Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein, from the standpoint of the characterization of the Guilds.

Robert begins to see the Guilds as the source of evil, pollution and corruption in 19th century England, but McLeod's characters are finely drawn, and even the "highest source of evil" is simply a man caught up in his time. The massive disparity of wealth between the Guildmasters and the "marks", who live in filth and poverty is well delineated, and all the characters live, and breathe.

But in the end, it is the flow, the quality of writing, that draws the reader through the book, and causes this book to stay on the bookshelf, to be read and savored again. ( )

guy grows up in factorys that change people into spirits ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/445675.htm...

Hmmm. On the one hand, this is the book that China Miéville's Iron Council should have been. Complex, interesting characters, a sparsely sketched yet believable social set-up, just the corner of the irrational (the mysterious "aether", discovered in 1678, and the cornerstone of England's prosperity, but which has dreadful effects on those it touches directly). The literary references are on the whole to those Dickens novels I haven't read, and to Hardy who I haven't read at all, but for all that the cliches of nineteenth-century Britain are well-enough known that it all made sense to me (the revolution is clearly 1848, or just possibly Paris 1870, rather than 1968). So a deep and absorbing novel.

But the start is awfully off-putting - took me several goes to even begin properly. Once I was in it, I was flying, and found it easy enough to follow. But I still felt it could have been done more efficiently and briefly, in say 300 pages rather than 450. Maybe that makes it Great Literature, and me a philistine. I don't know.