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GUARDIANS OF THE KEY
by Clio Gray
Headline, June 2006
320 pages
19.99GBP
ISBN: 0755331044


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In Clio Gray's first novel GUARDIAN OF THE KEY, it's 1805 and 16-year-old Mabel is trying to get used to life as a London heiress. Spirited from her home in Epping Forest by a childless distant relative-by-marriage, Aunt Flora, Mabel would rather explore the marketplaces with her younger street boy friends than attend her elderly benefactress's tea parties.

When one of Mabel's friends, Toby, is kidnapped on the same day as a man mysteriously commits suicide inside a London church, her life changes forever. With the help of listmaker, pattern-searcher, and amateur cryptologist Whilbert Scroop, Mabel discovers that she and her family are linked to both the murder and the mysterious mission of the semi-secret London Lucchese Council.

What is that? As Gray explains, Napoleon's conquest of Italy put an end to the centuries-old Republic of Lucca. In the 13th century, when faced with a similar threat, the city-state had sent a messenger to London, charged to protect a state secret. By 1805, the secret was lost, but Council member Petrus Castracani, a direct descendant of the 13th-century Lucchese prince Castruccio Castracani, believes it can be found. Unfortunately, so do his enemies -- and Mabel's.

GUARDIANS OF THE KEY is a pleasantly told tale. Gray is the winner of Headline Press's Harry Bowling Prize for a 5,000-word sample and 500-word synopsis of a novel set in London by a first-time novelist, for an early stage of this work, then bearing the distinctly less Brownian (Dan, that is) title of LONDON SPIRES. Perhaps at some point it was titled GUARDIANS OF THE SHROUD, as it is called on the website of MBA, the agency representing Gray and the Bowling estate.

Gray's research into both Lucchese history and legend and daily life in Regency London is impressive -- perhaps as the work of an author who is the namesake of the Muse of History should be. As the afterword shows, Castruccio Castracani was real: a subject of Machiavelli's prose and a Lucchese national hero. (Mary Shelley treated his freedom-fighting rather more sceptically in her 1823 novel VALPERGA, written during her expatriate years in Italy.)

The first chapter of GUARDIANS OF THE KEY is indeed a suspenseful, compelling beginning. But things begin to lag later, at least for this subjective reader. Mabel is an unusually childlike teenage girl. Her characterisation, and the narrative style of the book, are carefully simplified and sanitised in the style of Joan Aiken or Frances Hodgson Burnett. If you're looking for an intellectually challenging book for a young reader, GUARDIANS OF THE KEY will do well, and might even send an intrepid young person off to the library -- or, more probably, Google -- to look up Lucca and the real Castracani.

However, I found Mabel too perfectly good, rather simpering, and very naive despite her familiarity with life on the mean streets. And the alleged threat to Lucca, when it is finally revealed, seems based mostly in superstition.

The ending is underwhelming, but then Gray conceded in the publicity for the Bowling Prize that, after she won, she was "asked for the rest of the novel, which [she] hadn't actually written." She did "have a pile of notes and a woolly sheep of a plot . . . but it took three weeks of panicking and scribbling before [she] had the thing hammered out." Six monthly episodes were sent to her agent for critique and an additional four months later, Headline gave it the green light.

Maybe I'm just a bit jaded by mystery novels in which medieval state and church history causes serial murder in the modern world because there's a conspiracy to hide a superstition connected via heredity with an unassuming girl, and is chased by an autodidact who specialises in finding, well, "keys." Which have "guardians." The book's subtitle reads "A novel of intrigue, murder, and a lost legacy," so I don't think I'm alone in seeing this particular parallel.

In any case, Gray is an avid researcher and a promising writer. If, in her second novel, she takes a few more risks with characterisation and plot, it will be much stronger than GUARDIANS OF THE KEY.

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, June 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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